Weird Gardens - 1

A Serbian man wants to turn his home into a church because so many of his neighbours and friends are buried in his back garden. Dragan Djordjevic, who is fifty-three and lives in the rural southern village of Grbavce, applied for permission to register his garden as a cemetery so his mother could be buried there when she died ten years ago. In his application he said, ‘The nearest cemetery was too far away. I thought if I buried her in the back garden I could visit her grave more often, and save time.'

Permission was granted, but then one of his neighbours asked if they could bury a relative alongside his mother as Dragan already had permission, and now he has over seventy neighbours and friends of friends resting in piece in his back garden. The visitors on a Sunday overwhelm his small home, and block the road, so he has applied for permission to turn the house into a church to ensure that the site will be properly protected after his death. His life is given over to caring for the graves and helping visitors locate their relatives in what used to be his lawn and vegetable patch.

And veteran rocker Rod Stewart couldn’t agree more. He wants to follow in the after-death footsteps of Elvis Presley by being laid to rest in his back garden. Oddly, Stewart is a former grave-digger himself, which suggests he might have had a personal experience ‘on the job’ that put him off having his body rot in a grave, instead he wants to lie in a fancy mausoleum in the grounds of his English country home and he intends to write to his MP to find out how to go about it.

Rod Stewart photograph by alexdigo, used under a creative commons attribution licence

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