In a graveyard we visited in a small village in France last month, I noticed many of the graves were full of little plaques and ornaments. I thought they must be attached to the graves but they were not.
They had simply been placed on the stones and left there. There were messages inscribed on them to the deceased.
Different family members must have placed the plaques there because the same woman might have a plaque on her grave recognizing her as a grandmother, aunt, wife and mother.
There were also porcelain flowers, animals, people and birds and images related to the dead person’s hobbies or interests. I had never seen anything quite like it.
An interesting thing about graves I photographed in Kyoto Japan were these wooden markers called sotobas placed around the grave. Written on them were the names given to the deceased after they died and sutras- Buddhist sayings or holy writings.
In Ukraine, I noticed many of the Mennonite tombstones had anchors on them including my great-great grandfather’s.
I read an article about the anchor images on Mennonite gravestones in Ukraine. They were a sign that the people who died had anchored their lives in their faith.
My husband Dave is in one of the family burial rooms in the catacombs in Rome where some seven million people were interred between the second and fifth centuries.
Hiking in the mountains in Hong Kong we came across this enclosure with funeral pots in a small abandoned village. Dead people’s remains were in each pot. It was a very different kind of grave.
When we were on a walk along the ocean in Victoria British Columbia I noticed this grave marker for famed Canadian author Carol Shields. She spent the last three years of her life in Victoria and this plaque marks the spot where her family scattered her ashes into the ocean.
In Cambodia, I visited the Killing Fields where the skulls of some of the more than a million people who were killed during the violent Pol Pot regime in the 1970s are displayed as a visceral reminder of that genocide.
When we were in Agra in India we visited the Taj Mahal where the emperor Shah Jahan and his wife Mumtaz Mahal are buried. What an elaborate, beautiful and massive memorial it is.
This is Galileo’s ornate grave which we visited in The Basilica of Santa Croce in Florence Italy. It is actually Galileo’s second resting place.
His body was moved to this more prominent burial site a hundred years after his death when he was no longer an outcast from the Roman Catholic Church which had exiled him for his heretical scientific ideas.
I think there is much to learn about history, culture, science, religion, societal change and family beliefs by visiting graves and burial sites.
Other posts………
Visiting the Taj Mahal at Dawn
What Next? 