My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I love the Culbertson and Randall “Permanent” series books because they don’t strive to be comprehensive. Other cemetery guides become tedious lists of all the famous people jammed into a cemetery, but these books go for depth instead, collecting up biographies of a few choice permanent residents. It’s arguable you take more away from this series than the others, where either you recognize the famous names or you don’t.

While Permanent Londoners spends a fair amount of time on the Magnificent Seven cemeteries (Brompton, Highgate, Kensal Green, etc.), it really shines for poking around inside landmarks that make up in history what they lack in acreage. Four chapters explore Westminster Abbey; one covers the Poets’ Corner alone. Other chapters look into the Tower of London and St. Paul’s crypt. That’s worth the price of the book right there, as far as I’m concerned.

I also like that the book wanders as far as Windsor Castle, discussing the monarchs who chose to be buried at home, rather than in town.

My copy was published in 1996, but I see a more recent version came out in 2000. I hope someone allows them to update it for the current decade.

You can find some used copies of the 2000 edition on Amazon here: Permanent Londoners: An Illustrated Biographical Guide to the Cemeteries of London

View all my reviews on Goodreads.

The statue of Queen Anne outside St. Paul’s

St. Paul’s Cathedral
London, EC4M 8AD United Kingdom
Telephone: +44 20 7236 8350
Founded: 604 AD
Number of memorials: More than 200
Open for sightseeing: Monday to Saturday 8:30 a.m. – 4:30 p.m. Last tickets are sold at 4 p.m. On Sunday, the cathedral is only open for worship.
Admission: The price includes entry to the cathedral floor, crypt, and the three galleries in the dome. Admission also includes multimedia guides and guided tours for individuals and family visitors. Adults: £16.00 Students & Seniors: £14.00 Children 6-17: £7.00 Family ticket (2 adults + 2 children under 17): £39.00 Book your tickets online here.
Telephone: For questions about sightseeing at St Paul’s Cathedral, contact the Admissions Department at +44 020 7246 8357.

Inspired by the funeral of Margaret Thatcher, I’ve decided this week’s featured cemetery should be St. Paul’s Cathedral. (Thatcher will be privately cremated and buried by her family elsewhere, but her funeral was celebrated at St. Paul’s.)

Glorious St. Paul’s is the Cathedral of the Diocese of London, which consists of five areas: Willesden, Edmonton, Stepney, London, and Kensington. A cathedral is the seat of the bishop; in this case, the bishop of London. Westminster Abbey, on the other hand, is lead by a Dean.

The original church dedicated to St. Paul the Evangelist was founded on Ludgate Hill, the highest point in London, in 604. Several churches were built on the same site after catastrophic fires, to be replaced by the medieval cathedral that boasted the tallest spire in the world and some amazing stained glass. That building was under renovation in the 17th century when yet another fire destroyed it.

The current St. Paul’s was built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London in 1666. Full of light and air and crowned with luminous gold mosaics of angels, St. Paul’s is magnificent in a way that most churches – even St. Peter’s in Rome – are not. It’s well worth a visit, even if you don’t go underground to visit the dead people.

The crypt beneath the sanctuary is the cathedral’s foremost burial place. At its heart stands Nelson’s Tomb. Admiral Horatio Nelson died in 1805 at the Battle of Trafalgar and was buried in St. Paul’s crypt after a state funeral. He was laid in a coffin made from the timber of a French ship called L’Orient, which he’d defeated in the Battle of the Nile. The black marble sarcophagus that adorns his tomb was originally made for Cardinal Wolsey, Lord Chancellor during the reign of Henry VIII in the early 16th century. Wolsey fell from favor after he couldn’t secure papal permission for Henry to marry Anne Boleyn, so his sarcophagus remained unused at Windsor until a suitable occupant could be found. Atop the monument sits Nelson’s viscount coronet.

Field Marshal Arthur Wellesley, 1st Duke of Wellington, defeated Napoleon at Waterloo. He rests in a casket made of Cornish granite. The banners around Wellington’s tomb were made for his funeral procession. There had been one for Prussia, but it was removed during World War I and never reinstated.

Vintage postcard of the crypt at St. Paul’s, showing Wren’s tomb on the left.

The architect of St Paul’s Cathedral, Sir Christopher Wren, is buried at the east end of the crypt. His tomb is marked by a simple stone and is surrounded by memorials to his family, to Robert Hooke (Wren’s associate), and to the masons and other colleagues who worked on the building. The Latin epitaph above his tomb, written by his son says, “Reader, if you seek his monument, look around you.”

The crypt contains many other tombs and memorials for artists, scientists, and musicians. They include the Pre-Raphaelite painters William Holman Hunt and Sir John Everett Millais; scientist Sir Alexander Fleming, discoverer of penicillin; composer Sir Arthur Sullivan (of Gilbert and Sullivan); and the sculptor Henry Moore.

The royalty buried at St. Paul’s stretches back to the earliest days of Anglo-Saxon England. Sebbi, King of the East Saxons before he became a saint in the 7th century, was buried at Old Paul’s. His black stone sarcophagus was destroyed by the London Fire in 1666. Also buried at Old St. Paul’s was Ethelred the Unready, who died on April 23, 1016. During his reign, the Vikings attacked England repeatedly. Ethelred tried to buy safety by paying tribute. When the agreement was broken, he ordered the slaughter of all Danes in England. His tomb was also destroyed during the fire.

Like Westminster Abbey, the crypt of the cathedral contains cenotaphs to the memories of those buried elsewhere. Among them are author William Blake, who died in obscurity and was buried in Bunhill Fields Burying Ground, where his grave is now lost; Florence Nightingale, who chose to be buried with her parents in St. Margaret’s Churchyard at East Wellow in Hampshire; and T. E. Lawrence, better known to us as Lawrence of Arabia. He’s buried in the Anglo-Saxon church of St Martin, Wareham in Dorset.

Useful links:
St. Paul’s homepage

Lovely photos inside St. Paul’s

Architectural details at St. Paul’s

Virtual tours of St. Paul’s

National Geographic’s short video tour

CNN’s report on Thatcher’s funeral

Books I’ve reviewed that reference St. Paul’s Cathedral:

London Cemeteries

Who Lies Where: A Guide to Famous Graves

St. Mary’s Cemetery, Oakland, California

Tonight is my mom’s last night in San Francisco, so I’m going to hold off on writing this week’s Cemetery of the Week until tomorrow.  I have a plan, but it requires research to do it justice.

Instead, I offer this photo, taken last January, while I roamed around Oakland, California with my friend Dorian.  The picture serves as my desktop background.  I love it because it combines the complicated blue of the sky with many shades of green and the various colors of stone.

Of all the elements in a graveyard, I’d say the colors are my favorite.  There is something so restful about the combination of sky and foliage, whether it’s the deep verdant lawns in Michigan or the golden meadows of the California coast beneath the spectrum of white that makes up clouds or the unbroken cerulean of sky that stretches from horizon to horizon.  Sky blue is my favorite color, but emerald green is a very close second.

Of course, I love this photo because it captures the steepness of St. Mary’s Cemetery and the crazy lean of the old stones.  It’s not often that I can sum a cemetery up in one photograph, but this one does a good job of capturing St. Mary’s, which lies beside the wealthier and better known Mountain View Cemetery at the end of Piedmont Avenue.

Some cemeteries don’t need their own Cemetery of the Week to be enjoyable.  This one is lovely and worth a visit, if only to absorb the colors of sun and sky and stone.

The Hanging Tree in Historic Boot Hill

Boot Hill Cemetery
500 W Wyatt Earp Boulevard
Dodge City, Kansas 67801
Telephone:(620) 227-8188
In use: 1872-1879
Number of interments: none any longer
Boot Hill Museum Winter Hours: Labor Day – Memorial Day, Monday – Saturday
9 a.m. – 5 p.m. and Sunday 1 p.m. – 5 p.m. Closed Thanksgiving Day, Christmas Day, and New Years Day. Summer Hours: Memorial Day – Labor Day 8 a.m. – 8 p.m.

In 1865, soon after the Civil War finished, Fort Dodge was founded in the young state of Kansas near the Arkansas River. Its mission was to protect westward-moving settlers from Indian attacks. In 1871, H. J. Sitler built a sod house nearby and opened the area’s first bar inside a tent. Other settlers also recognized that the steady stream of pioneers passing by on the Sante Fe Trail would make for good business, so a town grew up. It became Dodge City.

In its early days, Dodge was a rough, lawless town. Its graveyard was the original Boot Hill, so-called because the men buried there “died with their boots on,” either in a gunfight or from being hanged, as opposed to expiring quietly in their beds of illness or old age.

That’s the legend. However, the tourist sign in my vintage 1960s postcard quotes Josephine McIntire’s poem “Boot Hill,” which says, “To any Traveler who may pass this way, and climb this lonely hill and say/A prayer for us who early found our rest upon the prairie’s wind-swept ageless breast. Weep not for us who early made our beds, wrapped in our blankets, saddles for our heads. For we are happy here, secure and still, locked in this rock-strewn, silent, sun-baked hill.”

The message on the back of the card reads, “Just came from Boot Hill and am tired enough to lay down but they won’t let me.” It’s postmarked 8/3/66.

The Hanging Tree postcard – undated – reports that “This coffinless graveyard was started during the golden gun age of the West. The unfortunate victims had their boots removed and placed under their heads as pillows. This custom gave this historic tract its name. The 43 persons buried here have since been removed.”

The modern sign in the cemetery says that “about 34 persons had been interred” on the site, but their graves were unmarked and were often dug up by wolves. In 1879, the city council ordered that the bodies be removed. It goes on to call the people in the cemetery “drifters, troublemakers, and unknowns,” although several sources say that an actress named Dora Hand was buried there after she was shot by someone who had a grudge against the judge in whose bed she was sleeping at the time of her injury. Newspaper accounts speak of her as a legitimate actress and point out that the judge was not sleeping at home at the time of the attack on account of an illness.

Boot Hill Cemetery is now located in the heart of present-day Dodge City, Kansas. It is part of the Boot Hill Museum, which displays more than 60,000 objects, photographs, and documents from the last half of the 19th century. As part of the museum, Front Street’s businesses have been recreated, including the Long Branch Saloon and the Tonsorial Parlor. The undertaker’s establishment, complete with horse-drawn hearse, made a big impression on me as a child.

Dodge City’s old town offers attractions such as gunfights in the street and cancan girls in the saloon. Like Tombstone’s Boot Hill, there is a gift shop. If you can look beyond the kid-friendly facade, the grave markers reveal details about life and death in the Old West.

Like the wooden markers in Tombstone, Arizona’s Boot Hill, the markers in Dodge City are fairly modern. These, however, are carved, rather than painted like those in Tombstone. Little historical plaques fill in the details that the grave markers omit.

A wooden tablet carved with the name Jack Reynolds, who deceased September 1872, remembers Dodge City’s first recorded killing. Jack was shot six times by a railroad worker.

Nearby, another marker is incised with a buffalo skull. The historic sign nearby says, “A buffalo hunter named McGill amused himself by shooting into every house he passed. He won’t pass this way again.” The Marion County (Kansas) Record reported on March 29th, 1873: “On Tuesday night, an unmitigated scoundrel and desperado named McGill was shot and killed at Dodge City. This is the same scoundrel who shot and killed a sixteen year-old boy on New Years Day last, without the slightest provocation.”

Another graver marker remembers “George Hoyt, shot July 26, 1878. One night he took a pot shot at Wyatt Earp. Buried on Boot Hill August 21, 1878. Let his faults, if he had any, be hidden in the grave.” George Hoyt was said to be among the drunken cowboys who fired their guns in the Comique Theater. In response, Assistant Marshal Wyatt Earp and Marshall James “Bat” Masterson, along with several other citizens, returned fire. Hoyt received a gunshot to the arm and fled. He died from gangrene in the wound. Some historians doubt that Earp actually shot Hoyt, but he took the credit.

Wikipedia lists 38 towns, stretching from Iowa west to California and north to Alaska, which called their pioneer graveyards Boot Hill at some point in their histories. Some of these “Boot Hills” have already been profiled on Cemetery Travel.

Week #25: Ward’s Cemetery, Bodie, California

Week #64: Pioneer Cemetery, Coloma, California

Week #94: Boot Hill, Tombstone, Arizona

Useful links:
Photos of some of the wooden grave markers

More photos of the graveyard site

The Museum’s website, which doesn’t mention its namesake graveyard

Legally hanged and buried in the same grave. 1960s postcard.

Boot Hill Cemetery
408 N. Hwy 80
Tombstone, Arizona 85638
Information telephone: 520-457-3300
Founded: 1878
Number of interments: approximately 250
Open: 7:30 a.m. – dusk
Admission: free

Boot Hill is an American term for a burial ground in the western part of the country, dating to the post-Civil War era in the last third of the 1800s. A graveyard called Boot Hill (or Boothill) denoted a settlement where men “died with their boots on” or violently and suddenly, as opposed to quietly in bed of old age or illness.

Tombstone, Arizona dates to 1877, when a prospector named Ed Schieffelin discovered silver and named the first mine Tombstone. By 1879, a town had sprung up in a relatively flat area nearby. Gunslingers, gamblers, prospectors, Chinese laborers, and fancy ladies flocked to the town, which at one time was the fastest growing city between St. Louis and San Francisco. The high tide of population reached an estimated 20,000 people.

Shortly after the mine opened, the area found itself in need of a graveyard. A slight hill northwest of town was chosen. It didn’t have a name in its earliest days. Tombstone’s pioneer cemetery remained in use only until 1884, when the New Tombstone City Cemetery opened on Allen Street. That cemetery continues to be in use today.

An alternate spelling of McLaury with the assertion they were murdered by the Earps. Vintage postcard.

While Tombstone’s early history was mirrored by boomtowns across the west, one event made its mark in the folklore of the West. The Gunfight at the OK Corral didn’t actually happen at the corral, but nearby on Fremont Street. On October 26, 1881, US Marshalls Virgil Earp and his brothers Wyatt and Morgan, joined by the newly deputized Doc Holliday, faced down the Clantons and the McLaurys. Half a minute and 30 shots later, Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers were ready for their journey to Boot Hill.

One of the best known epitaphs comes from a gravemarker in Tombstone. Lester Moore was an agent for the Wells-Fargo Stagecoach. He and another man had a dispute over a package. Both men died in the gun battle that followed. Moore’s marker reads, “Here lies Lester Moore. Four slugs from a .44. No Les no more.”

No Les no more. Plastichrome postcard.

George Johnson’s epitaph also approaches poetry: “Here lies George Johnson, hanged by mistake. He was right. We was wrong. We strung him up and now he’s gone.” Johnson was hanged for stealing a horse – which in fact he had legally purchased.

John Heath was taken from the county jail by a mob from the nearby town of Bisbee. They were incensed because he’d led five men in a robbery that had killed “respected citizens.” Heath was lynched from a telegraph pole near the city court house.

The graveyard was neglected for many years. Vandals stole the original wooden grave markers and the desert reclaimed the hill. The locals referred to the area as the “Old Cemetery” until the late 1920s, when it was renamed in hopes of drawing tourists. Its namesake is the Boot Hill Cemetary (sic) in Dodge City, Kansas, which dates to 1871. That will be the subject of another Cemetery of the Week someday.

The message on the back of this postcard reads, “Having a nice time — wish you were here!” Plastichrome postcard.

The graves in Boot Hill were originally heaped with stones “to keep the varmints from stealing the bones.” Those heaps of stones and historic records helped when it came time to make new markers for the graves, but a number of the pioneers resting here went to their final rewards anonymously. No one carried ID in those days; the West was where one went to reinvent oneself. The names and stories of some of these pioneers may never be known.

Useful links:

NPR’s feature on the graveyard

A listing of people known to be buried in Boot Hill

The Ghost Trackers’ night-time report

A brief history of Tombstone

Tears on their Tombstones

Other Old West graveyards on Cemetery Travel:

Week 25: Bodie State Historic Park

Week #64: Marshall Gold Discovery State Historic Park

Week #66: Sacramento’s Old City Cemetery

Week #68: the Brigham Young Family Graveyard

The Cemetery Travels Notebook is the place to keep field notes from your own cemetery adventures. It features 80 lined pages, interspersed with 20 lush full-page color photographs of cemeteries from Paris to Tokyo, with stops at Sleepy Hollow, San Francisco, and all points between, to inspire your wanderlust.

Photographer Loren Rhoads, editor of Death’s Garden: Relationships with Cemeteries and former cemetery columnist for Gothic.Net, now blogs about graveyards as travel destinations at CemeteryTravel.com. She’s a member of the Association for Gravestone Studies and the Graveyard Rabbits Association.

Ordering information:

The Cemetery Travel Notebook is usually available for $21.95 (softcover) or $38.95 (hardbound) from Blurb.com. See a preview at Blurb. With the SHARE10 code, you can take $10 off!

Praise for the Cemetery Travels Notebook:

“Loren Rhoads’ Cemetery Travels Notebook is the perfect notebook for a taphophile. It’s a lined notebook for all your note-taking needs. It’s also filled with beautiful full-color photos of monuments from the U.S. and beyond.” – Minda Powers-Douglas, The Cemetery Club

“The Cemetery Travels Notebook is really beautiful. It will be very useful.” – Jeane Trend-Hill, author of the Silent Cities series

“The Cemetery Travels Notebook is great! I love the photos and the amount of space for keeping notes and thoughts.” – Joy Neighbors, author of A Grave Interest

“I just received the Cemetery Travels Notebook.  The photos are inspirational and I love the fact that there’s a lot of writing space for my thoughts.” – Leni Panopio, Cypress Lawn Memorial Park

Vintage postcard from my collection.

The photo prompt for this week was lunchtime: not an easy topic to illustrate on a blog about cemeteries. I usually shy away from photographing strangers when I see them in graveyards, in order to respect their privacy. I have seen people picnicking from time to time: everything from sitting in folding lawn chairs and hoisting bottles of beer in Forest Lawn Hollywood Hills to seated on a quilt and chiming their wine glasses together in Metairie Cemetery in New Orleans.

People used to picnic in graveyards all the time. Once cemeteries ceased to be burial grounds right in the heart of town, it took time and effort to reach them, especially in the days before paved roads. If you went to visit your relatives, you packed a lunch and intended to set a spell.

I have a couple of vintage postcards of picnickers, but my favorite doesn’t show any people. It’s labeled “Summerhouse, Prairie River Cemetery, Centreville, Michigan.” The summerhouse is basically a thatch-roofed pavilion with rough straight trees holding up a conical roof. Welcoming bent-wood benches wait inside.

Summerhouses were common in cemeteries — usually in the south, I believe — where a visitor would want some respite from the sun. Often they had enough room that you could erect a rough table and spread out your feast.

If you type Prairie River Cemetery into Google, only one by that name comes up. Centreville, Michigan, despite its name, lies in the southwest corner of the state, between Kalamazoo and Elkhart, Indiana, not too far from the shores of Lake Michigan. Google maps shows Centreville surrounded by farms even now.

Findagrave has a list of graves in the cemetery, but no historical overview for it. The USGW has a list of cemetery photographs, but the interface is clunky and frustrating. I don’t know if the summerhouse still stands.

My favorite part of the postcard is the message written in spidery cursive on the back: “Dear Cousin: So glad you and Marshal should clasp hands once more. So old fashion like. Wish we had some more ice cream as it is warm here.” It’s postmarked 1911.

The Pigeon family monument, Montparnasse Cemetery

Cimetière du Montparnasse
aka Montparnasse Cemetery
3 Boulevard Edgar Quinet
Paris, France 75014
Telephone: +33 1 44 10 86 50
Founded: July 25, 1824
Size: 47 acres
Number of interments: more than 300,000 people in more than 35,000 tombs
Open: From March 16 to November 15: Monday to Friday from 8 a.m. to 6 p.m. Saturday: 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Sunday and holidays: 9 a.m. to 6 p.m. In the winter, from November 6 to March 15: Monday to Friday 8 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Saturday 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Sundays and holidays 9 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.
Map: You can request one from any of the guardhouses at the gates or download it here: http://www.pariscemeteries.com/pdf/Plan-sepultures-Montparnasse.pdf

The Mairie de Paris organizes guided tours. For information, call 01 40 33 85 85.

The second municipal cemetery in Paris might be considered a poor sister to larger and grander Pere Lachaise, except that Montparnasse Cemetery is so full of intriguing and beautiful sculpture. Its flat, tree-shaded paths are pleasant to walk in any weather, but now that spring is coming and birds will fill the trees, it will be particularly lovely.

Montparnasse was recognized as an historic monument as early as November 2, 1931. It serves as the final resting place of Guy de Maupassant, whose short story “The Horla” scarred me as a child; composers César Franck and Camille Saint-Saëns, whose Danse Macabre you can hum, and Jean-Paul Sartre, author of No Exit, alongside his companion Simone de Beauvoir, whose book The Second Sex pioneered feminist theory.

Among the joys of Montparnasse are the two life-sized lions snarling atop one grave. A cloaked woman hunches over another monument, her face buried in her hands. Elsewhere, a crusader in armor, draped in a floor-length marble cape, keeps watch. Perched atop a mound of stone clouds, an angel sounds his trumpet directly into another grave. Nearby, a marker bears a deep relief of a shrouded woman, laid out of her bier, clutching her limp infant even in death. On yet another, a nude woman stands in relief, balancing a five-pointed star overhead as she poses before the pyramids of Egypt. A skeletal Death, clutching his scythe, lounges at her feet. By far the strangest monument is a rotund man-sized cat, painted with Op-Art flowers like something out of Yellow Submarine.

A gauze-wrapped corpse lay on the ground beneath one of the cemetery’s wall. Above it, a brooding bust protrudes from a marble slab. When I visited, a single red rosebud, its end wrapped in tinfoil, lay atop the marble corpse. This is the cenotaph in memory of Charles Baudelaire, the author of Les Fleur du Mal. (A cenotaph is a monument to honor a person whose remains lie elsewhere.)

Elsewhere in Montparnasse lies the grave Baudelaire shares with his mother and stepfather. That gravestone’s inscription makes no mention of Baudelaire’s worth as a poet. He died in Paris on August 31, 1867 of syphilis. His mother, who nursed him at the end, said he died with a smile on his lips. That seems unlikely.

Closeup of the Pigeon family monument

Also in Montparnasse stands one of my all-time favorite grave monuments: a life-sized four-poster bed. On the bed lay a man and a woman sculpted in bronze. She sleeps beneath the covers, fully dressed in Victorian finery, complete with a veil. Half out of bed, he wears a coat and tie, boots, and clutches a book in one hand.

Useful links:
A brief history of the area, in English

A whole lot of photographs of monuments in Montparnasse

All the famous French people in Montparnasse

A great video compilation of all Montparnasse’s lovely monuments

Other Parisian cemeteries on Cemetery Travel:

Cemetery of the Week #10: Pere Lachaise

Cemetery of the Week #19: the Paris Catacombs

Cemetery of the Week #20: Napoleon’s Tomb

Well, this is an experiment. I’m trying to use the WordPress app to blog from my iPhone. So far, not impressive. I couldn’t figure out how to put a photo at the top of my post and write text after it without publishing the photo first and then editing the post. More experimentation is required.

Anyway, it’s been way too long since I did a photo challenge. The subject of today is “My Neighborhood.”

There aren’t any neighborhood graveyards in San Francisco, although there are remnants of graves in many neighborhoods. The oldest of these are in the churchyard at Mission Dolores.

I’ve written about the Mission before, but not about my relationship with it. I’ve visited it more than any other cemetery in California in the 25 years I’ve lived in San Francisco. I’ve watched it change from overgrown and full of broken stones to a tamed rose garden to full of native plants and designed to teach about the early Mission days when the Spanish converted the Miwoks.

The churchyard used to be dominated by a huge mound of stone that harked back to the grotto of Lourdes. Now it has a large tule reed house, like the Miwoks would have lived in–although not in the graveyard. It strikes me as intrusive.

I shot this photo standing outside the graveyard, looking through the chain-link fence. The shady paths looked peaceful. A robin sang at the top of its voice. Spring is here and life goes on and that’s the most beautiful thing that I know.

Exterior of St. Peter’s Basilica on a rainy day taken by Mason Jones

St. Peter’s Basilica
Piazza San Pietro, 00120 Rome, Italy
Telephone: + 39 06 69 885 318
Email: scavi@fsp.va
Established: 64 AD?
Open: St. Peter’s tomb and the Vatican necropolis are only allowed 250 visitors per day. A guide leads small groups of 12 at a time, so you must request a ticket well in advance. Tours last an hour and a half. Details are here.
Admission: $16.50 for visitors age 15 and up. Children under 15 are not allowed.

In the bible, one of the apostles is called Simon until Jesus says, “You are ‘Rock’ and on this rock I will build my church, and the jaws of death shall not prevail against it” (Matthew 16:18). Simon became Peter, who denied Christ three times before the crucifixion and, after Christ’s resurrection, received the command to “Tend my sheep” (John 21:16). After Christ’s ascension, Peter was the undisputed leader of the new Christian church. The modern popes draw their authority as Successors of Peter.

On July 19, 64 AD, an enormous fire started in Rome. The initial suspect was Emperor Nero, who wanted to clear the area to build a more beautiful Rome. When he began to fear the civil unrest, he blamed the Christians. At Nero’s Circus, Christians were fed to wild animals, crucified, or turned into living torches so that spectacle could continue through the night. The remains of these martyrs were taken afterward to Vatican Hill, a Christian and pagan graveyard at the edge of town.

There is no contemporary account of Peter’s martyrdom, but later historians tell us that he was crucified upside down. The earliest surviving account of Peter’s martyrdom comes from a letter written about 95 AD, several generations after his death. It says that Peter was martyred in Rome and buried on Vatican Hill.

Interior of St. Peter’s Basilica showing the baldachino above the altar over St. Peter’s grave. Vintage postcard.

In 324, the Emperor Constantine – the first Emperor to convert to Christianity – began construction of a basilica (a large oblong building with a semi-circular sanctuary on one end) over Peter’s tomb. The building enclosed Peter’s tomb on three sides and allowed pilgrims to see it on the East. It was visible until Pope Gregory the Great covered it with an altar during his reign from 590-604.

By the 15th century, the basilica was in dire straits. It had been repeatedly sacked during the barbarian invasions and completely neglected with the Popes moved to Avignon. In 1506, Pope Julius II began demolition of the old basilica. It was completed in 1593, but by then, St. Peter’s tomb was covered in construction debris and lost.

When I toured the Catacombs of Saint Sebastian, the guide told us that graffiti found there said that Saints Peter and Paul had rested there. This confused me, since I knew Saint Peter was supposed to be buried under the basilica that bears his name in the heart of the Vatican. Church doctrine holds that Peter’s bones were taken from his grave during the reign of Emperor Valerian, when Christian graves lost their protected status. They were taken to the catacombs out on the Appian Way, where they were hidden until it was safe to return them to the original grave.

The “confessio” below the altar, above St. Peter’s grave. Vintage postcard.

The two basilicas and their attendant buildings covered much of the ancient Roman-era graveyard, but excavations of the area continue. One excavation beneath the floor of the basilica, begun in 1940, discovered stone tablets with inscriptions that showed veneration of Peter was well underway by 120 AD. It also discovered a tomb surrounded by a brick wall, covered in reddish plaster, that bore the graffito PETR and EN, which Vatican archeologists translated as “Peter is here.” Peter was buried beneath the present altar of the “Confessio.”

In 1941, some bones were found in a niche in the red wall, wrapped in purple and gold fabric. These were declared by Pope Paul VI to be the bones of St. Peter in 1968. The bones were placed in Plexiglas containers, ten of which remain in the tomb now.

Useful links:
A virtual tour of St. Peter’s tomb

A fully-illustrated guide to St. Peter’s tomb

A map of the Vatican grottoes

The Vatican’s English-language website

Other cemeteries in Rome on Cemetery Travel:
Cemetery of the Week #8: the Protestant Cemetery of Rome

Cemetery of the Week #15: the Capuchin Catacombs

Cemetery of the Week #29: the Pantheon

Cemetery of the Week #32: the Mausoleum of Augustus

Cemetery of the Week #67: the Catacomb of St. Sebastian