Some thoughts about cemetery culture in Europe

I've noticed something that's nagging on me for a while: It's the different approach of the christian churches graves concerning...

I know it sounds a bit ambitious for a small blog like this but still here's what i think:

The different christian churches (in my limited experience mainly the catholic church and the Churches who follow the Protestant Reformation) are doing things quite differently. And the Catholics are doing it (at least in my opinion) better: The graves of their dead are more often a thing of beauty and of passion.

Protestant Reformation Cemeteries are very often dull, cold and uninviting. Their Headstones are often very simple and very unpersonal. And if they contain something personal and even artistic it is quite often very strange. To get the picture here i will show you two examples:

This is a -believe it or not- a statue on a Protestant grave showing Jesus. And it seems to me that they made him deliberatly ugly. I just don't see the point.













Here's a Jesus that looks proper to me and it's on the same cemetery:

To make my point here's another example: This is the Protestant idea of an Angel:

Don't get me wrong again: I like every grave that is even remotely interesting and this piece of art is interesting indeed. But it is incredible ugly either. Again: Why?













Here's an example of a proper angel:

This one was again on the same cemetery.








To get to an end today and to an end to this large post i'd like to show you some details of the freaky Jesus:

All pictures were take at the Johannisfriedhof, Bielefeld, Germany.