Cemeteries do not usually inspire pleasant feelings, but there are some that soothe visitors with their tranquillity, inspire them with their history, amuse them with their vibrancy, astonish them with their size, or impress them with something else. Many cemeteries are beautiful and each has a story to tell, just as the stories of the people who rest in their graves are inimitable, but some of the world’s cemeteries do stand out from the average and are, as people like to say, the most beautiful. While the perception of beauty depends on the eyes that see something, here are some cemeteries that are undeniably interesting, if not the most beautiful.
The Romanian cemetery in Sapanta is certainly different. In fact, it is cheerful. That is what it is called, the Merry Cemetery, or Cimitrul the Merry. It got its unusual name because those who went there could not help feeling that it was really cheerful. The crosses are brightly coloured and the epitaphs are sometimes amusing and sometimes satirical.
The villagers had a special attitude towards death, which stemmed from their belief in the immortality of the soul. In their view, death was not at all tragic, since it represented a transition to a better life and gave the person the chance to meet the god Zalmox.
The cemetery began to rise on the village’s soil in the 1930s, after a local artist, Stan Ion Patras, came up with the idea. He was a sculptor, painter and poet all in one, and in the course of half a century he created a whole series of wooden crosses that are now admired for their carvings in a style that was unique to him. Although he was a unique master, his work did not disappear with his death in 1977, but was carried on by his apprentice Dumitriu Pop Tincu.
The vibrant blue crosses are made of oak wood, hand-carved by Patras after being cut and dried. The upper part of each cross depicts a scene from the life of the deceased in a simple and stylistically naive but striking image. It represents his or her main virtue or characteristic and thus brings him or her back to life.
Thus, on the crosses we see women spinning wool or weaving a carpet, housewives baking bread, men chopping firewood, farmers ploughing the land, shepherds tending sheep, musicians playing instruments, butchers butchering a lamb, teachers at their desk, alcoholics with their drink, and so on.
After Patras carved the cross, he painted it. He always used the characteristic vivid blue for the background and vibrant yellow, red, white and green for the scenes and the geometric and floral decorations on the edges.
But no cross was complete until he had accompanied it with a short poem of between 7 and 17 lines. He wrote all his poems in the local dialect. Sometimes lyrical and sometimes ironic or satirical, they were always sincere, spontaneous and written in the first person singular.
He has turned them into a kind of message from the deceased to the world, so each one mentions his name and each one reveals a brief description of his habits, personality or life. Patras’s poems even talk about what happened to the deceased after death, for example at the funeral, or describe how he died. Patras did not stop at bad habits either, but they are presented wittily and without moralising.
In this way, Stan Ioan Patras and Dumitriu Pop Tincu have managed to recreate an entire village in a cemetery, giving a second life to the deceased with more than 800 crosses and giving visitors a reason to feel good about their work.
Land lost, cemetery gained
Bonaventure Cemetery in Savannah, USA, is quite different, and its natural setting makes it one of the most beautiful and relaxing cemeteries in America. At the end of the 18th century, the land on which it stands was in private hands, but the Tattnall and Mullryne families were unlucky. They found themselves on the wrong side of history in the Civil War, but were left with nothing in its aftermath. They fought for land, but they lost that fight too.
The new owner kept the name of the land, Bonaventura, or fortune, which Tattnall had a few years later when he managed to buy the land back. However, it did not stay in family hands for long. In 1846 he sold it to Peter Wilteberg and with him the cemetery really began to develop.
For example, it was the final home of lyricist Johnny Mercer, who wrote more than 1,500 poems and won four Oscars before his death in 1976, poet Conrad Aiken and little Gracie Watson. Visitors still decorate the fence around her tomb with toys, as the story of her death is a local legend.
She was the daughter of Frances Watson, who moved to Georgia to run the Pulaski Hotel. Little Grace came with the family. She was supposedly irresistibly sweet. She laughed, sang and danced so much that nothing seemed to stop her. But at the age of six, she suddenly developed a fever. She began to cough. She got a fever. Before they knew when, she had died. Her father had a memorial made in her memory to remember her forever.
Waverley Cemetery has a special beauty. It is also home to the graves of some remarkable people and boasts some incredible statues, particularly adorning the older graves, but it is its location that is most striking. It is on top of a cliff overlooking the sea.
The story of Waverly Cemetery really began in 1859, when industrialisation and the craft industry began to bring life to this previously remote place. Suddenly there was a bustle of people making soap, candles, shoes and so on, and more and more farmers.
The need for a cemetery in the new community was discussed as early as 1863. They looked a little at the best practices in London and Paris and set up Nacropolis to look after the future of the cemetery, but they made it a condition that the cemetery had to be self-sustaining.
So in 1875, they bought their first piece of land and made a plan. They were close to modern thinking at the time, which considered a cemetery to be a park, so they carefully planned the paths and roads that intertwine it. The first part of the cemetery was not officially opened until 1877 and three days later the first deceased was buried.
Today, more than 50,000 graves and tombs rise on more than 16 hectares of land, along with some beautiful statues, such as the white marble angel that looks down on the graves and watches over them in some way. There are also a few angels around, with urns, obelisks and cracked pillars, which have cracks on purpose, as they symbolise the brevity of life.
In stark contrast to this part of the cemetery is the more modern part, which may make some feel that the older part is somewhat neglected. In the dry periods, when the grass is gone, the graves are surrounded by dirt instead of beautiful greenery, but people are not so distracted by this that they fail to see its basic beauty.
Bones of St Andrew
St Andrews Cathedral Cemetery in Scotland is quite different. Like all cemetery stories, it is indelibly linked to people, in this case a religious community that probably developed here as early as 732. At least that is the theory, which draws on the story that it was then that the remains of St Andrew were brought here. The second story is a little juicier. It tells of St Rulus, also known as St Regulus, who brought many of St Andrew’s bones here by boat as early as 374, when he sailed from Greece. It was not a peaceful voyage, of course, and he was also shipwrecked, but fortunately not far from the present-day harbour.
Since then, the settlement has slowly grown in importance and importance in the religious life of Scotland. When it was important enough, in 1160 the building of the cathedral was begun, and it became the largest in Scotland. It took them 150 years to complete it, because they weren’t really lucky.
Shortly after the nave was finished, a storm destroyed the western part of the cathedral. It was rebuilt again, this time in a slightly different way. Afterwards, the English took lead from the roof because they needed it for the war effort.
In 1378, the cathedral was so badly damaged by fire that it had to be rebuilt, and not so long later, in 1409, a winter storm destroyed the south transept. The Reformers also had their own way with it, destroying the beautiful decorations associated with the wrong religious period. The end of the cathedral followed not long after.
Today, the cemetery is a reminder of the town’s glorious past. For those interested in history, it is as eloquent as a book, revealing, among other things, the story of St Mary’s Church, of which nothing remains. When it was destroyed by the enemy, the material left behind was used to build St Andrew’s Cathedral.
Today, the cemetery is particularly beautiful, but the most beautiful and oldest gravestones can only be seen in the museum, where they were moved to protect them from the weather.
La Recoleta Cemetery in Buenos Aires may not have such a rich history, having stood “only” since 1822, but it is stunning in its own way. At first it was just the garden of the local church, but when the governor banned the use of churches and their land for burials, it became an official cemetery, then 12 acres in size. Although today it is known that on the day of the official opening of the cemetery on 17 November 1822, the first two people buried here were a freed black boy, Juan Benito, and a Uruguayan girl, Maria Dolores Maciel, today the cemetery is so large that no one can find their graves.
But they all see the intermingling of architectural styles that has occurred over time. Among the more than 6400 mausoleums, some are neoclassical, others neo-Gothic, others art nouveau or art deco, and of course there are many modern mausoleums.
Although the cemetery was not very interesting at first, when President Torcuato de Alvear ordered its renovation in 1881, it took on a completely different appearance. Entrance gates were built, the main roads were rebuilt – yes, the cemetery is so big that it has main and side roads – the chapels were decorated and enlarged in a somewhat French style.
The cemetery was planned better than cities are planned elsewhere. In its midst, there are neat neighbourhoods separated by stone and concrete corners. There are street name signs at every intersection, and the cemetery has its own ‘town centre’, in which most of the trees and other fescue in the cemetery are planted.
Each mausoleum represents a different architectural style, so it is hardly surprising that there are Greek temples and pyramids in the middle of an Argentine cemetery, and it is not at all disturbing that such different mausoleums touch each other.
The graves are decorated with angels, images of Jesus, coloured glass and tombstones, which are usually inscribed with the date of death, but not the date of birth, as is common in Europe.
The cemetery, which is reserved for the richest in Buenos Aires because the land is the most expensive in the city, is of course home to many famous people, but none more so than Evita Peron, who, after her death, was buried and reburied until she found peace in her father’s family tomb in the Recoleta Cemetery. The burial was not peaceful. The upper classes did not want her there, and long after her death they tried to drive her away, but by then she was safely resting deep under a layer of cement and steel that prevents vandals from breaking into the tomb.
Today, her grave is one of the most visited in the cemetery, easily found by tourists and locals would have no trouble finding David Allen’s grave. The Italian immigrant was the night watchman of the cemetery and dreamt of being buried there. He saved enough money to buy a place and build his own tomb. To ensure that his marble statue was as close to his likeness as possible, he went to his native Italy and had one commissioned.
Legend has it that David committed suicide in his grave when he finished his tomb, although some sources say he died years after he had finished his life project. In any case, today, when night falls, he is said to haunt the cemetery like a ghost. Those who walk the streets of the cemetery in the middle of the night are said to hear his cries.
But that’s not the only strange story connected to this cemetery. Another is about Rufina Cambaceres, who was buried alive when she was 19 years old. In 1902, she reportedly suffered an epileptic seizure and was buried. When she woke up, she started screaming and banging on the coffin. The security guards at the cemetery heard her and rushed as fast as they could, but by the time they managed to dig her out, she had already suffered a stroke. The story goes that scratches were found on the inside of the coffin and on her face.
Her mother was guilty under the weight of guilt. She had a new coffin made for her daughter, this time in marble. It is topped with a carved rose and an image of a girl lying on her side, looking at Rufina. The coffin now rests behind a glass panel so that if Rufina woke up, she could be rescued in time.
Under the blue skies of Paris
Paris’s Père Lachaise Cemetery is another story, with more than 70,000 graves and around one million people buried in it, reportedly the first of many cemeteries in the world to be designed as a park. In 1711, the architect Sir Christopher Wren came up with the idea for such cemeteries when he wanted to design a cemetery set back from settlements and covered with trees.
It took a long time from idea to realisation, as Napoleon only founded the famous Paris cemetery, which is today a mixture of park and shrine, in 1804, although still long before the English and the Americans.
The cemetery, which is characterised by a wide range of architectural styles, is said to be the most visited cemetery in the world today, which is hardly surprising, as it is a treasure trove of some of the world’s greatest talents, even if they are now deceased. Most visitors are said to visit the grave of Jimmy Morisson, lead singer and frontman of The Doors. He died in Paris in 1971 and was buried in an unmarked grave.
In time, the cemetery administration put a simple commemorative marker on it, but it was stolen by miscreants. The simple gravestone that replaced the stolen one has also disappeared to an unknown destination. As the grave had become a real pilgrimage centre over the years, the cemetery authority even hired a security guard in 2008 to prevent the many visitors leaving gifts, songs and messages for the dead singer from destroying either his grave or the neighbouring graves.
Those who are not Jimmy Morisson worshippers will be pleased to hear that the most visited grave at Père Lachaise is likely to be that of Oscar Wilde. After he was almost driven out of England for his homosexuality, he took refuge in France and died there in 1900. A monument was erected to him. The angel was baring his crotch, but was injured by intolerant men not long after he could be seen.
Even today, it is not untouched, but covered with traces of lipstick. Women kiss the stone to show their loyalty to a writer who was broken by the authorities for his sexual orientation, which was still a criminal offence in England at the time.
Victor Noir’s grave also has sexual overtones, albeit in a different way. Victor was not well known in his lifetime. Born Yvan Salmon, he moved to Paris under the artistic name Victor Noira and became a journalist. When the Emperor’s cousin challenged the owner of the newspaper he worked for to a duel, Victor found himself in the role of second.
He should have sorted out all the details at the duel site, but he managed to get into a fight with the prince when the prince told him he was a servant. It is not clear who was the first to be slapped, but it was probably Victor. He could say no more because the Prince shot him.
Victor was buried in a tomb with a bronze statue of him in the same position as Victor was lying when he was shot by the Prince. His hat lies beside it, as it did at the hour of his death. This would not really be very interesting if the statue were not very naturalistic. The artist has creased Victor’s trousers slightly at the crotch so that he looks aroused.
And so was born the myth that if a woman rubs herself against this spot and leaves a flower by Victor’s hat, she will be sure to marry within a year. The fact that almost the whole statue is covered with a green wolf, but not the trousers at the crotch, makes the myth all the more attractive.
The story of Frederic Chopin’s burial is also a bit unusual. Only his body lies in the tomb, while his heart was transported to his native Poland. His grave, marked by the muse of music, Euterpe, weeping bent over his broken lyre, is almost always decorated with bouquets and potted plants of admirers of his music.
The Federalist Wall, or Wall des Fédérés, has its own story to tell, although it is nothing special in itself. On the twenty-seventh of May 1871, the last rebels and supporters of the Paris Commune were surrounded by government forces. The battle had been lost beforehand, yet fighting raged all night between the graves.
In the morning, the expected victors lined up 147 survivors in front of a brick wall, shot them and buried them in a common grave. Today, opposite “their” wall, a memorial dedicated to the fallen of all wars stands, in an attempt to create a kind of emotional avenue where people can walk and realise the value of life and the futility of war.
Rest under the Mount of Olives
The famous collection is also the largest and holiest cemetery in the Jewish world. The Jews built it at the foot of the Mount of Olives, which offers a magnificent view of Jerusalem, but they believe that the cemetery, which today contains some 70,000 graves, is not very old. In fact, it was not until the 15th or 16th century that the old cemetery at the foot of the mountain began to develop, when Muslims began to threaten it and a safer place had to be found.
The site at the foot of the mountain was chosen because it was relatively close to the Jewish Quarter in the Old City of Jerusalem, and because the area was relatively uninhabited. They also liked the location because it was dusty. They reckoned that the cemetery would be a pilgrimage site for those heading across the flood plain. If they did, dust would accumulate on their clothes in the cemetery. When they set out, they would carry it with them and scatter it on the graves of their loved ones buried somewhere far away, thus ensuring an immediate resurrection for them too.
One of the stories about the cemetery is that on the Day of Resurrection, those who are buried in the cemetery will be the first to rise, and after the resurrection, they will be subject to a completely different set of rules than the deceased buried in other cemeteries.
During Jordanian rule, the cemetery was badly damaged by soldiers removing tombstones to use the stone for war purposes, but after the Six-Day War it was restored. This created a cemetery that is quite simple and huge. It is divided into sections, each of which is used to bury the dead of a different Jewish community.
Just as the cemetery at the foot of the Mount of Olives is the largest in the Jewish world, Okuion is the largest in Japan, if it can even be called a cemetery. According to the Shingon Buddhist teachings, there are no dead, only souls waiting to rise again. They may do so in other cemeteries, but here they wait in close proximity to Kobe Dashi, the founder of Shingon Buddhism, because he is also resting among them.
The approach to his tomb is decorated with 10,000 lanterns, in the glow of which the monks perform two rituals a day. It is believed that Dashi spends his days in eternal meditation, waiting for the Buddha of the future. When the buddha of the future arrives, Dashi will rise and meet him, and at that time the other souls who are now waiting in the cemetery will also rise.
Because the anticipation of new life is so attractive, the number of graves in the cemetery is constantly increasing, but this is not a problem because there is plenty of space. The cemetery is located deep in the Koyasan forests and is so remarkable that it has come under UNESCO protection.
The forest is dotted with around 200,000 tombstones and tombs, placed wherever they are placed. Thus, from the two-kilometre-long main path that runs through the cemetery, there are numerous paths leading off in all directions.
One of them also leads to a children’s cemetery, identifiable by the red pieces of cloth, like bibs, tied around small memorial stones. Parents of deceased children tied them to protect their children on their way to a new life.
A walk among the graves
And on a perfect plain, since 1868, stretches Arlington National Cemetery, the only national cemetery where the fallen of every war since 1864, when the first soldier was buried there, are buried. The land once belonged to the legendary Confederate Army commander Robert E. Lee, but Lee lost his land with the loss of the war.
Today, it is home to more than 400,000 deceased soldiers, veterans and their families, but their opponents have also found a place among them. During the Second World War, two Italian prisoners and one German died in American captivity. Since the Geneva Convention mandates a decent burial, and Arlington is relatively close to Washington, where the trio died, they were buried among American soldiers.
But the trio are not the only aliens among Americans: there are around 60 of them buried in the cemetery, and around 5,000 other graves of unsung heroes.
In 1984, an unidentified soldier from the Vietnam War was buried there, but 14 years later he was dug up and DNA tested. They found he had a name and gave him a decent burial in Missouri.
The cemetery is also the resting place of around 4000 freed slaves. In 1863, the US government established Freedman’s Village on Arlington land to house those slaves freed by invading Union forces and those who managed to escape from plantations in nearby Virginia and Maryland. At its height, the village was home to around 1,000 former slaves, some working for the government, others on plantations growing food for the Unionist army.
For almost thirty years, the village, which was more like a town, had been bustling. It was full of homes, churches and shops, it had its own hospital and school. But in 1900, everyone had to leave. The authorities needed more land for new graves. Those freed slaves who had died before were buried there and their tombstones inscribed with the words ‘civilian’ or ‘citizen’.
Today, the cemetery is ideal for walking, but not nearly as much as the Assistens cemetery in Copenhagen, where assistens means extra and thus the cemetery is called the Extra Cemetery.
It was built in 1760 as a cemetery for the poor, so each of Copenhagen’s five parishes had a piece of land, and the orphanage and hospital also had a burial place. As the cemetery was quite far from the city, it was only a cemetery for the poor until 1875.
At that time, however, Chancellor Johann Samuel Augustin decided that he should be buried there too. The cemetery became fashionable overnight, and over time it became a tourist attraction, although it is still in use. At one point, the city authorities considered closing it and turning it into a park, but Copenhageners fiercely resisted.
The cemetery, surrounded by a yellow wall, is full of lush trees, ivy and rhododendron. It is part of their heritage, so they did not want to give it up, and they also objected because the cemetery is already used as a park.
It is part of the Assistens Centre, which also houses a museum, a former chapel, a park and lawns. This means that locals can normally walk around the cemetery, sunbathe, have picnics, run or cycle through the cemetery, study and court there.
The cemetery is always in good company, if not of the living then of the dead, as the writer Hans Christian Andersen, the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, the physicist Niels Bohr, the architect Finn Juhl and many other famous Dutch people are buried in this truly extra cemetery.
But Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York, has always been more like a park than a cemetery. As its name, made up of the words green and wood, suggests, the cemetery covers 1.9 square kilometres of hills, valleys, lakes and paths, along which you can see one of the largest collections of 19th- and 20th-century outdoor statues and mausoleums.
Trees as old as a century and a half provide shade for a wide variety of inhabitants. They include the composer Leonard Bernstein, for example, and many famous families, such as the Roosevelts, Pierrepontes and others, have buried family members here. Indeed, by 1848, it was the fourth most popular cemetery in America, and it was said that one in seven Americans had roots in Brooklyn.
When it was founded in 1838, it was one of the first rural cemeteries in America, but unlike others, it had already made a name for itself far beyond its borders by around 1860. To be buried in Green-Wood became a prestige, to see the cemetery a necessity. Green-Wood was transformed into a tourist attraction, drawing more than half a million visitors each year, second only to Niagara Falls, America’s biggest attraction. But that is not even a surprise. A visit to the cemetery was also a family outing, as people were allowed to sit in the cemetery and take carriage rides through it.
Because the cemetery was so popular, it also influenced the creation of New York’s Central Park and Prospect Park, which today stretches near Green-Wood. The park and the cemetery can be seen by anyone, but the catacombs are only accessible to those who come on a guided tour on the right day at the right time. There are 30 tombs, usually privately owned by families, so the catacombs were not open to the public until 2003.
Although they were not designed as a burial site, they are interesting because of the chance discovery of a worker who was carrying out construction work on the crematorium in January 2013. He found a metal box in the wall he had to break down, which turned out to be a time capsule. In 1954, someone had hidden six books about the cemetery, published in the 19th century, inside it and built it into the wall.
He wrapped the books nicely in plastic, but not precisely enough. The water damaged them so badly that the pages were destroyed just by touching them. On the advice of an expert, the books were frozen to prevent them from completely disintegrating, and when they were, at least the titles of the books became visible.
But it’s not just books that have found their way to the cemetery – so have Argentine parrots. No one knows exactly how this happened, but it seems that in 1967 an airport worker curiously opened a crate of exotic animals and let them loose.
The parrots flew away and caused heartburn around the city, so they wanted to kill them. After some deliberation, they decided to let half of them live, but before they could kill the parrots, they had already moved away. They found their new home in the cemetery and have been living there peacefully ever since, without disturbing anyone.
They are not interested in brownstone doors either. The arches were erected between 1861 and 1863 or during the Civil War and depict scenes from the Bible on their surface. They are built in the Gothic style, but this is not the predominant style in the cemetery. There are many architectural styles, although most of the monuments, statues, mausoleums and graves are nevertheless in the classical style.
There is no cemetery chapel. It is built in the Gothic style and bears a famous signature, having been designed by Warren & Wetmore, the architectural firm responsible for, among other things, Grand Central Metro Station.
Marx’s last home
There was also a lot of activity at Highgate, or the Londoners’ home cemetery. In the first decades of the 19th century, they faced a major problem: mortality rates were high and space for burials was scarce. Where to put all their dead?
They solved the problem the way they were solved in those days: they started burying them in the black. Disguised as priests, so as not to attract attention, they buried them wherever they could, next to houses, taverns and on hillsides, but always in very shallow graves. They needed them for the new dead, so the one they put in today was covered with living lime so that it would decompose as quickly as possible and make room for the new body in a few months. These makeshift graves, of course, were a source of great loss and spread disease.
At the beginning of the 19th century, London was home to one million people. Over the next 20 years, their numbers grew rapidly, and so did the number of deceased, but not the number of cemeteries. Around 1830, the city authorities could no longer turn a blind eye to the problem not only of the dead but also of disease, so Parliament decided that seven new private cemeteries should be opened around the capital.
Highgate Cemetery was one of them. When the first deceased was buried there in 1839, people were a little surprised – the architect Stephen Geary and the renowned gardener David Ramsey had beautifully interspersed the buildings with vegetation, which now included exotic plants. The cemetery was so beautiful that it was not difficult to find investors for further development.
In the following decades, it became one of the city’s trendiest cemeteries. It brought in enough money to buy more land and expand, but soon there was no longer any need. By the turn of the century, people no longer wanted lavish funerals and expensive tombs, and with some 40 gardeners having to join the army, the cemetery was understaffed. Nevertheless, they did not neglect it, they just did more with fewer hands.
But that didn’t save the cemetery. It kept losing money. Burials were less and less luxurious and people opted for simple graves, and many graves were abandoned because the descendants had either died or moved away.
To stop the cemetery’s decline, some of its land was sold in 1956 and two churches were closed, but to no avail. In 1960, they went bankrupt, but the new owner was not so lucky. For fifteen years he kept his head above water and in 1975 he simply closed the cemetery.
But then the Friends of Highgate Cemetery came together to save its “monuments and buildings and flora and fauna” for the benefit of all Londoners. They started to clean up the surroundings and repair the monuments that had been damaged by vandals over the years, giving the cemetery a new lease of life.
Since then, it has been continuously restored and renovated, and many monuments have been protected. But these do not attract as much attention as the two most famous cemeteries.
The first belongs to Karl Marx, who died in 1883 and is buried in the newer, eastern cemetery. The statue was not erected on his monument until 73 years after his death. It is not clear what is happening to the other known grave, as it is closed to the public. It is the resting place of singer George Michael, who died on 25 December 2016. It is located in the western part of the cemetery, where his mother, the painter Lucien Freud and the alleged Russian spy Alexander Litvinenko are also buried nearby. As the site is private, it is fenced off and therefore relatively safe from admirers. While they would like to make a pilgrimage to the singer’s grave, they do not have the opportunity to do so because even the guided tours of the West Cemetery do not include his final home.
