These graves are unlikely to be frequently visited, this cemetery is lost among marshes and forests, surrounded by solitary summer houses.
The graveyard belongs to Barysau mental hospital, and here lie lunatics who did not manage to leave the walls of their asylum.
Both barbwire and old mouldy boards are attached to grey concrete fence poles. A very specific junkyard is organised right next to the cemetery. It is filled with rusty cans, packs from pills that turn a human being into a vegetable... Rare passersby heading to their dachas confirm us these graves are special.
There are only few crosses nor gravestones, dated the 70s or 80s. Most graves are marked with blood red poles with small plates attached. The plates tell the names and the life time. Human-high grass, peeling off paint, rusty fence makes the place look somewhat sinister, at first sight.
However, probably all “government” graves all over the country look similar to these ones. The poles closest to the road bear the number or the row. The last number seen by me was 38.
Most people resting here passed away between the 1970s and the beginning of the 1990s — the peak of death in the asylum. However, half graves posses no marks at all and covered with thick grass.
Few crosses erected in the cemetery are signed 1990s or 2000s. It seems that during the Soviet times the only last thing the asylum dwellers could have been granted were wooden poles. Gravestones were too expensive... Only some of the graves look like regularly attended. Other are slowly leveled by the time.
Most patients in Barysau mental hospital have no guardians or their relatives cannot looks after them. There are plenty reasons for this, but if living people are neglected, there is nothing to say about the dead.
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