Each week the CCANSW will feature one or two articles about specific cemeteries in Australia, New Zealand and the rest of the world, especially those we may not have yet have heard about, and your local ones that we ought to know about.
Each week the CCANSW will feature one or two articles about specific cemeteries in Australia, New Zealand and the rest of the world, especially those we may not have yet have heard about, and your local ones that we ought to know about.
Park Island Cemetery’s first burials were recorded in 1917 and it provided plots until just after WWII. Many victims of the 1931 earthquake rest here and are remembered with a cenotaph.
It's the largest cemetery in the world, said to have been providing for daily burials for over 1,400 years. Wadi-us-Salaam, which translates as 'Valley of Peace', is an Islamic cemetery located in the Shia holy city of Najaf, Iraq. The cemetery covers 1,485.5 acres (601.16 ha; 6.01 km2; 2.32 sq mi) and contains tens of millions of bodies. It also attracts millions of pilgrims annually.
West Auckland may be better associated with black sand beaches and bogans that spring blooms, but Waikumete Cemetery - New Zealand's largest - is said to have one of the best collections of South African wildflowers - the "jewels of the veld" - outside South Africa. Initially planted atop graves of South African migrants, the baby pink angel's trumpets, bright orange tritonia, blue and purple baboon flowers, white chincherinchee and multi-hued African corn lilies now pop up all over the place between September and December.
The incineration of bodies was a controversial topic in Ukraine in the 1960s, after the horrors of the Holocaust during World War II and particularly the Nazi massacre at Babi Yar. The topic had just started to be discussed publicly when this odd-shaped neomodernist concrete crematorium was built in Kyiv.