The Old Dutch cemetery in Cossimbazar is the first of our Indian Dutch heritage places we visit on our one-month travel list in 2013. Only two inscriptions of the 22 tombs at the cemetery in are readable when we visited it in the morning of 10 December 2013. They are of Gregorius Herklots and two of the Bahe family.

The cemetery is well kept, but we are disappointed that most of the stones seem to have been getting a layer of cement so that inscriptions are no longer visible. But in the 2011 book The VOC in India (in Dutch) Bauke van de Pol has a picture of 1900 by the journalist Maurits van Wagenvoort, who writes that there were only five inscriptions visible at that time. See also a Bauke van de Pol video.

This is the tomb of Tamerus Canter Visscher, who was Chief Salesperson secunde of the VOC Bengal direction and Cief of the VOC in Kalkapur (now Cassimbazar). He was born in Pinjum, Friesland in 1729 and he died on 31 January 1778.

It is interesting to note that both the Archeological Survey of India and the Department of Tourism of the West Bengal Government have information boards at the entrance of the Dutch cemetery.

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