There are four Italian Military Cemeteries in Ethiopia, located in different parts of the country:
- Addis Ababa Military Cemetery
- Adigrat Military Cemetery
- Macallè Military Cemetery
- Uarieu Pass Military Cemetery (in the Tembien area)
The Italian Embassy in Addis Ababa, in close cooperation with the Office of the Defence Attaché, has developed a guide to the four cemeteries (only available in italian).
The aim of the guide is to facilitate the retrieval of information on individual fallen soldiers and the places where their remains are kept.
In this regard, the Italian Embassy in Addis Ababa, in close collaboration with the Office of the Defence Attaché, ensures the proper management and maintenance of the cemeteries, thanks to the funds provided by the General Commissariat for Honours to the Fallen in War (Commissariato Generale per le Onoranze ai Caduti in Guerra – CGOCG).
The guide offers a systematic cataloguing of the names of the fallen soldiers resting in each cemetery, as well as other personal data such as date and place of death, exhumation and eventual transfer. This cataloguing, made available to the public for the first time in April 2020, benefited from information taken from military registers archived at the Italian Embassy in Addis Ababa, the Office of the Defence Attaché and the Consular Chancellery. The list of names of the fallen is attached to the guide (Annexes A, B and C) and is available for only three of the four military cemeteries, since the identity of the fallen resting in the cemetery of Passo Uarieu is unknown.
Furthermore, the guide is intended to be a tool to facilitate reaching the cemeteries themselves, which may not be very easy in the Tigray region. To this end, it contains useful information for visitors, such as the opening hours of the cemeteries, contact telephone numbers and geographical coordinates to reach each of the cemeteries.
The guide is divided into five chapters. The first four chapters are dedicated to the description of each of the military cemeteries and report the most relevant historical facts related to the construction of the cemeteries. Each one bears witness to events that took place both during the years of the Italian occupation in Ethiopia and during the Second World War. Finally, each section concludes with useful information on how to reach the cemetery.
The fifth chapter deals with decommissioned military cemeteries, i.e. the places where the bodies of fallen soldiers were initially interred before being moved to the current four military cemeteries. The guide concludes with an explanatory note on the transliteration of Ethiopian names from Amharic to Italian.