Aunt Anna and death - All Saints' Day and cemeteries of the world

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Writer: Anna Nilsson Spets

So All Saints' Day has come to an end, in Sweden one of the finest holidays we have. Despite the darkness and the loss, it is a day filled with warmth, light and memories.

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All Saints' Day

Here in Belgium, All Saints' Day is big, really big, and there are decorations both high and low. Priority one is a large ball chrysanthemum, the bigger the better.

Then there will be a cut flower arrangement, perhaps a votive candle will be lit too.

At my job, it's been a busy time, with florists making more than 1000 arrangements.

That stuff with chrysanthemums and cut flowers wouldn't work in Sweden, it would freeze in no time.

Cemeteries in the world

A much-publicised cemetery is located in Doel, near Antwerp. The community that was closed down and forcibly redeemed for an expansion of the harbour that never happened.

The graves are still there, waiting to be moved or not.

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It is interesting to know how people bury their relatives in different parts of the world.

In Madagascar, a resting place is built where the remains are placed, and every seven years they are taken out and wrapped again. Famadihana is the name of the ritual and it means ”turning the bones”, you wrap them in new clothes and it is celebrated with pomp and circumstance with food and a live orchestra. Many years ago in Madagascar, I visited a special cemetery for PIRATES!

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On a small islet, where a hollowed-out tree trunk and a paddle took me, lay the remains of a number of more or less famous pirates who had their haunts around Madagascar. Different and imaginative.

During a visit to Senegal I made an overly long detour to Joal Fathidou, just to see the very different cemetery located on a small island basically made of mussel shells.

Here, Muslims and Christians are on the same island. A host of ancient baobab trees make up the decorations. A very strange place.

At Moheli in Comoros you can visit the island of the lepers, where the bones have been incorporated into the walls of nature. A tiny island that you came to but never left.

Or like in the Grand Comoros, where a small mosque appeared overnight, nobody knows how? Legends that are told generation after generation.

For me, visiting a cemetery or a graveyard is a cultural experience, it's part of my travelling.

Winding your way up the hill by the old town of Sarajevo, you come to the incredibly sad resting place of all the victims of the war years of the 1990s. Long rows of the whitest marble stones, an honour guard silently doing its duty.

It's heartbreaking to read on the statues how young they were.

Sarajevo has several other interesting cemeteries, the Jewish one with its ancient tombstones is worth a visit. If you are travelling to Bosnia and want to understand the ethnic cleansing during the war, you should of course visit Srebrenica. Here thousands have their final resting place. It is so sad that the angels weep.

If we are going to talk about Jewish cemeteries, why not the one in Krakow with its moss-covered green stones. Remuh cemetery is located in the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz, the first graves are as old as almost 500 years.

By far the most impressive cemetery has to be Pere lachaise in Paris. It takes almost a full day to get through it, it's so huge.

It's as if time has stood still here, for many centuries. The graves are covered with moss and decorated with dusty artificial flowers.

Pere lachaise is a major tourist attraction, many celebrities are laid to rest here. Jim Morrison, Piaf and Chopin are some of them.

Just outside the city centre, there is also an animal cemetery which was unfortunately not open at the time of my visit to Paris.

On my bucket list of cemeteries is one I really want to visit, the Happy Cemetery in the village of Săpânța, Romania. The graves tell the story of the person through colourful pictures and quirky texts.

In Mexico, death is a big deal, the Day of the Dead is celebrated on 1-2 November, family members gather to honour the deceased. They build altars decorated with flowers, candles, food and photos, things the deceased loved. Parades with skeleton costumes are a common occurrence.

Death, burial sites, customs and traditions tell us a lot about traditions and ways of life, and we can learn a lot of interesting things... whether it's a resting place in a hollow baobab tree in Africa or in a mausoleum in the United States.

So death, death, death can take many forms.

Death is the death with which the beloved Astrid Lindgren began many of her conversations.

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Anna Nilsson Spets

60+ year old lady with a lifelong love for Africa. Emigrated to Flanders in Belgium and works with plants on a daily basis. Writes, takes photos and tries to inspire others to budget travel on their own. Blogs on "Anna's mix" about travelling, work, plants, writing and much more.

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