Monthly Archives: August 2011

Europe’s Best Cemeteries #3

Père-Lachaise – Paris, France

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Everyone loves a celebrity corpse, and there are quite literally piles of them in Père-Lachaise. Renowned as the final resting place of Jim Morrison, this enormous Parisian landmark is also home to Oscar Wilde, Frédéric Chopin, Molière, Marcel Proust and Édith Piaf (three guesses what’s written on her tombstone. Wrong: there’s nothing.)

But it’s not all about the famous cadavers: come for the dead, stay for the décor. Père-Lachaise’s ornate memorials, leafy walkways and lovely smoke-free follies help create a calm oasis in the frantic French capital.

You can read the whole article – Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries – in the August edition of stalkingElk

Europe’s Best Cemeteries #2

Old Jewish Cemetery – Prague, Czech Republic

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The Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague is, rather predictably, a cemetery for old Jews: specifically, those who snuffed it between 1439 and 1787. During this time the Jewish community was kettled into a tiny ghetto, having to stuff their stiffs into a 60-metre-square graveyard, and so over three centuries it was crammed with around 100,000 bodies. Which explains why it has Europe’s highest concentration of tombstones.

FUN FACT!!! Prague’s famous cemetery only survived Nazi occupation because Hitler wanted to preserve it as ‘a museum to an extinct race’.

You can read the whole article – Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries – in the August edition of stalkingElk

Europe’s Best Cemeteries #1

Cross Bones – London, England

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The most famous resting place in London is, without doubt, the wonderfully gothic Highgate: the eternal residence of everyone from Karl ‘Commie’ Marx to Douglas ‘Galaxy’ Adams; Michael ‘Benzene’ Faraday to Jeremy ‘Withered’ Beadle. The capital’s most interesting cemetery, on the other hand, is Cross Bones.

An unconsecrated necropolis for so-called ‘Winchester Geese’ – medieval prostitutes who were licenced by the Bishop of Winchester to work within Southwark – it is simply a mass grave for those deemed unfit for a Christian burial: the outcast dead. Now it’s most famous for a cracking Halloween procession.

You can read the whole article – Killing Time in Europe’s Best Cemeteries – in the August edition of stalkingElk