cemetery

A hare—the very symbol of timidity—on a Roman tombstone, where we might instead expect to find an eagle, a lion, or perhaps a horse?

The iconography of the stele is unique in the entire corpus of ancient archaeological finds: it depicts the deceased descending from the world of the living into the afterlife, escorted from the mourners by Hermes and Charon to the judge of the Underworld

In the cemetery of the Church of St. Bartholomew in Vyšší Brod, founded in 1259, stands an unusual grave: a simple concrete monument bearing a red star and a gold hammer and sickle, with the gilded inscription below

For the Georgians, Prince Konstantin’s unexpected return home was also seen as the sudden revival of national pride and ancient royal dignity, which contemporaries called a “spiritual coronation”

I couldn’t see the Good Shepherd fresco, but I did learn how, when Nicaean Christians buried under his protection, a pagan citizen in the same necropolis related to death

The walls of Nicaea were built during the Roman imperial period, when it was an imperial city and the seat of a council. After falling into Ottoman hands in 1331, the walls remained almost entirely intact, stretching five kilometers, with nearly a hundred towers and four gates.