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Graveyards

Author Alastair Horne

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Graveyards, burial sites and cemeteries are as old as human civilization, resting places and memorial sites for loved ones, the great and sometimes the infamous. Some of these places retain a poignant atmosphere that tells of heroic or deadly deeds – the 210 men of George Custer’s command are remembered by graves scattered around the memorial marking their defeat at Little Bighorn in Montana, USA. Other, older graveyards retain a haunting quality that tells of the long history of their country and people – the 16th century Greyfriars Kirkyard in Edinburgh was soon filled with the bodies of victims of bubonic plague. Graveyards reveals both the universality of death, and the diversity of how we commemorate or memorialize our dead, from the hanging coffins of Sagada, Philippines, where, among the jungle-clad peaks of the stunning Echo Valley, hundreds of wooden coffins are hung from impossibly sheer rock faces, to the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague, testament to the huge Jewish community that lived in the Czech capital before the Holocaust. Readers can marvel at the Cairo Necropolis, known as the ‘City of the Dead’, a series of vast Islamic-era tombs and cemeteries dating back more than a thousand years, and enjoy the Merry Cemetery in Romania, famous for its brightly coloured tombstones with paintings describing, in an original and poetic manner, the lives of the people who are buried there. With detailed captions explaining their history and often ghostly past, Graveyards is a vivid pictorial exploration of the best-known, most-haunted and quirkiest burial places in the world today.