A simple walk through the Bellu Cemetery located in the Capital City Bucharest gave birth to a project through which a blogger created a digital map of the site, thus promoting the history, monuments and personalities whose remains were deposited in the most famous cemetery in Romania, in the form of funeral tourism with QR codes and 3D scans.

'This is the place where personalities sleep their eternal sleep who, throughout their lives, changed the destiny of Romanians and laid a brick in the construction that we call 'Romania' today: (...) painters, writers, princes, ladies, mayors, philosophers and intellectuals of the pre-war, inter-war and post-war periods, as well as works of art belonging to the following styles: Neoclassical, Romantic, Eclectic, Art Nouveau, Neo-Romanian, Modernist Art Deco and Mediterranean Eclectic,' is the message that greets you when you access the digital map of the Bellu Cemetery.

The digital project 'Bellu Cemetery - An Open-Air Museum', initiated by the cultural NGO 'Traveler through Romania' debuted in 2019. Following a visit to the alleys of the site, impressed by the funerary monuments and the notable personalities buried in the cemetery, an initiative group decided to develop a project through which they wanted to promote the objective, from a tourist point of view.

'Before starting the project, we visited famous cemeteries abroad, to see what they do well and what we lack. We saw how enthusiastically people visit cemeteries, how local authorities promote history and how a new type of tourism was being born - dark tourism. It may seem gloomy, but this type of tourism, which is a combination of architectural and cultural tourism, generates spectacular revenues annually, in some Western European countries,' Iulian Tanascu, the founder of 'Traveler through Romania', told AGERPRES on Thursday.

Subsequently, the blogger contacted the cemetery administration with an idea in mind to transform the Serban Voda 'Bellu' Cemetery into an online museum, so that more and more people would have the opportunity to find out precious information about the personalities buried there.

'We present all the information we identify on the project's Facebook page, while in the case of the personalities, the information is also included in a digital map, which can be accessed at any time by anyone. Basically, from any device, anyone interested can access the map and enter the Bellu universe - https://www.travellerinromania.com/cimitirul-bellu/. At the moment we have a database of 89,000 documented graves, which means a total of over 100,000 people. Of these, a little over 6,000 are personalities. So far, we managed to put 100 of these personalities on the map, with their number to grow in time,' specified Iulian Tanascu.

The digital map of the Bellu Cemetery will also include 3D scans of the funerary elements, so that visitors will have an experience as similar as possible to a real visit, from hundreds or thousands of kilometres away.

The initiative started from the desire to offer the public the possibility of accessing precious historical information in an easy way. In parallel with the online development of the map, and the promotion of the objective in the online environment, the project team will also launch a book about the Bellu family, as Baron Barbu Bellu, Minister of Religions and Justice back at the time, was the one who donated the plot of land in the first place, in 1853, for the then mayor of Bucharest, Constantin A. Rosetti to built a cemetery on it.

The platform, which is to be improved continuously, is now functional, with more than 800,000 accesses already recorded.

'Another interesting thing about the Bellu Cemetery is the very large number of cats. This is the most populated place with cats in Bucharest, which makes visitors very happy,' reveals the blogger.

The Bellu Cemetery is the largest and oldest cemetery in Bucharest and one of the most famous in Romania, after the Merry Cemetery in Sapanta. It dates back to the mid-19th century (...), covering an area of 28 hectares. AGERPRES (RO - writing by: Florin Zafiu, EN - writing by: Cristina Zaharia)