A Thousand-Year-Old Church in Denmark and What I Learned about Burial

 

Just after we crested a small hill on a drive in Denmark, this beautiful Church was 500 meters ahead. My friend Cliff and I stopped to take a picture of what turned out to be a thousand-year-old Church of a type very common in Denmark. It is called Sorbymargle Kirke.  

Just after we stopped, the caretaker, Carina Rasmussen, drove up and offered to let us see the inside of the Church.  The design, long and narrow, is replicated across the country in Church large and small.  

There were very old drawings on the wall.  

But the real revelation was the graveyard.  I had seen another Church the day before with an immaculate garden cemetery.  This one is lovely.

Do you see what's missing?  I didn't. But it was not until we visited another Church where I saw old headstones in what could have been a granite recycling bin that I got the story on what's missing--old headstones.  In America, graveyards are the biggest problem faced by people who design roads and bridges and housing projects. We bury people in durable caskets. People here are buried in biodegradable caskets. The plot is a 25 or 50 year rental. By then, the current occupant is part of the soil and someone else moves in.  

The headstones get recycled as stone.  

The graveyards stay small and clean. there are no cracked, faded, broken 300-year-old headstones.  

One of the wonderful things about travel is seeing culture in a way you never could except on the ground in the place you are visiting.  And in this case, getting the answer to a question I never knew to ask.