Download - Olga Echevskaya, Soc&SA Modular PhD
For the dead, For the living, For the tourists:
Constructing narratives of Kerepesi temető
Olga Echevskaya, Soc&SA Modular PhD
1. A cemetery near the 8th district
1. Entering and starting.
First steps: the wall
Mo
ving
on
: “Ru
ssian
military sectio
n”
Moving on: the dead and the living
Old town / Heritage part
Arts quarter: creative class
“Lower Middle Class” district
Slums
Abandoned areas
Brief summary:
• The logic of a cemetery is similar to the logic of “lived” urban environments; it has cultural centers, rich parts, kind of gated areas, working-class areas, slums and abandoned places.
• Stratification is there not only in terms of economic inequalities, there are evident cultural differences felt in feelings, smells, bodily reactions, as well as in ways of decorating the graves and objects put on the graves to accompany the dead person.
• Cemetery is a very diverse place, and a very lively place. When you are looking at it from outside, it is kind of reduced to its “function”. And this is how it is very similar to an urban ghetto: one is the place for the dead, the other one is the place “with bad reputation”. But once you are in, you see huge diversity of the uses of space and ways of living with the space and its “aura”.
2. Kerepesi temető: Hungarian Pere Lachaise and object of
cultural heritage
• Kerepesi Cemetery (Kerepesi úti temető), officially named Fiume Road National Graveyard (Fiumei úti nemzeti sírkert) is the most famous cemetery in Budapest founded in 1847.Numerous Hungarian notabilities are buried here, including Lajos Batthyány, Ferenc Deák, Lajos Kossuth, Lujza Blaha.
• It's got the same allure as Pere Lachaise in Paris, minus the crowds.
• “Kerepesi Temetö is definitely a place you MUST see when visiting Budapest. It’s totally breathtaking”.
Europe's only 'Museum of Reverence' on burial culture canbe found in the graveyard. Guided tours must be pre-booked.
What is missing:Details on public and “market” uses of the Cemetery
Will be (hopefully) added:Planning / scheme and access issues (public aspect of the
cemetery and “entry” conditions)Interviews with people working at the cemetery (at least,
museum workers, maybe some other personnel)
Will not be added:Interviews with living relatives of the people buried at
Kerepesi Cemetery – people’s accounts of cemetery structure, functions and uses.
What else did I miss?
Kossith Lajos Monument
Cemetery Arcades
Sources and resourcesInformation about the Cemetery:http://hungarystartshere.com/ and other “sightseeing” siteshttp://www.findagrave.com/ - “directly functional” resourceshttp://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kerepesi_temeto; Wikil and Hungarian page
also.+ User’s blogs at Livejournal, WordPress, stand-alone blogs (“tourist
gazes”)
Photographs of the Cemetery:http://www.budapestindex.com/http://hungarystartshere.com/ and other “sightseeing” sites
A photo essay about Kerepesi Temetö by Edition Handdruckhttp://www.edition-handdruck.de/ktb/ktb.html
http://www.flickr.com/photos/transylvaniaguide/2610433656/ http://picasaweb.google.com/retepkavonster/KerepesiTemeto# and
other random image collections from Flickr, Picassa and the like+ Photos I made myself.Camera used for “ethnographic walk”: Panasonic LUMIX DMC-FZ8