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Unless you happen to be a vampire, visiting a cemetery during your holiday may sound like a fairly morbid thing to do.
However, apart from being Ireland’s National Cemetery and the final resting place of those that shaped Ireland, Glasnevin Cemetery also marks the foundation of Catholic emancipation in Ireland, being a non-Anglican cemetery.
Originally, it started out as a mass grave for the Catholic cholera victims and eventually grew into Ireland’s largest cemetery with the country’s national heroes also being interred here. In fact, there are more Dubliners buried in Glasnevin than are currently living in Dublin.
Covering an area of 120 acres with around 1,200,000 burial sites, Glasnevin Cemetery offers an alternative walking environment where one can view the resting places of such influential individuals as Charles Stewart Parnell, Eamon DeValera, James Larkin, Maud Gonne MacBride, Countess Markievicz, Ann Devlin, Brendan Behan, Michael Collins and Daniel O'Connell the ‘The Liberator’, who liberated Ireland from penal laws and founded the cemetery.
A monument rises 160 feet above his crypt in the form of a round tower built in early Irish-Christian style. The graveyard is adorned with many interesting graves and memorials, mixing Gothic, Victorian and Celtic styles. The Glasnevin Cemetery also serves as a glimpse at the changing funeral culture throughout the decades.
Modern headstones adorned with emblems of soccer clubs lie alongside eerie rows of graves housing babies and stillborns along with their mounds of toys and wind chimes.
The oldest section of the graveyard is laced with massive trees and large monuments and the cemetery was surrounded by high walls so as to deter body snatchers. All in all, this City of the Dead is quite formidable, home to rich and poor, young and old, famous, infamous and anonymous.
Glasnevin Cemetery is open daily with free entrance and two-hour tours are available on Wednesdays and Fridays.
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