I was just thinking this, do we regularly breaking into tombs in the rest of the world? I guess some of the cathedrals themselves are tombs and are big tourist attractions.
Most cemeteries in Europe have been destroyed to make space for urbanisation. The underground of Paris is full of bones from those cemetaries (catacombs of Paris). It's fairly common as outside of a few aristocratic families, people keep a very short memory of their ancestry. I have a very vague knowledge of who my ancestors were back to the mid XIX century and nothing prior. Hard to have any emotional attachment to people you never heard about. So if no one cares, better to build a parking lot!
I have very vivid memories as a child of walking through Brookwood Cemetary in south east England seeing a big machine crunching up headstones. Vast swathes of the place was flattened. The cheat code here seems to be "topple testing" for health and safety reasons.
It's the UKs largest cemetery and in a shocking state:
There is a park in Brussels where you literally walk on alleys paved with tombstones from the Jewish cemetery. You can still see some of the inscriptions there.
On the continent, afaik most countries work on a lease system, you rent a plot for a few decades (which may or may not be renewable). Some countries have a “perpetual” lease with an ongoing fee, a few years after the payment stops the plot gets cycled.
‘Course space requirements are also a factor, if you have a family plot in a depopulated village in the countryside odds are good plots will be cheap and renewable forever.
Old church with over hundred years old tombstones around it is literally an English landmark. Even in central London. Tombstones you mention belong to people from wrong social class.
I am not even sure about social class. In any case these old cemeteries are preserved probably more as historical artefacts, like an old Roman wall would be in London, rather than out of respect for the dead.
I've spent some time on genealogy, and really beyond grandparents and maybe great grandparents it's mostly curiosity and for the interesting stories, and I only care about the graves to the extent that it makes solving the puzzles easier. It's not like there is anyone alive in my family who knew older ancestors of mine than my great grandparents.
For my part I've only ever seen even my dads grave once, and feel no need to go back there, though I understand why some might feel it matters to have the grave of someone they knew in person because of the emotional attachment.
It's a bit of a paradox: burial rites are among the earliest and most fundamental elements of any society we know of; but long-term maintenance of burial sites has always been a challenge. That's probably because, after all the fanfare to honour the dead (which is mostly a way to minimize immediate social disruption), everyone eventually moves on.
When my dad died, the funeral mattered to me. But the grave does not. Of course to some it does, but it doesn't take long before everyone it mattered to are dead too. I think it's fine to keep graves for those who cares, but that shouldn't really obligate society to keep them around very long.
There is a park in my city that used to be the city cemetery. They moved the cemetery to a new place due to capacity and turned the original one into a park.
I think it is a very common practice. Everyone will be forgotten eventually, no matter the fame.
Yes, we regularly (for some definition of "regularly") uncover human burial sites (both as part of planned archaeological excavations and accidentally during construction) all around the world, including Europe, Asia, and the Americas. If you're asking specifically about tombs then the answer is also yes.
US and UK phrenologists encouraged a lot of grave descration, often not even waiting for a corpse to be interned before shipping the remains out.
Yagan’s murder by colonial settlers was, even by the day’s standards, an act of hideous violence. That his head was subsequently removed and dispatched to England as a biological curio, a specimen to aid the discredited voodoo science of phrenology – whereby racial intelligence and personality could purportedly be determined by cranial distinctions – added indignity to death.
Easy to write off as the bizzarro actions of those gosh darned old timey folks ...
A naked life size bronze of Aboriginal warrior Yagan, resting a spear across the back of his shoulders. It is quite evident that the head of Yagan is not the original one (rather oversized, has a far too long a neck and is an altogether different shade). I must say that because the statue’s head has been stolen twice (and given the way Yagan died), the sculpture now takes on a strange and ironic overtone.
Christianity has an ancient tradition of relics in which even in the absence of an actual corpse people will just pick up some random bone and be like "this was some old ladies actual hand, it has magic powers now" and then parade it around the city every year.
I just got back from a triple to Naples where there's a church that had a secret skull collecting cult under it for decades, it's a tourist attraction now. Yes it is still full of peoples skulls.
So yes, it seems like there is a statute of limitations on our obedience to the dead.
