Lush green hills, idyllic scenery and phallic headstones – this is certainly not your average graveyard.
Khalid Nabi cemetery in Iran is one of the world’s most unusual necropolises with its tombs shaped like male and female genitalia, which in a country as conservative as this, sticks out like a sore…well, you know.
Less explicit though is the exact reason why the suggestive monuments have been erected in the first place.
The exact age and meaning behind the tombs are unknown, likely due to the country’s national embarrassment over the site, meaning there is little, if any, scholarship into it.
Some anthropologists suggest it may be traced back to phallus worshipping peoples from Central Asia and India, although no conclusive evidence exists to prove that.
Located in the North Iranian mountains near the border with Turkmenistan, the ancient graveyard is scattered with around 600 suggestive-shaped graves, most of which are of phallic.
