Jorge Luis Borges, the Argentine writer who invented a new mode of fiction and influenced most of the writers who came after him, is buried in the Cimetière des Rois (Cemetery of Kings) in Plainpalais — the Genevan cemetery also known as the Cimetière de Plainpalais. He died in Geneva in 1986, having returned to the city he had loved since studying French and Latin here as a teenager during World War One.
His grave is marked with a horizontal stone engraved with scenes from Norse mythology — warriors, ships, intertwined beasts — and a quotation from Old English. María Kodama, whom he married in the months before his death, placed the stone. The cemetery also holds the graves of John Calvin, Jean-Louis Agassiz, and other Geneva notables, but Borges draws the most pilgrims. The cemetery is open daily and free.