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Cenotaph

A monument erected in honor of a dead person whose remains lie elsewhere.

(Greek: "empty tomb") Monument, sometimes in the form of a tomb, to a person buried elsewhere.

Ancient Greek writings tell of many cenotaphs, none of which survives.

Existing cenotaphs of this type are found in churches (e.g., in Santa Croce, Florence, where there are memorials to Dante, Niccolo Machiavelli, and Galileo).

The term is now applied to national war memorials.

Cenotaphs have been erected in many countries around the world since ancient times.

It was a common tradition in the ancient world, with many examples built in Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece and across in Northern Europe (in the shape of Neolithic barrows).

A cenotaph is an empty grave. Three major types of cenotaphs can be found:

1) A cenotaph memorializing a person whose body was lost or was buried at sea.
2) A cenotaph memorializing a person who was originally buried at that location, but later the body was moved to a different location.
3) A cenotaph simply memorializing a person of note as a gesture of respect and honor (many occurrences of this can be found at Westminster Abbey in London, England - Lord Byron, T.S. Eliot, Lewis Carroll, etc.)