Although visiting the dead is not as rewarding as visiting the living I have found that it is the dead that speak more eloquently of the history of a place. In Prague the Old Jewish Cemetery has graves that date back to 1439 although some argue that it is a thousand years older than that. The numbers of grave stones and numbers of people buried there is unknown. This is because the Jewish community was not granted more land to bury their dead so they had to keep adding more layers of soil on top of the older graves. Which is not a bad idea when you think of it. Because of this the cemetery has at least 12 layers of graves. So although there are approximately 12 000 tombstones presently visible there may be as many as 100 000 people buried in this spot and because of that, it is often referred to as ‘the Jewish Garden’.
How do they also have space to have a store under the grave yard?
ReplyDeleteI always thought that eventually we'd have to recycle grave sites, if we're not going to cremate... otherwise we'd have more dead land than living...
maybe we will give more value to the importance of the graveyards and the dead in the future and not worry about them taking up valuable real estate...
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