A cenotaph is a tomb built on purpose to stay empty
The word comes from Greek for empty tomb. A cenotaph honours people whose bodies lie elsewhere or were never found. Lutyens' plain stone Cenotaph in Whitehall, first built of wood and plaster for a 1919 victory parade, became the model for war memorials across the British Empire.
Empty monuments are ancient. Egyptians and Greeks built them, and some Neolithic barrows in northern Europe served the same purpose. Some honour individuals: Florence's Santa Croce basilica holds one for Dante, who is actually buried in Ravenna, and Bordeaux displays Montaigne's. Lisbon's National Pantheon contains six, including memorials to Vasco da Gama and Henry the Navigator.
The Whitehall Cenotaph was deliberately secular. It bears only carved wreaths, the dates of both world wars in Roman numerals, and a three-word inscription, The Glorious Dead, picked by Lloyd George. Intended for the dead of the First World War, it now stands for all British service personnel killed in war, and each November political leaders lay wreaths there. Replicas and variations went up in Bermuda, Auckland, Hong Kong, Singapore and many other places.
The form has travelled far beyond Britain. Baltimore's Battle Monument, designed by French émigré Maximilian Godefroy and finished in 1827, is considered the first war memorial in America and features on the city seal. The cenotaph at the Alamo is empty because the defenders' remains were cremated. Kenzo Tange designed the concrete cenotaph in Hiroshima's Peace Memorial Park for victims of the August 1945 atomic bombing. At Khejarli in Rajasthan, one remembers 363 Bishnoi villagers killed in 1730 while defending their khejri trees.
Some honour those lost at sea. Families on Inishmore in the Aran Islands once built memorial cairns for drowned fishermen, most dating from the 19th century. A cenotaph at Woodlawn Cemetery commemorates Isidor and Ida Straus of the Titanic; his body was recovered but hers was not. In Indian architecture the idea took a distinctive shape: Mughal tombs such as the Taj Mahal and Humayun's Tomb place a cenotaph in an upper chamber above the real grave, and domed chhatris, from a word meaning umbrella, dot Rajasthan.
Source: Cenotaph
