The winding, hilly streets of Paris's oldest Cemetery

Cimetiere Pere-Lachaise

Final home to Oscar Wilde, Frederic Chopin, Jim Morrison, and a host of other foreign and French notables, the Pere-Lachaise cemetery hosted the six of us (temporarily) one sunny morning in late April. Like many places used in daily life (daily death?) in Paris, this space is an art form in itself. If the famous bodies have decayed, the work of the sculptors lives on in the 100,000+ burial sites. (The place has had a million burials -- do the math, we're stackin' em deep). Generally the more famous the body, the less fancy the grave. Here's some of our photos:

As the cemetery streets wind through the hills, they make it easy to get lost and hard to find specific graves:

Dying in the Chapel

Very often a small chapel is built completely over a family's plot and contains markers for family members who are buried above ground inside. Some are quite elaborate with stain glass windows and altars. Here's Martha inside one of them:

A Wilde place

Another popular grave is that of our former neighbor, Oscar Wilde. This one is quite modern for this place:

Close the door!

For some unknown reason, the rather nondescript grave of Jim Morrison has become a cult shrine as you can see by this photo of young girls who were nowhere during Jim's prime (lucky for them).

This grave has been defaced several times and has caused security at the cemetery to be tightened. A guard stands here more-or-less permanently.

Some people leave behind remembrances which make the place look even worse. Here's the Doors' drummer and lead chick many years later returning to their lead singer's grave:

Obviously you can take people out of the sixties but you can't take the sixties out of the people.

The Christmas Storm

Last time we tried to get to Pere-Lachaise was the day after the great storm of 1999 and we found the gates closed. Suzie was able to get in about a month later (February 2000) and left us a map which we put to good use. After the storm, the cemetery still looks good but there are spots of obvious damage such as this:

Here's a picture of some more wrecks:

Strollin'

Because of the hills, it sometimes appears that graves are stacked almost on top of each other:

All in all, it's quite a place and pretty nice to visit but I wouldn't...

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