Exploring a 259-Year-Old British Cemetery at Calcutta 🇮🇳 For c/Tombstone Tourism by @grindle

All good people love walks through old cemeteries, and those who don’t are either villains or madmen... I can't recollect which writer told this, but I remember he is very, very famous - Shakespeare or Dostoevsky or another genius guy, so you should definitely trust this opinion, lol.

At least, in the case of Toni and me, this rule works perfectly - we are both 100% good 😎👍👍 and are fond of tombstone tourism. So when I came up with the idea of visiting South Park Street Cemetery (1767), known previously as Great Christian Burial Ground, I was met with complete understanding.

One can expect something special from a colonial cemetery in Calcutta, and that one will be right: this city was the capital of British India until 1911, and thus became a place of rest in Jesus for many rich British men and women who had been living in the epicenter of the fascinating British expansion in Asia. So, let's enter this temple of tombstone art and history:

What an alley, right?! 10-meter tombstones looking more like little temples of an unknown religion (considering no crosses in sight), an uncertain mixture of ancient Greece and Asia... That's not just my impression - look what Wikipedia states on that:

...Gothic-style tombs and monuments, mixed with the rich flavor of the Greek, Egyptian, and Indo-Saracenic styles. In certain instances, elements from Hindu architecture and Islamic tombs have also been adopted

Like a lost city of a forgotten civilization in the jungles of Bengal...

Mysterious obelisk to sacrifice a goat or two in the sake of an eerie primal god!

And more of them:

The white one is the tallest, and marks the grave of the superstar of this cemetery:

Image: Wiki

Right, it's Sir William Jones, a Welsh scholar!

I had never heard of him before but, as it turned out, I know well about his work.

Have you ever heard about the Indo-European language family?..

It was he who discovered that Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and other European languages have much in common and proposed in 1786 that they had a common ancient ancestor language. The basics of modern linguistics.

Back to the cemetery:

Many of these tombstones-mausoleums are big enough to live in them, that's why you can't shake the feeling of walking through a strange abandoned town, not a cemetery.

No doubt, homeless people would love living there if the place weren't a protected architectural object with a 50-rupee entrance fee. Honestly, I wouldn’t mind staying in such a tombgalow myself - single rooms I usually rent offer the same level of comfort, yet have less charm.

How about this:

A miniature Greek temple, isn't it?

I entered the place with Toni, but I became so absorbed in the cemetery's beauty that I stopped keeping pace with her and soon lost sight of her.

I felt like a hound in a forest full of hares - overexcited, all turned into a scent, hurrying to grasp every detail - a pure beast with a photo camera.

Look at this, a grave of someone who died in 1784:

I really wanted to read stories carved in stone, but I had no time. No doubt there are plenty of them scattered at South Park Street Cemetery but you need a whole day for such a reading. A random one:

A British surgeon who lived in the middle of nowhere and was "engaged in extensive trade to almost all parts of the world" and "his name as a mercantile man was conspicuous and his loss lamented by many personal friends". Looks like this multitasking guy had the Internet...

Let's keep walking:

Rows of two-meter-tall geometric figures form an avenue; the sunlight was as sweet as flower nectar (i.e. quite mildly).

A 20th-century building, closely adjacent to graves, slowly turns black too, as if it caught ringworm from the neglected stray tombstones.

Plaques on the wall - ones that lost their graves... As lonely and sad as doll heads, separated from the bodies and lost.

Are these tiny Byzantine churches?

Is this a dwarf temple of Apollo, with two columns connected by a membrane like one between a duck's toes?

Are there mummies inside these pyramids?

And if vampires have their own Airbnb, how many properties are available at this cemetery?

I wasn't trying to remember the way; I was just wandering, following wherever my nose led me. I knew I'd run into Toni sooner or later, and we'd go to the exit together. My intuition did not fail me, lol.

Both hungry as hounds after a hunt, we ordered food from the first decent street restaurant we came across.

South Indian food - so yummy!

P.S. South Park Street Cemetery isn't the only British cemetery in Kolkata. There is another one, called the Scottish Cemetery at Calcutta (alas, significantly time-worn). Numerous British and other European graves can be also found at Lower Circular Road Cemetery. There might be more places of this nature in Kolkata.

The photos were taken with a Nikkor 24mm f/2.4D (and a couple of shot with a 50mm) on a full-frame DSLR Nikon D750 on January 7, 2026, in South Park Street Cemetery, Kolkata, India.