TIL the largest cemetery in the world is Wadi-us-Salaam in Iraq. It has 6 million bodies, covers 6.01 km2/2.32 sq mi of land and has been in use for at least 1400 years.
TIL the largest cemetery in the world is Wadi-us-Salaam in Iraq. It has 6 million bodies, covers 6.01 km2/2.32 sq mi of land and has been in use for at least 1400 years.
What a waste of space
Yes, space is certainly a premium in the Arabian desert.
It would be funny if they discovered oil underneath.
Archeologists, ten thousand years from now.
I'm guessing all the skeletons will be a clue.
For anyone confused by the image, those are mostly crypts you're seeing.
... to be buried at the cemetery, one has to be interred inside one of the shared crypts in the cemetery.
Here's a picture with a bit more detail:
6 million bodies over 1,400 years is on average almost 4,300 bodies each year, or a little less than 12 bodies each day.
Astounding! And of course, that's assuming that it has been in use at the same rate the entire time.
It could be that for 20 years, almost no one lived there so there were very few burials, but at another point there was a war or a plague and they were burying 100 people a day.
Edit: I forgot to mention that it's actually more than that now.
The cemetery saw heavy fighting during the 2004 Battle of Najaf. It is estimated that during the Iraq War, about 200 to 250 corpses were buried there daily; however, in 2010 this number had decreased to less than 100.[5] Approximately 50,000 new bodies are interred in the cemetery annually from across the globe.[14] This figure is an increase on the approximately 20,000 bodies, primarily from Iran, that used to be interred annually in the early 20th century.[15] Most Iraqi and many Iranian Shi'ites have a relative buried in the cemetery.[16]
Ghost Woodstock.
Sadly, Jimi and Janis are not buried there to be part of the entertainment.
Edit: On the other hand, I'm guessing they would appreciate Arabic love poetry over Me and Bobby McGee.
The middle east was on a good path during the 60s/70s.
I'm sure a few musicians from that era are buried there and keeping everyone entertained.
So places not to be during the zombie apocalypse.
I've always thought of zombies as an infection of the living or recently living. Graveyards are more of an undead thing, you need necromancy to worry about they coming back to life.
Who knows? Depends on the zombie. Before Night of the Living Dead, they were all supposedly raised from the dead by voodoo, which I imagine a lot of Haitians found pretty fucking offensive, but NOTLD was already in the '60s.
Also, I may be misremembering, but I'm pretty sure one of the Return of the Living Dead movies (not to be confused with Night of the Living Dead movies) featured zombies coming out of graves.