A macabre burial site with over 80,000 skeletons has been unburied below a children’s playground in Poland.
Construction workers found the so-called Park of the Dead while renovating a park in a busy city centre.
The £1.5million project to build new playgrounds, benches and outdoor gym in the northern city of Bydgoszcz has been temporarily stopped.
Lead archaeologist, Robert Grochowski, said: “We’ve found completely untouched layers of graves. I can easily say that there are around 80,000 skeletons.
A water company discovered the underground cemetery while they were testing to see if they could build pipes underneath the park.
Grochowski said there was a 17th century evangelical cemetery on that spot.
The city of Bydgoszcz was occupied by Germany from the 17th century until around 1918.
For this reason, the archaeologist said most of the skeletons probably belonged to Germans.
The last bodies were reportedly buried there in the middle of 1945.
In the late fifties the communist government decided to shut down the cemetery to make a park and promised to remove the remains.
However it is now apparent that only just the tombstones were removed whilst the skeletons were left buried underneath the ground.
According to Grochowski,
The mayor of Bydgoszcz has reportedly convened a special commission to solve the problem.
One social media user said: “It’s a common knowledge that before WW II there was a huge cemetery there.
“The park is called The People’s Park but colloquially we call it the Park of the Dead.”
