In Iran, cemetery struggles to keep up with virus
TEHRAN, IRAN » For over half a century, a massive graveyard on the edge of Iran’s capital has provided a final resting place for this country’s war dead, its celebrities and artists, its thinkers and leaders and all those in between. But Behesht-e-Zahra is now struggling to keep up with the coronavirus pandemic ravaging Iran, with double the usual number of bodies arriving each day and grave diggers excavating thousands of new plots.
“All of the crises that we have experienced at this cemetery over the past 50 years of its history have lasted for just a few days or a week at most,” said Saeed Khaal, the cemetery’s manager. Never before — not during earthquakes or even the country’s 1980s war with Iraq — has the pace of bodies flowing into Behesht-e-Zahra been so high for so long, he said.
With 1.6 million people buried on its grounds, which stretch across more than 1,320 acres, Behesht-e-Zahra is one of the world’s largest cemeteries and the primary one for Tehran’s people.