Requiem for a pagan soul. Pagan reminiscences in 19th century cemeteries in Lithuania

Authors

• Eglė Bazaraitė Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa
• Teresa Heitor Instituto Superior Técnico, Universidade de Lisboa
• Maria Manuel Oliveira Universidade do Minho

Keywords:

burial ground, graveyard, urban cemetery, history of burial, architecture for death.

Abstract

European burial grounds suffered a great shift in the 19th century: hygienic strategies of city development brought them to be outside of the city cores. A new model of cemetery handed a right to memory for those social classes that were sentenced to forgetting before: it was the time of the rise of the individual. Following garden development – from hortus conclusus to an open landscape – first through the use of the false funeral monuments in the gardens, then placing real tombs in natural milieu (for example, a tomb of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in Île des Peupliers in Ermenonville) – people got accustomed to see death in the garden and burial spaces acquired Edenic expression.

Lithuania was the very last European country to accept Christianity; all the territory was only Christianised in the beginning of the 15th century. Therefore this article approaches burial grounds in Lithuania as places where pagan culture meets recent Christian attitudes and concerns.

The first trigger for this research was an urge to identify elements of pagan beliefs in spatial solutions of Lithuanian cemeteries. In order to decode a morphogenetic identity of Lithuanian burial grounds, two 19th-century cemeteries in Vilnius, Lithuania, were approached from a syntactic point of view taking into account the mythological references of Christianity and Baltic paganism. The spatial texture of two cemeteries – Rasos and Bernardines - is analysed and compared, by interpreting it as a system of accessibility axes. Configurative relations are used to inform morphological analysis by identifying their architectural character and cultural identity as well as relating them to the pagan imaginaries of the afterlife.

To understand the spatial reality of the cemeteries, observations of the movement have been carried out, helping to construct simple graphs of cemeteries’ plans, significant for genotype definition.

Through the configurative relations it was possible to confirm a premise that the two burial grounds studied in the paper are symbolically-organic spaces, which could have evolved in the sequence of the pagan custom to bury in the wilderness – places associated with abode of gods and the dwelling places of dead.