Unknown Soldiers

The Père Lachaise Cemetery is the largest in Paris with over a million burials. It is also the most visited cemetery in the world, though I found it uncrowded and quiet on a Wednesday afternoon.

I photographed the graves of Edith Piaf, Oscar Wilde, Frédéric Chopin (remembered as "Fred" on his headstone) Jim Morrison (who was born in my hometown of Melbourne, FL), Georges Bizet, and Marcel Proust. I'm sue you can find better pictures on the Internet, but you may not notice some of the more interesting details. For example, Oscar Wilde and Jim Morrison are so popular that gates have been placed around their plots. That hasn't stopped people from writing their names on the tombstone in front of Morrison's (poor chap) or leaving lipstick kisses on the plexiglass that forms a second layer of protection around Wilde's.

In the pictures I'm sharing with you, I've chosen to focus on the less celebrated features of the cemetery. It's a little difficult to describe because it's so big and has varied landscapes and textures, which I tried to capture in the first image.

There are some large trees and some beautiful flowering trees (dogwood? cherry? empress?) as seen in the next photo, but most of the ground has been covered in stone, leaving very little green space.

The hillside cemetery is so large, with 97 divisions separated by a veritable maze of cobblestone paths, it can be a little difficult to find particular graves. This turns out to be a neat feature of the cemetery because you accidentally get to see the great variety of tombs, mausoleums, sepulchers, crypts, shrines, and vaults. You can see some of them in the third picture.

I'd like to point out some of my favorite unknown soldiers. First, there's Arman, who I was sure was a cellist, but it turns out he was an artist, and a recent addition to the cemetery. Next, we have Mr. Barbedienne, obviously a pimp. And lastly was the tallest single shrine I saw, that of a Mr. Beaujour. I believe he may have been compensating for something...