To understand how the Dutch live, how they think, and what religious traditions and spirituality mean to them, you can make a strange choice – visit the Funeral Museum in Amsterdam. It is paradoxical, but it has its own logic.
The Museum of Funeral Rituals, the only one in the Netherlands, was founded relatively recently, in 2007, on the grounds of the quiet and beautiful De Nieuwe Ooster cemetery. The collection is small, but interesting and even interactive. There are only four modern exhibition halls connected by a long passage. Each of them is dedicated to different aspects of death and the burial of the deceased. Materials on various funeral traditions are collected here: Protestant, Catholic, Jewish, Muslim, Chinese, Creole, and many others.
Separately, you can note the model of the first Dutch crematorium - in this country cremation was officially prohibited for a very long time. The museum also presents a collection of miniatures of various hearses.
While becoming acquainted with the exhibition, for some reason gloomy thoughts about death do not come to mind; on the contrary, everything is arranged in such a way as to make us think about the present.
