It is said that love never dies, even when people do, but who ever said those things had to be separated? Here is a list of the most romantic graves and monuments just in time for Valentine’s Day.
The Lovers of Cluj napoca
When Archaeologists in Cluj-Napoca, Romania were excavating a 15th century monastery they didn’t expect to find the grave of a young couple buried hand in hand. The male skeleton had a broken sternum from an injury that likely killed him, while the female’s skeleton was intact suggesting she died from a heart attack or stroke. The romantic theory is that she was so overcome with grief from her lover’s death that she couldn’t go on much longer.
Image: Wikipedia Commons Adrian Andrei Rusu and Institute of Archaeology and Art History
Grave with the Little Hands
In the Het Oude Kerkof cemetery located in Roermond, The Netherlands stands a pair of graves separated by a wall. The tall headstones reach above the wall and are joined together by a set of sculpted stone hands. The graves belong to Catholic noblewoman J.C.P.H. van Aefferden and her husband Colonel J.W.C. van Gorkhum. Van Gorkhum was a Protestant man and because the cemetery was strictly divided into Catholic, Protestant, and Jewish sections he was unable to be buried in the van Aefferden family plot. When van Gorkhum died in 1880, van Aefferden ordered the unique headstones and had them placed right at the edge of the wall separating the Catholic and Protestant sections of the cemetery. People still visit the gravesites to this day that locals affectionately call Het graf met de handjes, or “Grave with the little hands.”
Image FRANK JANSSEN, WIKIMEDIA COMMONS // CC BY-SA 3.0
The Grave of Georges Rodenbach
Who doesn’t love a dash of melodrama with their gravestone? Poet and writer Georges Rodenbach was best known for his tragic novel called Bruges-la-Morte, that told the story of a man mourning his deceased wife. He also wrote 3 more novels and 8 volumes of poetry during his lifetime. When Rodenbach died in 1898, he was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. A simple headstone wasn’t enough for the poet, he wanted a grave that was just as dramatic as the stories he wrote. He is sculpted bursting out of a granite grave and holding a flower to the air as if to defy death. It is truly a grave fit for a man who wrote so often about love and sorrow.
Shared Lives, Shared Casket
Missouri couple Raymond and Velva Breuer lived a long and happy life together and were married for 77 years. In 2017, Raymond passed away at the age of 97 with his loving wife by his side. Only 30 hours later, Velva also passed away. Surviving the couple were their 6 children and 18 grandchildren. Their son Bobby Bruer in an interview said that “Dad told one of the nurses before he passed, that if they went close together, that they should just be buried together, in the same casket.” He asked the funeral director if it was possible, and sure enough, they were laid to rest in their shared casket.
