A Short History to Start With

Athens First Cemetery: a Short History to Start With

Oddly enough, the story begins in Paris. At the beginning of the 19^th century, change was in the air and this included new ideas about the proper burial of the dead. Discoveries concerning the spread of disease in the 1700s had made leaders in densely populated and plague prone cities realize that the malignant odors and seepage emanating from overcrowded graveyards around urban churches were not merely unpleasant but a miasma of unhealthy particles extremely harmful to the living.(1)

 Paris was the first to act upon this knowledge. Between 1785 and 1787 all of the graves in the Holy Innocents Cemetery and elsewhere were dug up and the bones placed in massive catacombs out of harm’s way.

  And something else: the responsibility of safely burying the dead was no longer to be a Church concern; it became the responsibility of the municipality.

In 1804 the Père Lachaise Cemetery, designed with these new ideas in mind, opened for business. It was modeled on the ancient cemeteries of Greece and Rome where the dead had been buried in impressive tombs outside of the city walls. (2)

At first there were few takers. Families resisted the idea of a cemetery not on hallowed ground and far away on the fringes of the city. By 1806, there were only 44 burials. The solution to this challenge was brilliant. The bones of Molière (died 1676) and Jean De La Fontaine (died 1695) were transferred and ceremonially re-interred in the new burial ground. This sparked interest. 

But he real publicity coup came in 1817 when the bones of Heloise (died 1164) and Abelard (died 1142) were brought to Père Lachaise and buried, their new tomb beautifully canopied by fragments of a defunct French abbey. 

This tomb spoke, not to scientific hygiene, but to full blown 19^th century romantic sensibilities, - as did the plan of the cemetery itself.

The new aesthetic dictated that a cemetery could and should be picturesque, grand, and somewhat antique, - in fact an entirely pleasant place to stroll and enjoy nature and, of course, to make a pilgrimage to the famous graves. 

 Wikipedia Commons

Père Lachaise today has over 5,000 trees

Major walkways were broad and many others were delightfully meandering. One historian points out that the very idea of a park within an urban landscape actually originated because of the pleasing results of cemeteries like Père Lachaise.  It was a winning combination. By 1830 Pere Lachaise’s population had risen to 33,000 and counting.

 Grave monuments reflected the current ideals and aesthetics of the Parisian population. This being the Napoleonic era, it is hardly surprising that ancient architectural motifs and practices were wildly popular. Sarcophagi, Egyptian obelisks, ancient columns, architraves, pediments, and ancient motifs of all kinds were deemed appropriate and took their place alongside Christian and Gothic architectural trappings. It was as if the cemetery were a bridge, connecting dead 19^th century worthies to a glorious past that Europe was more and more claiming as its own inheritance.

Père Lachaise was admired and emulated as early as 1830 in the United States, in Scotland in 1836, and in Athens beginning in 1834.

The First Cemetery of Athens

Of course, Athens did not need such a cemetery for quite the same reasons as Paris did. It contained no seething church yards ready to contaminate the masses. In 1830 Athens had been reduced to rubble by the war, had a small population,(3) and very few habitable houses. But King Othon and his German planners along with the cosmopolitan Greeks from abroad in his government had ambitious plans for the new capital. It was going to be the Paris of the south with the same tree lined avenues of Paris, the same impressive architecture along its broad streets – and, eventually, an imposing cemetery to match. It took a while to realize, and to reconstruct the exact timeline of its development is impossible because records are sketchy. (4)

 By ignoring today’s poor man’s art deco entrance built in 1939, and bypassing the plaza that was not part of the original cemetery, continue south to the beginning of the lane leading to the Agios Lazarus church. At this juncture the original concept comes magically to life. 

The core of the First Cemetery is breathtakingly beautiful, and it is extensive enough to get a little bit lost in…

It was founded by a Royal Decree in 1834, the same year Athens became the capital of Greece. At the same time burials in and around churches in Athens were forbidden and the control and running of cemeteries was given over to the municipality.

Now in the heart of Athens, the First Cemetery was then very much on the periphery. It began small and grew along with the city. The exact size of the original core is not known. We do know that it was in operation by 1839, that the Agios Lazarus Church, its focal point, was in place by 1840. 

  Agios Lazarus as it appears today.

The area around this church is studded with names that are famous in the history of modern Greece: Kanaris, Kolettis, Church, Tzavelas, and Korais. In Korais’ imposing grave, we see another echo of Père Lachaise: in 1877, his bones were disinterred from the Montparnasse cemetery in Paris and re-interred beside Agios Lazarus.

 

It is almost impossible to stand far enough back to photograph the entire monument 

Other illustrious Greeks who had either died before 1830 or outside of the boundaries of the new state would eventually be transferred or, in lieu of that, a cenotaph created, not many –but enough to make a point: heroes of the modern state belonged together in the First Cemetery.

There was a circuit wall in the 1840s but just where exactly is a bit of a mystery, and a priest’s house and some kind of shelter was created for guards.

 By the early 1850s, Athens’ mayor had ordered a gate placed at the entrance and that the cemetery’s ‘streets’ be planted with trees à la Père Lachaise. By the late 1860s, the core of the cemetery would have begun to resemble what you see today.

Funeral services would have been held inside Agios Lazarus but citizens also used city churches for the funeral liturgy and then brought the bodies to the cemetery in procession up Anapafsios (Οδό Αναπαύσεως) Street to their final resting place. It would have been a long procession, but one that is still made in the case of political or artistic worthies.(5)

By 1899-1901 Agioi Theodoroi  had been built.

 

It was white in 1900 

It is the cemetery’s most imposing church but at the time of construction it was outside of the cemetery walls in the plateia that fronted the cemetery’s original entrance. The area in front of it became the plaza of today’s cemetery sometime in the early 1900s and, whereas its tombs are in architectural sync with the older part of the cemetery, collectively they display the more inflated grandiosity preferred by twentieth century worthies. The plaza today also contains an underground mausoleum for officers, an impressive ossuary built in 1928, and the spacious tombs of the rich or politically important.

These modern add-ons make comprehending the original 19^th century cemetery difficult, but there are some contemporary descriptions to help...

 Demitrios Vikelas, a cosmopolitan Greek then residing in Paris and destined to become the first head of the International Olympic Committee visited the First Cemetery in 1884 and was impressed. He observed that the city did not seem to be doing a very good job of upkeep and that the  Christian graves smacked of what he called ‘archaiolatry’ (a great word but an odd comment considering that it was the style of the era and Athens, more than most cities had a legitimate claim to the practice (6)). And he made one more striking comment: that what he saw before him was a Pantheon, - a school of history for Greeks. In the future he envisioned thousands flocking to visit the cemetery to learn.

 For the Olympics of 1896, the city did make an effort to make the First Cemetery the attraction it should be. They named the main ‘streets' for the Olympics and then, inexplicably, erased all but one marker. 

This one was left because it was part of the grave  itself

This fact makes visiting today quite frustrating, so much so that for the purposes of the blog, Filia and I have had to devise our own particular names for ‘main thoroughfares just to aid ourselves in navigating and explaining our location to each other on our own expeditions to unlock the secrets of who is buried there and where. 

From an original single section, the cemetery now has 18 and the boundaries of these sections have altered so frequently over time that even if you have an idea of where a section actually is (the latest are marked on the map at the entrance if you look closely) and a grave number you will be completely defeated by a numbering system gone haywire – so much so that, although our intention is  to give the number and section of each grave we discuss, we also know that the map accompanying each text will be absolutely necessary.

Consider this:  Père Lachaise is one of the top tourist attractions in Paris. Paris!  But the Athens First Cemetery is often quite deserted.

It is possible to wander throughout the cemetery and completely lose sight of other visitors. More likely to be in evidence is the old gent at the original entrance who makes the same request for coins every time we pass, the cats which have carved out definite territories for themselves,

A Section 7 Cat

 or a small number of city workers whose job is general maintenance and sometimes to clean up a loved one’s tomb  for a fee.

Not to paint too bleak a picture, there are clean-up crews, regular garbage collection and the lanes are generally well looked after. The task is made more difficult by the constantly shedding trees. 

Still, in the core of the cemetery, individual graves, even those of the famous or of great artistic merit are often completely or partially overgrown and many tombs are in need of repair. (To be fair, the upkeep of graves is the responsibility of the families who either rent or own the plot.)

   Sometimes shears are enough to uncover a tomb, in this case a stunning Bonanos sleeping lady.

 

 What is strange is that it is so difficult to locate a grave and there is no one to ask unless you try at Agios Lazarus where a very abbreviated list of some few names is available to a Greek speaker, - or you must go to the municipal office outside of the cemetery gates. 

 On my first visit there, I was told that if I gave them a name, they would give me a number and I got the distinct impression that it had better not be too many names. 

 No list of those buried in the cemetery was available to us (7). The map at the cemetery’s entrance gives no indication of the whereabouts of even the most famous grave.

This is a pity because Vikelas was right. This burial ground is a pantheon and could be a school of history for Greeks and foreign visitors alike if only the effort were made. 


 Both aesthetically and historically, the First Cemetery today is an unsung Greek treasure – known to experts but not to the general public. The city should be doing more to encourage the visitors Vikelas envisioned.

 The fact that it is still a working cemetery should not be a deterrent. So is Père Lachaise.

Footnotes

11)    The novel  Pure by Andrew Miller describes in fiction  and rather gory detail the disinterment of the graves at Holy Innocents.

22)    The ancient Greeks also believed that miasma was a physical manifestation although not in quite the same way. Their ideas of burial hygiene were probably more advanced than those of  Europe before the 1700s.

33)    Athens population in 1825 was just under 10,000. It would have been far less after 5 years of war. One figure I read was 5,000.

44)     Elsewhere on the blog, maps of what we think was the original cemetery, as well as the cemetery today will be provided. For a more detailed explanation of the cemetery’s growth in Greek, see http://www.archaiologia.gr/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/100-20.pdf

55)    Many funerals ending in the First cemetery have become famous in their own right, although for different reasons: the interments of George Papandreaou,  George Seferis, and  Kostis Palamas, come to mind.

66)    The ‘archaiolatry’ of the First Cemetery will be discussed in The First Cemetery:  A Little Bit of Ancient Greece in Modern Athens on the blog.

77)    A full  ‘list’ is complicated by the fact that not everyone buried in the First Cemetery stays buried …