There aren't so many of us around here at the moment but perhaps a seasonal quiz of a sepulchral nature might prompt some interest. The following are all the grave markers of famous or at least reasonably well-known people and are the memorials associated with the place where their remains were finally interred albeit in some cases after having been relocated from their first place of burial. Some of these grave markers are distinctive and famous in their own right, others are perhaps most notable for their humble simplicity compared to the life of  the person they commemorate. I have had to crop or otherwise mask any clear names, so in order to discover who lies therein you will  need to pay close attention to where the tomb appears to be, any symbols, ornaments or inscriptions, and what items recent mourners mght have left.

I have posted the whole quiz twice: the first I will leave as is for any late-comers who may wish to give it a try; the second posting I will use to confirm correct answers  by posting the names and burial details. I will also use the second post to add extra clues should they be needed. Good luck and in passing maybe spare a thought for the people whose resting places these are.

No. 1


No. 2


No.3


No.4


No. 5


No. 6


No. 7


No. 8


No. 10


No. 11


No. 12


No. 13


No.14


No. 15


No. 16


No. 17


No. 18


No. 19


No. 20


No. 21


No. 22


No. 23


No. 24


No. 25


No. 26


No. 27


No. 28


No. 29


No. 30

As said above I'll leave the opening post untouched and will use this second post to confirm correct answers by giving the names and places. Should extra clues be needed I'll add them here, but only once you've all struggled for a while.


No. 1

Ludwig Boltzmann, one of the fathers of modern physics, died in 1906 and is buried in Vienna’s main cemetery. In 1877 he defined the current definition of entropy, the equation of which appears on his tomb as S = k log w. The constant k is now known as the Boltzmann constant.

No. 2

Richard III, who having been killed at the battle of Bosworth in 1485 and so rather decisively having lost his thone to Henry Tudor, found himself unceremoniously parked in a corner of the Grey Friars Priory in nearby Leicester. The original tomb was believed to have been removed during the English Reformation and his remains were wrongly thought to have been thrown into the River Soar. However an archaeological excavation found bones on the site previously occupied by the priory which were subsequently identified as belonging to Richard. He was reinterred, with rather more ceremony than had accompanied his original burial, in Leicester Cathedral in 2015.

No.3

James Joyce, always something of a wandering exile, had in later years been living in Paris until late 1940 when he'd fled Nazi-occupied France for Zurich in Switzerland. When he died unexpectedly on 13 January 1941 following surgery for a perforated duodenal ulcer he was buried in the Zurich-Fluntern cemetery. His wife, Nora Barnacle, requested permission for the repatriation of Joyce’s remains but the Irish government turned her down (Joyce had remained a subject of the United Kingdom all his life). The grave was just an ordinary plot and remained largely unadorned until 1966, when the remains were moved to a more prominent site within the cemetery and the current life-size bronze statue of him was unveiled. Joyce rests alongside his beloved Nora (who outlived him by ten years) as well as their son George Joyce and his wife, Asta Osterwalder.

No.4

Mary Queen of Scots in Westminster Abbey. Following her execution at Fotheringhay Castle (8 February 1587) on the orders of Elizabeth I, Mary was buried at Peterborough Abbey, it being the nearest suitably 'royal' place. Elizabeth reigned on until her own death in 1603, when Mary’s son James VI of Scotland inherited the English throne and reigned as James I of England. In 1606 James commissioned this grand marble tomb for his mother in the Lady Chapel of Westminster Abbey and in 1612 Mary’s body was moved from Peterborough to Westminster. Although they never met in life, Mary's nemesis Elizabeth is now just across the way, and in a rather smaller tomb too. A flag of Scotland still hangs in Peterborough Cathedral to mark the former location of her burial.

No. 5
   
Yup, it's the enormous and iconic bust of Karl Marx on his tomb in Highgate Cemetery, London. Not sure what else to say really.

No. 6

John Keats, another English poet buried in the so-called English, or Protestant, cemetery in Rome, the Cimitero Acattolico. Keats travelled to Italy in the hope that the milder climate would improve his health, however he died in 1832 at just 25 years of age. Having suffered repeated negative reviews and criticism in the British press, Keats was convinced his hard work would amount to nothing and his name would be forgotten. He insisted that his tombstone should not have his name on it and instead read: "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water".

No. 7

As Priscilla has correctly pointed out ... following his assasination, Mahatma Gandhi was cremated in accordance with Hindu tradition on this site at Rajghat in New Delhi on 31 January 1948 and which is now marked by a black marble platform. Gandhi's ashes were then placed into several urns which were sent across India for memorial services. Most of the ashes were finally immersed at the Sangam at Allahabad (the holy site at the confluence of the Ganges and Yamuna rivers) but some were secretly taken away. One urn, eventually found in a bank vault and reclaimed through the courts, was finally dispersed into the river at the Sangam of Allahabad in 1997, while the contents of another urn were only dispersed into the sea at Girgaum Chowpatty (near Mumbai) in 2008. Some of Gandhi's ashes were also scattered at the source of the River Nile at Jinja in Uganda and a memorial plaque marks the event. Another urn remains at the palace of the Aga Khan in Pune which is where Gandhi was held as a political prisoner from 1942 to 1944. There may still be others.

No. 8

Vladimir Lenin's massive mausoleum on the Red Square in Moscow. Just two days after Lenin's death on 21 January 1924, architect Alexey Shchusev was tasked with building a structure suitable for viewing of the embalmed body by mourners. A wooden tomb, built in Red Square close to the Moscow Kremlin Wall, was ready on 27 January and the same day Lenin's simple wooded coffin was placed inside. More than 100,000 Soviet citizens visited the tomb in the next six weeks. By the end of May Shchusev had replaced the tomb with a larger, more elaborate mausoleum and Lenin's body was transferred to a new, more elaborate sarcophagus designed by architect Konstantin Melnikov. This new wooden mausoleum was opened to the public on 1 August 1924. In 1925 the Soviet government decided to replace the wooden structure after mold was found in the walls and even on the body itself and the new (and current) mausoleum of marble, porphyry, granite and labradorite, designed by Shchusev, was completed in 1930. The mausoleum also served as a viewing stand for Soviet leaders to review military parades on Red Square. In October 1941 when it appeared that Moscow might fall to German troops Lenin's body was evacuated to Tyumen in Siberia, but was promptly returned and the tomb reopened after the war. Between 1953 and 1961 the embalmed body of Joseph Stalin shared a spot next to Lenin's, until he was removed as part of the de-Stalinization process and he is now buried in the nearby Kremlin Wall Necropolis, leaving Lenin again as the sole resident.

No. 10

The tomb of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Achaemenid Persian Empire, at Pasargadae in what is now Iran. Strictly, unlike all the other graves here (although see Priscilla's comments regarding no.7, Gandhi, and also my own about no. 20, Hedy Lamarr's ashes ) this tomb no longer contains his actual remains as in the chaos created by Alexander the Great's invasion of Persia and after the defeat of Darius III (although Alexander himself ordered the tomb not to be violated) Cyrus' mausoleum was broken into and looted, which is what tends to happen when your coffin is made of solid gold. Nevertheless the edifice has largely survived 2,500 years of weathering, earthquakes, foreign invasions, successive empires, regime changes and revolutions.

No. 11

When Virginia Woolf committed suicide in 1941, she was cremated and her ashes buried beneath a large elm tree in the garden of Monk’s House at Rodmell, East Sussex, where she had lived with her husband, Leonard Woolf, from 1919 until her death. When Leonard Woolf died 50 years later, he too was cremated and his ashes buried alongside his wife’s. The elm has since blown down and busts of the Woolfs were erected in the garden in its place.

No. 12

Napoleon Bonaparte's tomb at Les Invalides in Paris. Napoleon of course died on Saint Helena (5 May 1821) and in his will he had asked to be buried on the banks of the Seine in Paris.  However the British governor ordered his burial on the island in a wooded valley which Napoleon had specified as his preferred option if he didn't get to be returned to France (the site was later purchased by the French government of Napoleon III and it remains French territory under the control of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs). In 1840 Louis Philippe I negociated with the British government for the return Napoleon's remains to France and on 15 December 1840 a state funeral was held in Paris. The horse-drawn hearse proceeded from the Arc de Triomphe down the Champs-Élysées, across the Place de la Concorde to the Esplanade des Invalides and then to the cupola in St Jérôme's Chapel, where it remained until the tomb designed by Louis Visconti was completed. In 1861 Napoleon's remains were finally entombed in a magnificent sarcophagus of red quartzite brought especially from Russia, placed in the crypt under the central dome at Les Invalides.

No. 13

Sir Isaac Newton in Westminster Abbey (against the choir screen, to the north of the entrance to the choir). Even without his name on the inscription below (which I cropped out) it would have been obvious whose tomb it was if only the photo was closer in order to show all the details. The front panel depicts figures using instruments related to Newton's mathematical and optical work. One has a telescope, one is looking through a prism and another is balancing the sun and planets on a steel yard. Others depict Newton's activities as Master of the Mint; figures carry pots of coins and an ingot metal is being put into a furnace. Above this the sculpture of Newton reclines against a pile of academic books labelled 'Divinity', 'Chronology', 'Opticks' and 'Philo. Prin. Math' (ie his Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica of 1686). With his left hand he points to a scroll held by two standing cherubs on which is painted a mathematical diagram. The background is a pyramid on which is a celestial globe marked with the signs of the zodiac, the constellations and the path of the comet of 1680. On top of the globe sits a figure of Urania (the muse of Astronomy) leaning on a book.

No.14

Eleanor Aquitaine lies in the Abbaye de Fontevraud, Anjou, next to her second husband Henry II of England (her first marriage to Louis VII of France having been unnulled) and with her favourite son Richard the Lionheart close by. Henry and Eleanor eventually became estranged, particularly after Henry imprisoned her in 1173 for supporting the revolt of their eldest son, Henry the Young King, against him. She was not released until 1189, when Henry II died and Richard ascended the throne, and she lived well into the reign of her youngest son, John. In life she was described as "more than beautiful" and "one meet to crown the state of any king", but was even more than this – fearless, passionate and very clever.

No. 15

Fyodor Dostoevsky is buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery which is a part of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra (ie Monastery) cemetery in the centre of Saint Petersburg. He's in the section largely devoted to writers, painters, composers, architects and musicians, so has some good company.

No. 16

After his death at the Battle of Trafalgar, the body of Horatio Nelson, 1st Viscount Nelson (hence the coronet on top), was carried to Gibraltar and then back to England preserved in a cask of brandy. Nelson's body was unloaded from HMS Victory at the Nore in the Thames estuary and then conveyed upriver to Greenwich and placed inside a lead coffin, which was in turn placed inside a wooden one made from the mast of the French warship L'Orient, which had been salvaged after the Battle of the Nile. He lay in state for three days in the Painted Hall of Greenwich Hospital and was then taken to the Admiralty the day before the funeral. On 9 January, the funeral procession consisting of 32 admirals, over a hundred captains, and an escort of 10,000 soldiers took the coffin from the Admiralty to St Paul's Cathedral, where after a four-hour service he was interred. The massive sarcophagus was originally carved for Cardinal Wolsey (but he, having fallen out of Henry VIII's favour was buried in Leicester Abbey without a monument) while the base had been intended for the tomb of Henry VIII himself but which was never completed by the time of his death (so Henry ended up interred in a vault at St George's Chapel, Windsor Castle, next to Jane Seymour).

No. 17
   
Oscar Wilde's tomb in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris. Wilde died of meningitis on 30 November 1900 and was initially buried in the Cimetière de Bagneux outside Paris. In 1909 his remains were disinterred and transferred to their current place. The tomb, depicting a modernist angel, was designed by Sir Jacob Epstein and over the years had attracted so many admirers, many of whom left red lipstick kisses and other messages, that in 2011 a glass barrier had to be installed to prevent further damage.

No. 18

Pyotr I Alekseyevich, aka Peter the Great of Russia, entombed in the Peter and Paul Cathedral in Saint Petersburg, the city he'd founded.

No. 19

In 1902 Cecil Rhodes died at his seaside cottage in Muizenberg in what is now the Western Cape of South Africa. The government arranged an epic journey by train from the Cape to Rhodesia, with the funeral train stopping at every station to allow mourners to pay their respects. He was finally laid to rest at World's View, a hilltop located approximately 35 kilometres south of Bulawayo, in what was then Rhodesia. Today his grave site is within the Matobo National Park in Zimbabwe.

No. 20
   
Hedy Lamarr, born Hedwig Eva Maria Kiesler in the Austrian part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, was a Hollwood actress and self-taught physicist. Amongst her inventions and scientific developments was a radio guidance system for missiles that used spread-spectrum and frequency-hopping technology to defeat jamming. This was eventually used by the US military and was subsequently developed further as the basis for modern wireless communications. She died in Florida in 2000 and while her ashes were spread in the Vienna Woods in accordance with her last wishes, her suitably modernist memorial is in Vienna's main cemetery.

No. 21

Leo Tolstoy, buried with the simplest of memorials in a wooded glade on the Tolstoy estate, Yasnaya Polyana, in the Tula region of Russia. Tolstoy was born at Yasnaya Polyana and lived there all his life. Before he died he declared that he wanted to be buried in "the place of the little green wand" which was a clearing in the forest near the house that was so-named by the Tolstoy family after a story made up by Leo's older brother, Nikolai, about a magic wand that was hidden there and that whoever who found it would never die or be ill.

No. 22
   
Théodore Géricault's imposing tomb in the Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris, with him reclining on top holding his paint brush and palette, could be of any one of a number of French painters - unless as Priscilla says you can recognise his most famous work, 'The Raft of the Medusa', depicted on the bronze panel beneath. Géricault died of tuberculosis in 1824 at the age of just thirty-two: I wonder what he might have achieved if he'd lived longer.

No. 23

This is the final resting place of Anne Boleyn buried under the nave of the Chapel Royal of Saint Peter ad Vincula that is situated within the Tower of London. The church faces onto Tower Green where Anne was beheaded on 19 May 1536: Henry VIII had commuted Anne's sentence from burning to beheading, and then rather than have a queen beheaded with the common axe had brought an expert swordsman from Saint-Omer in France to perform the execution. I was surprised to learn that her grave had been thought lost and that it was only rediscovered during renovation work in 1876 when three underfloor burials were found that were identified as being Anne Boleyn, Margaret Pole Countess of Salisbury, and John Dudley 1st Duke of Northumberland.  


No.24

The tomb of Polish-born composer Frederic Chopin in the Cimetière du Père Lachaise in Paris. At the top is the muse of music, Euterpe, weeping over a broken lyre (how camp) while a carved relief of Chopin in profile adorns the front of the tomb. His heart, according to his wishes, is entombed within a pillar at Holy Cross Church in Warsaw.

No. 25

Christopher Columbus's enormous tomb in Seville cathedral depicts a catafalque being carried by four kings; the symbolic monarchs of Castile, Leon, Aragon, and Navarre. But are the remains in the casket really those of Columbus? He died On 20 May 1506, aged 54, in the Spanish city of Valladolid and his body was first buried at a convent there. A short while later his remains were moved to the monastery of La Cartuja in Seville (as per the will of his son, Diego) and in 1513 they are thought to have been moved into the majesty of Seville Cathedral. So far so good. However in about 1536, the remains of both Columbus and his son Diego were moved right across the Atlantic to the cathedral in Colonial Santo Domingo, in the present-day Dominican Republic, in accordance with Columbus' request that he be buried on the island. By some accounts, when France took over the entire island of Hispaniola in 1793, Columbus's remains were moved to Havana, Cuba, which at the time remained Spanish. However after Cuba became independent following the Spanish–American War in 1898, the majority of the remains were moved back to Seville Cathedral, where they were placed in the current elaborate tomb which was built in 1899. However along the way, here and there, and back and forth across the Atlantic, various bits seem to have been pilfered and are now held, almost like religious relics, in quite a few different places.

No. 26

Diana Spencer, Princess of Wales, who is buried on a small island in an ornamental lake on the Althorp estate in Northamptonshire. The island was decided as the best place to lay her to rest because the water would, according to the Earl Spencer, "act as a buffer against the interventions of the insane and ghoulish, the thick mud presenting a further line of defence. We all agreed that, with its beauty and tranquillity, this was the place for Diana to be". The ground was consecrated by the Bishop of Peterborough prior to the burial and the grave is marked with a white memorial plinth and urn. A Doric-style temple with Diana's name inscribed on top is situated across from the lake as a place where visitors can lay floral tributes.

No. 27
   
Marie Curie, née Maria Salomea Skłodowska, is interred in a very simple tomb above that of her husband Pierre in the Panthéon in Paris. She died on 4 July 1934, aged 66, at the Sancellemoz sanatorium in Passy in the Haute-Savoie region of France, from aplastic anemia believed to have been contracted from her long-term exposure to radiation that had caused damage to her bone marrow. She was buried at the cemetery in Sceaux, a town near Paris, alongside her husband Pierre who had been killed in a Parisian road-traffic accident 28 years earlier. In 1995, in honour of their achievements, the remains of both were transferred to the Paris Panthéon. Rather uniquely their remains are sealed in lead coffins not for the usual reason of preservation, but because of their extreme radioactivity. She became the second woman to be interred at the Panthéon (after Sophie Berthelot) and the first woman to be honoured with interment in the Panthéon on her own merits.

No. 28
     
Percy Bysshe Shelley is buried in the so-called English, or Protestant Cemetery (Cimitero Acattolico) in Rome, despite him being an avowed and rather vocal atheist. With his family he had left England in 1818 to escape its "tyranny, civil and religious" and had embarked on a long tour around Italy staying, sometimes for months at a time, in Rome, Florence, Pisa, Naples and other places. He died, drowned, in a boating accident in 1822 while trying to sail his newly-purchased boat, the Don Juan, along the coast between Livorno and Lerici with a crew of just himself, an English friend Leigh Hunt, and a young Italian boat boy. The Don Juan and its inexperienced crew were lost in a storm and ten days later Shelley's body washed ashore near Viareggio and was so disfigured from its time in the water that his friend Edward Trelawny could only identify it from the clothing and a copy of Keats's 'Lamia' in a jacket pocket. Shelley's body was cremated on the beach where it was found, and the ashes were then buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome.

The above watercolour painting shows Shelley's grave some years later, with tall acanthus flowers at its foot and the head towards the rustic brick wall, which is actually part of the ancient Aurelian Walls of Rome built towards the end of the third century. It's a very pleasant place, redolent with history yet peaceful and calm despite being in the middle of a busy and bustling capital city - as I can vouch from personal experience. However as a 13-year old who was being dragged by his parents around interminable Roman remains, museums, art galleries, Baroque churches and crumbling graveyards, I might have been less than fully appreciative at the time. An extra point if you can identity the resident of the prominent pyramidal tomb in the background ... actually two extra points as he is really only remembered for being buried in a pyramid in Rome. Other than that he is essentially unknown to history beyond being briefly a Roman city official with obviously far more money than style.

No. 29

Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet) died in 1778 but because of his well-known criticism of the Church, which he had refused to retract before his death, he was denied a Christian burial in Paris. However friends and relations managed to bury his body secretly at the Abbey of Scellières in Champagne, where the brother of his long-term partner (they had never married) was abbé. In 1791 the National Assembly of France, regarding Voltaire as a forerunner of the French Revolution, had his remains brought back to Paris and enshrined in the Panthéon.

No. 30
   
Mel Blanc, who did the voices of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Tweety, Sylvester, Yosemite Sam, Foghorn Leghorn, the Tasmanian Devil, Porky Pig and Elmer Fudd, amongst others.

Fab! A quiz. Great idea Meles!

I'll try No. 17 as Oscar Wilde's grave at the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Well done MM! I know3 a few but will not be greedy but must have 25.... Mel Blanc......... sufferin' saccotache.... yeah! I tort I tor a puddy tat a treeeping up on me... etcetera.

I've just added five more that somehow got missed off the first post ... so your number 25, Mel Blanc, is now at number 30 (he just had to have the last word). But now there'll be no more changes, so that really is all folks.

I'm going to guess that No. 3 is another Irish writer who died in France - and that's James Joyce.

No 22 Theodore Gericault (spelling?) Must be because of the depicted  Wreck of the Medusa  - what an interesting tomb!

I hadn't realised Meles that Joyce had died in Switzerland nor that he had been considered British. Fascinating stuff. I must have been mixing him up with W.B. Yeats who died in France in 1939 and whose remains were repatriated after the Second World War.

Well done Priscilla for getting the painter. I recognised the Medusa painting but didn't know the name of the artist.

Okay - I'll go for No. 19 - the grave of Cecil Rhodes in Zimbabwe (Rhodesia).

Is 26 not the restingplace of Princess Diana at Althorp?

Dirk

No guesses from me, but I just want to say how marvellous some of these graves and gravestones are. My husband finds my interest in cemeteries morbid, but they are one of my favourite sites. I can't wander round them like I used to but there is a wonderful old (by New Zealand standards) quite close to where I live and I must get my son (who lives about a mile from us) to take me there sometime.

I was expecting a rush to name no 12 - one of the most famous ever - The Tomb of Napoleon - or so I think it is.

I'll also bag no 10 as the Tomb of Cyrus the Great - how come I should know this instantly, I have no idea, but I did.

All correct so far. If Priscilla was amazed that there wasn't a rush to name Napoleon's iconic tomb, then I am surprised that nobody has immediately recognised numbers 2, 5 and 8, which I thought were very low-hanging fruit and easily picked off ... but perhaps you are just being considerate of any late-comers.

Priscilla wrote:

I was expecting a rush to name no 12 - one of the most famous ever - The Tomb of Napoleon - or so I think it is.

a.k.a. Boney's bones.

No. 27 must be Marie Curie.

Well done Viz. That one I thought particularly difficult unless you somehow managed to decypher her name, inscribed as Marie Curie-Skłodowska, but which I'd been careful to mostly obscure. There's little else to go on except that she is interred just above a clearly-related other, her husband Pierre, and that the floral tribute bears the colours of Poland, not of France, despite the tomb being in the Paris Panthéon. So however did you deduce it was Mme Curie?

All was obscured but I managed to make out Sklodowska. Staying with Poland - would No.24 be Chopin?

Is no.2 Richard III (or perhaps a nun according to nordmann)?

No. 20 is Hedy Lamarr.  Checking on Ms Lamarr's grave I looked on a site about famous Viennese graves and came across no.1 quite by chance.  No. 1 is the grave of physicist Ludwig Boltzmann.

Is no. 4 Mary Queen of Scots?  I wondered if there were some depictions of thistles on the pillow the lady is resting on.

No 7 - The Mohatma Ghandi Ghat - not sure if it counts as a tomb or if it  a memorial of the cremation site. Marigolds are always part of the flower patterns.

So tonight is the night when departed souls of the good may harass the living bad; how very human to have reversed the universal understanding of that. I supposed dressing up as the good might be a tad tedious....... supposing that one could imagine what that could be. or come to that who? Nominate any good person and someone will dig up a murky tale to stall that concept, I suppose. And the really good people I ever knew would not want to harass anyone.

Boltzmann, Richard III, Mary Queen of Scots and Hedy Lamarr are all correct LiR, as is Vizzer's suggestion of Chopin.

And yes P it is Mahatma Gandhi. I thought his ashes were interred there but as you have pointed out I was very wrong as his ashes ended up in a variety of places, indeed nearly all were eventually dispersed into rivers in accordance with Hindu tradition.

Priscilla wrote:

So tonight is the night when departed souls of the good may harass the living bad; how very human to have reversed the universal understanding of that. I supposed dressing up as the good might be a tad tedious....... supposing that one could imagine what that could be. or come to that who? Nominate any good person and someone will dig up a murky tale to stall that concept, I suppose. And the really good people I ever knew would not want to harass anyone.

It's the witching hour on All Hallow's Eve and as a bad'un I'm obviously in trouble and in need of some old time religion. But which one, Catholic or Protestant or Heathen? Oh, to hell with choosing. Three is a lucky number don't they say.    

So if we've got Diana, Princess of Wales (courtesy of Dirk) and Mary, Queen of Scots (courtesy of LiR) then let's see if we can make it a hat-trick for the Diocese of Peterborough and go for No. 23 as Catherine of Aragon.

Because it looks like her, I think no 11 is the memorial to Virginia Wolfe. But the tree under which her ashes were buried was an elm tree and these leaves are not...... but later thinks..... oh, daft me, of course almost all our elm trees were wiped out by tha nasty dutch elm disease carrying beetle. The current tree leaves look very much like those of the Judas tree that flowers on the bark of its branches and a a poignant choice if that is so. My goodness, tombs are ever interesting from many aspects. I am with Caro on this one.

Me getting greedy now - of course 8 is Lenin's tomb - apart from one other, I'm nearly done then. Am keening tho to know about the green woodland tomb - and the one showing a relics casket being carried..... and the lovely floor inlay one in an octogen. 

Most interesting reading when I checked out my guesses, MM, for which I thank you.

Katherine of Aragon's tomb in Peterborough cathedral is just a bit too obvious, so if I'd blurred her name there wouldn't be much left,



... so a good guess, but no. The floor tile of no.23 does however mark the grave of another queen and indeed with your sharp eyes Viz (I'm still not sure how you managed to make out Marie Curie's maiden name, Skłodowska, on her tomb) you can probably make out the word 'queen' in gothic script, but the exact name is conveniently hidden by the red roses (themselves a clue perhaps).

No. 11 is Virginia Woolf and you are also correct that the tree, which was apparently a large elm, did die some years ago. I thought the leaves of the tree there now might be from a deciduous magnolia - I have something similar in my own garden.

PS:
And yes, no. 8 is of course Lenin's tomb, or mausoleum rather, on the Red Square in Moscow.

PPS:
Apparently the elm tree that shaded Virginia Woolf's grave blew down in a gale (though of course it might well have already been weakened by Dutch elm disease) and it was only then that her bust was erected on the spot where the tree had once stood. Judging by this photo the current tree just to the right of the bust is indeed a purple-flowered magnolia ... so well done me!

Catherine of Aragon normally gets pomegranates rather than roses so I should have realised. My eyes can't be that good though, because I've now noticed that the Roman numeral is not III but VI as in 1536. So if it's not the strait-laced Catholic Anglophile Catherine then it must be her nemesis the coquette Protestant Francophile Anne Boleyn at No. 23.

No. 23 is indeed Anne Boleyn, buried under the nave of the Chapel Royal of Saint Peter ad Vincula, which is within the confines of the Tower of London and indeed faces directly onto Tower Green which was the place of Anne's execution. The commemorative floor tile within the chapel is however Victorian and was only put there after her remains were rediscovered during restoration work on the chapel in 1876.

I think 23 may be Percy Bysshe Shelley - hope I have spelled his name correctly.

LiR, your spelling seems perfectly correct, however I think your numeration is much awry. No.23 is most certainly not Shelley (it's Anne Boleyn). Nevertheless your suggested man might still appear elsewhere.

Is Shelley no. 28.  I'm a bit sausage-fingered when on the mobile phone.

No. 6 I think is John Keats.

Ah yes, those 19th century poetical boys John Keats (no.6) and Percy Bysshe Shelley (no.28). While neither were quite as "mad, bad and dangerous to know" as Byron, they were both young men who rather stirred things up ... albeit that Keats thought so little of himself that he believed that his name would soon be forgotten, hence the epitaph on his gravestone suggested by himself, "Here lies One Whose Name was writ in Water". Shelley meanwhile died simply living life to the full; in a reckless - though doubtless very fun, at least initially - boating accident off the wild Italian coast of Liguria. So in a way it was his name that became writ in water.

No pomegranates for this fellow but it's certainly low-hanging fruit. No. 5 is the famous landmark which for years represented 'London' for schoolchildren in the Soviet bloc - the bust of Karl Marx in Highgate.

Full marks Viz.  

However from O level history I always thought it was, "Workers of the world unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains", which I think sounds much better. Doesn't the slogan come directly from the 1848 Communist Manifesto, albeit that the original document was written in German (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei), or maybe Marx said it in different ways at different times? Or is there a specific reason why it's quoted that way on his memorial?

Surely the full Marx were Chico, Harpo, Groucho, Gummo, and Zeppo. 

I suspect that 'workers of the all lands' is a transliteration while 'workers of the world' is a translation. Agree, though, that the latter is catchier but I'm not sure why they chose the former. Maybe the designer of the plinth was a pedestal pedant. 

As for the remaining clues, then I'm with P in being particularly intrigued by Nos. 21 and 25. Also - the faces of Nos. 18 and 29 seem vaguely familiar but very difficult to place. In the same vein, I'm going to guess at No. 15 as being composer Peter Tchaikovsky simply because it looks a bit like him and I can't think who else it might be.

No. 15 is not Tchaikovsky, but he is Russian (as indeed are two others still to be deduced) and he is buried in the same cemetery as Tchaikovsky. For what it's worth the lines of verse below his bust are from John 12:24,
"Verily, verily, I say unto you, except a corn of wheat fall into the ground and die, it abideth alone: but if it dies, it bringeth forth much fruit."
... although I'm not sure if that will help much other than suggesting, along with the Russian Orthodox cross on top of the tomb, that he was quite religious.

Thanks for the clue - so No 21 is Tolstoy - my knowledge of Russians to look up is - shall we say - somewhat thin. Thanks for the opportunity to do a bit of interesting reading MM. Hope you can set up another similar later..........this burial thing, I mean; there's been quite a lot of it about, after all.

No. 21 is indeed Leo Tolstoy, buried with the simplest of memorials in a wooded glade on the Tolstoy estate at Yasnaya Polyana (now a museum) where he'd lived all his life. Nice isn't it? It's the sort of grave I'd choose for myself, though it must be quite difficult to keep the grass on the mound trimmed and not over-run with weeds while still looking suitably rustic.

Er - there's always artificial grass..... I'll get me coat.

Purely guessing and mostly likely wrong - I've tried to think of learned medieval women.  Is the lady at no. 14 reading a book Christine de Pisan?  I haven't been able to find an image of her tomb.  I also thought of Anne de Bretagne or Hildegard von Bingen but their tombs are very grand affairs.

An interesting choice for no.14 LiR, but no it's not Christine de Pisan. Of course just because she's settled down for eternity with a good book need not mean she was well read - it could just be the medieval equivalent of 'Fifty Shades of Grey', although I suspect it's probably a copy of the Gospels and she is trying to look pious. As a clue the lady in the tomb married two kings and lived to see three of her sons crowned as kings.

Ah - the clues helped for no14 Eleanor of Aquitaine.... possibly reading her survival in heaven handbook.... self published, even.

Cross with myself for not realizing who this was. This photo was not quite as I recall the effigy - having  once made a special visit  to the abbey to see it. My photo of it from another angle shows her visage as pop eyed and looking both fearsome and somewhat surprised at being dead..... possibly not the original  carvings in place there, anyway but altogether, a stunning place to spend a day. (She was quite  a woman, eh?)

I'm rather surprised the tombs in Fontevraud Abbey survived the anti-royalist vandalisation that accompanied the Revolution, perhaps they were spared because the monastic buildings adjacent to the abbey church were turned into a prison, in which capacity they served right up until 1963.

Are we getting to the point where additional clues are needed, or shall I wait a bit longer? I can't hope to match the quality of Nordmann's deviously clever musical clues - which were often more obscure than the original picture quiz - but perhaps I should start to think of something for the remaining six: numbers 13, 15, 16, 18, 25 and 29.

No additional clues needed just yet. That said - your additional clue that No. 15 is buried in the same St Petersburg cemetery as Tchaikovsky has helped me to deduce that it's Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Although I've read books by the exquisitely-interred Leo Tolstoy and also short stories by Anton Chekhov, I've never read any of Dostoyevsky's works. Maybe I'll try one of his novels this coming winter.

OK, no clues just yet.

Nevertheless Fyodor Dostoyevsky, buried in the Tikhvin Cemetery in Saint Petersburg, is indeed no.15. And I accept that his bust didn't really help as frankly all those late nineteenth-century, fully-bearded guys, looked very much alike when hidden behind their fashionable whiskers.

No. 16 looks like it's either a Habsburg or a Romanov. The vaulted ceiling is white, however, which seems too plain for an Orthodox sepulchre. The style of the crown also looks somewhat feminine. On those points, therefore, I'll guess at Maria Theresa of Austria.

Hmmm ... that's an interesting chain of thought but almost completey wrong. However as you requested I'll give no clues, at least not at this time.

An of course moment.... no25....the tomb of Christopher Columbus; interesting design.