Initially, when the first few people died of plague in 1680, the residents of Maribor were not too alarmed. Those early deaths were attributed to sweating sickness, and at the end of June, plague seemed to have only grazed the town.
Then the disease struck with full force, and the Mariborians panicked. They either fled the town or locked themselves in the houses to escape the pervading smell of death in the streets. Dead bodies were taken outside the town walls at night by the undertakers who were appointed specifically to carry out this sad and extremely dangerous task. The corpses were unceremoniously thrown into deep plague pits, covered with a layer of active lime and then buried. By the end of 1680, as many as 483 town residents had died of plague. In today's terms: this equals to over 33,000 Mariborians dying within six months.
There was hardly a house in the town that had not been affected by the disease, and each family had their own tragic story. For example, in October, a postman named Hitzelberger lost three daughters in a single day. Allegedly, the Murmann's Bakery located at today's 24 Koroška cesta (Carinthian Road) was the only house where no one got sick. The story goes that the baker's wife served bread on a long-handled iron shovel through a small window, and the customers had to pay by dropping coins into a dish filled with vinegar.
Koroška cesta 24
2000 Maribor
