Taphophilia

Taphophilia, also called tombstone tourism or cemetery tourism, and a practitioner called a taphophile, cemetery enthusiast, grave hunter or graver, is a passion for visiting cemeteries and for the epitaphs, gravestone rubbing, photography, art and history of, often famous, deaths found there. The term was most notably popularized by author and biographer Scott Stanton as the title of his website and book The Tombstone Tourist: Musicians, about the lives and gravesites of famous musicians, and some practitioners are drawn particularly to the historical aspects of a cemetery or the historical relevance of the people buried in it: La Recoleta in Buenos Aires, the Old Jewish Cemetery in Prague and the Zentralfriedhof in Vienna each carry a large array of famous inhabitants and their tombs and have become significant tourist destinations on that basis, and the historic cemeteries of New Orleans draw taphophiles for their relevance to the city's cultural history. Genealogy tourists pursue a related but distinct aim, searching out cemeteries and their records to verify grave records and ancestral burial locations, and taphophilia itself has roots in a much older tradition of pilgrimage to the burial sites of religious icons and leaders, common in medieval Europe, and in the ancient Chinese tradition of ancestor worship, which likewise involved visiting shrines and gravesites to venerate the dead; the hobby's modern form grew further out of the nineteenth century garden cemetery movement, which was deliberately designed to encourage visitors to stay and walk its grounds.