Cmentarz Nieistniejących Cmentarzy, Gdańsk

The Cemetery of Lost Cemeteries is a memorial arranged as a cemetery, honoring Gdańsk burial grounds erased after the Second World War. It commemorates 27 cemeteries belonging to different faiths; most disappeared during the 1960s and 1970s. The surviving stones represent a range of religious communities and include 38 recovered gravestones dating from the eighteenth to the twentieth century.

The trees and markers are arranged like the aisles of a temple, while stone columns shaped as tree trunks suggest trees in decline. The designers, Hanna Klementowska and Jacek Krenz, created this unusual place, which opened in 2002. A fragment of Mascha Kaléko’s poem is carved into the main monument. Human remains discovered during construction were placed inside it, giving this memorial a physical connection to the people and burial grounds it recalls.