As it appears on Google Maps, the photos below appear to be of a bustling and densely-populated city with buildings, houses, and other establishments of different sizes. This place, which is in Iraq, is such a wide piece of land with over 1,485 acres, that it deceivingly seems just like any other busy town.
Nothing out of the ordinary, right? Just a normal-looking city in the desert…
…except it’s not, because it’s actually a massive graveyard. And by massive, we mean the equivalent of a small town in the U.S., and contains millions of bodies–dead bodies, of course.
Don’t believe us? Take a closer look for yourself:
Those definitely aren’t buildings or houses…
Here’s a close up of one of the tombstones…
This cemetery of epic proportions is home to a lot of corpses, making it even more populated than actual towns and cities so much so that visitors often choose to ride bicycles to make it easier for them to roam the place.
As you can see, there’s also military presence here due to threat of violence that has been occurring within the area.
And here are a couple more close up shots of mourners, visitors, and the tombstones…
The construction and beginning of this cemetery actually dated back to over 1,400 years ago, which clearly explains the millions of bodies that lie here. It even expands furthermore to accommodate as many as 500,000 additional bodies being buried every year. And judging by this estimate, we can only expect this graveyard to get bigger and bigger in time.
