Children of the Light.

Today we visited a cemetery after class.

This may sound a little weird and morbid to some of you but I was really excited because I had really been wanting to go.

This cemetery is the oldest in Athens and is incredible.

We learned that in Greece, it is a sign of respect to bury someone's body, especially in a cemetery like this one.

After about a 10 minutes walk, we finally arrived, and began walking around. I walked slowly, to make sure I took every plot, and every grave into account. It took me a little while to start taking pictures, just as a sign of respect from me, and I left no grave unnoticed. I passed some large and some small. Some containing families and others containing just one person. Some very elaborate stones and statues and others with a simple cross. Some graves of men and women that have lived a long life and others whose lives were short lived. I passed graves that were overgrown and broken to pieces and I passed graves that had just been given new flowers.

The grave stones, and the cemeteries themselves, here in Europe are not like the ones in the United States. They hold more than just a stone and a body. There is beauty, complexity, heart, and life in these cemeteries.

I saw the most amazingly heart-wrenching thing today in the cemetery when an elderly woman came to the grave plot of an elderly man and began to change out the flowers and water them, weeping the whole time. This is an image I will never forget. It grabbed my heart and wouldn't let go. I could feel the start of her pain just by hearing her cries and I could feel her love for this man just by watching her water the flowers on his grave. She was so strong and I may never see something so beautifully vivid again.

As we set off to leave, someone asked me why I like old cemeteries so much. I was kind of happy that someone asked because the entire time I had been walking down the rows of graves, I was thinking about it. I responded to his question, telling him that in these types of cemeteries, you don't just find tomb stones but you get a glimpse into these people's lives, who they were, what they loved. The graves in these cemeteries aren't just graves, but they are lives.

It's a little ironic, comparing people's grave stones to their lives, but it's true. You get the most wonderful sense of who these people where, who their family is, and what happened to them just by looking at their plot of land in this place. It is the most incredible and one of the most beautiful things in the world, to me.

You cannot recreate or truly explain the love, passion, sadness, and awe you feel when in a place like this cemetery. And I would never want to. Because I fell in love with these people today. I fell in love with the light they shined while buried deep underground. It was a melancholy beauty that will last forever.

-Jess