Editor’s Note: What, you’ve never heard of the Atlas Obscura? The founders - Dylan Thuras and Joshua Foer - have created a compendium of the world’s wonders, curiosities and esoterica, which they’ve agreed to share with Viator blog readers. Click here to read previous Atlas Obscura posts.
Hello Viatorians, Viatorites, and Viatorinians!
Sorry for the long delay, but I am happy to announce that the next installment of Atlas Obscura’s wonder-inspiring, off-the-beaten-path places that don’t make it into traditional guidebooks is here! This week’s theme is appropriately halloweeny, three Cemeteries, each bizarre and creepy in its own way!
Highgate Cemetery, London
The Merry Cemetery, Romania
The merry cemetery in Săpânţa, Romania is unusual in the candor of its gravestones. Displayed on the wooden crosses in bright pictures and annotated with limericks, are the illustrated lives and deaths of almost everyone who has passed away in the town of Sapanta.
Illustrated crosses depict soldiers being beheaded, a townsperson being hit by a truck, and a man drinking himself to death. The epigraphs reveal a surprising level of frankness. “Underneath this heavy cross. Lies my mother in law poor…Try not to wake her up. For if she comes back home. She’ll bite my head off.”
Merry Cemetery, Sapanta - Romania
Another reads “Ioan Toaderu loved horses. One more thing he loved very much. To sit at a table in a bar. Next to someone else’s wife.”
Highgate Cemetery, London
The story of Highgate Cemetery in London is so outlandish, you couldn’t make it up if you tried. Once one of London’s nicest Victorian burial grounds, by the 1960s it was a dilapidated mess. Used as a location for the infamous Hammer horror films, the site became the focus of a modern “vampire hunt” after witnesses claimed to have seen one.
Two magicians led a battle of one-upmanship to find and kill the supposed vampire. Though no vampire was found the hunters dug up real tombs, staked actual dead bodies and left beheaded (already dead to begin with) corpses strewn throughout 1970s London. It culminated on Friday the 13th in 1973 when a mob of ‘hunters’ from all over London swarmed over gates and walls into the locked cemetery, despite police efforts to control them.”
St. Sebastian’s Cemetery, Salzburg
St. Sebastian’s Cemetery, Salzburg
Medieval Europe had a thing for death. Called “memento mori” and meaning “Remember that you are mortal,” it was a standard theme for churches, paintings, and most of all cemeteries. The St. Sebastian’s Cemetery in Salzburg, Austria has memento mori in spades, covered in skulls with snakes coming from their eyes, bony figures holding hourglasses, and winged skulls, it is a true treat for anyone with a morbid streak.
Among the luminaries buried in this macabre cemetery are Mozart’s wife and father, Archbishop Wolf Dietrich who was disgraced by the church, denied burial in the Cathedral crypt and so is buried here, and Theophrastus Paracelsus alchemist, mystic, scientist and sometimes called “the father of modern medicine.�
-The Atlas Obscura Team
November 2nd, 2009 at 7:48 am
I so love the idea of the The Merry Cemetery! Not just a tombstone, a biography - genius!
November 2nd, 2009 at 8:29 am
Those tombstones are incredible, I have never seen anything like them. The merry cemetery? That is a very interesting name for a cemetery.