Cemetery Description: |
About a quarter of the cemetery was said to have been lost to Soviet construction at the site in the 1960s. Some of those stones have been found in various parts of the city, e.g., as part of the roadway, but have not been documented by this project. Over the past 20 or so years, a dedicated group of survivors and descendants have worked/paid to freshen up the grounds, build a protective exterior wall, and maintain the remainder of the cemetery--not an easy undertaking given that Druya is located in a border area considered by the Belorussian government to be off limits without special approval. Some dozens of the stones in the cemetery are noted in the spreadsheet, but could not be analyzed as the were laying face down, eroded or in fragments. Due to the aging, the stones no longer appear in their original, unusual and in some cases probably unique poly-chromatic form that can be seen in the subsets of pictures on line that were taken decades ago. It is also the case that while the names and father's names remain legible in most of the remaining stones, in this community only about 10% of the stones contain the individual's surname (if any).
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