Surviving for centuries, Prague's Old Jewish Cemetery has accumulated tens of thousands of bodies stacked atop each other in morbid layers and may have escaped Nazi destruction as a "museum of an extinct race."
While no one is sure when the cemetery was founded, its oldest gravestone dates back to 1439 which has led some scholars to believe that the site is maybe even a century older than the evidence suggests. No matter the exact date of its founding, the graveyard has managed to stick around in the same spot for hundreds of years. Since it is frowned upon in the Jewish religion to move a body from its original burial site, the limited space in the boneyard was used up quickly and later generations began simply burying their dead in layers on top the older remains. This has led to a hectic cram of over 12,000 headstones and grave markers tightly packed into the single cemetery. However, given the stacking the cemetery employed, it is believed that there may be as many as 100,000 bodies buried in the soil.
Interestingly, during the Nazi occupation of Prague during World War II, the graveyard seems to have been untouched despite the overwhelming anti-semitism that was ravaging Europe's Jewish sites. It is believed that Hitler spared the cemetery so that it could be made into a "museum of an extinct race." The proposed museum would have collected the increasing number of Jewish possessions that the Nazi's were confiscating.
Today the Old Jewish Graveyard is a popular site among visitors to the city, although most are not aware that they are treading on a large portion of the former inhabitants.
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