In the Greater Accra region of Ghana, the Ga people’s dead are laid to rest in unusual coffins. It won’t be surprising if their graves in the cemetery, if exhumed, would yield caskets of different shapes and sizes.
The funeral tradition of the Ga involves the use of coffins shaped according to the profession, status, or personal interests of the deceased. For example, the remains of Nii Agbetekor, the supreme traditional military leader of the town of Nungua, were placed in a lion-shaped coffin at his funeral in November 2024, CNN reports.
Swiss anthropologist Regula Tschumi has been documenting the funeral tradition of the Ga people and her book, “Buried in Style: Artistic Coffins and Funerary Culture in Ghana,” shows the different coffin designs she personally saw from 2004 to 2024.
There was a coffin shaped like a pineapple for a seller of the fruit. Another was crab-like for a builder named Crab. A dead footballer was placed inside a boot-shaped coffin.
A traditional priest was buried in a giant blue teapot in 2009, a reference to the container he used in rituals, according to CNN.
Meanwhile, in the cemetery of the small Serbian village of Kisiljevo, a 300-year-old headstone bearing the name of Petar Blagojevic has been rediscovered and is being promoted as a tourist attraction.
Local historian Nenad Mihajlovic told Agence France-Presse (AFP) the grave was empty as the body had been dug up in 1725, burned, and the ashes scattered in a lake.
Villagers blamed the deceased Blagojevic for the deaths in the area at the time, so they dug him up and “drove a hawthorn stake through him,” according to AFP, citing accounts of the alleged bloodsucker’s unofficial biographer, Mirko Bogicevic.
“We have a fully documented account of an extremely unusual event — one officially identified as a case of vampirism,” the 68-year-old Mihajlovic said, referring to Blagojevic.
The town hopes to capitalize on the grave as that of the first recorded vampire, antedating Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Dajana Stojanovic, head of the local tourism office, said.