coffins

Read Time:2 Minute, 16 Second

The remote and harsh setting often made life very hard indeed, but also meant Mother Nature took great care with the dead after they submitted to the elements.

Until recently.

The well-preserved remains of three men in coffins at Likneset were removed from Svalbard’s largest graveyard earlier this month and are now in cold storage at Svalbard Museum. The graveyard is on a coastal cliffside at Likneset on northwestern Spitsbergen, described as the heartland of whaling in the archipelago during the 17th and 18th centuries, but erosion had put the coffins in immanent danger of being washed into the sea.

About Post Author

Mark Sabbatini

I'm a professional transient living on a tiny Norwegian island next door to the North Pole, where once a week (or thereabouts) I pollute our extreme and pristine environment with paper fishwrappers decorated with seemingly random letters that would cause a thousand monkeys with a thousand typewriters to die of humiliation. Such is the wisdom one acquires after more than 25 years in the world's second-least-respected occupation, much of it roaming the seven continents in search of jazz, unrecognizable street food and escorts I f****d with by insisting they give me the platonic tours of their cities promised in their ads. But it turns out this tiny group of islands known as Svalbard is my True Love and, generous contributions from you willing, I'll keep littering until they dig my body out when my climate-change-deformed apartment collapses or they exile my penniless ass because I'm not even worthy of washing your dirty dishes.

marksabbatini@yahoo.com

http://icepeople.net