Time Travel Tuesday

Jeanne Oliver has been in Paris with her teenage daughter Maddie the past few days.  Today she posted some photos of Montmartre Cemetery, which made me think of the last time I was there in July of 2014. So I thought I'd take a trip of my own, back in time, and have a look at some of the photos I took back then.

It's funny how a photo can transport you back to an exact moment in time.  I remember visiting this cemetery mid-morning and how warm it was.  I can see from my photos it was a day of clear blue skies and full sun, resulting in either bright light or deep shadows in many of my pictures.

There are many beautiful sculptures in this place.  I shall need to do some research on them, to see what I can discover.  Who carved them and when?  On whose graves do they sit?  I suppose I should have taken pictures of the writing on the graves and not just the sculptures themselves but alas, I did not.

The statue in the photo below, tucked under the bridge (the cemetery is located below street level) was quite amazing:

The artist's palette under the bust suggests is the tomb of a painter.  Here's a closer look:

I love the way she is holding the flowers in her hand, as if she is about to strew the petals on the ground after pulling them out of the apron at her waist.

As is common in Paris cemeteries, there are many small, individual tombs or mausoleums - small buildings sitting side by side, housing the dead.

The one in the middle of the photo above has plexiglass to protect this slender beauty:

Many of them, such as the one pictured below, have exquisite stained glass windows, some badly damaged.

And others, completely intact and exquisitely beautiful.

There were many magpies about. They move quickly, it was hard to get a clear photo of any of them but eventually I did.

Just looking at these photos makes me long to go back and take another stroll along the pathways. There are more than 35,000 tombs in this cemetery and I only saw a small fraction of them!

Day 15/100 - #100dayproject