Revising Reykjavík: changing narratives of skeletons, structures, and imagined futures

In Reykjavik, Iceland, the city’s oldest cemetery was exhumed in favor of yet another tourist hotel despite local cultural leaders’ objections and existing concerns that new hotels already exceeded projected demand. For Icelanders, cemeteries are important material and symbolic markers of the nation’s history and heritage and cherished contributors to Icelandic cultural identity. The anomalous destruction of this particular, historically...