Rakowicki cemetery opened in the early years of the 19th century. Like anywhere in Europe burial places for the dead were moved out of the city for health related reasons. The cemetery is a place of burial of the ordinary citizens of the city as well as national heroes, there are special sections allocated to graves of the participants of Polish national uprisings and casualties of two World Wars. My main focus was on getting some sense of the local grave culture so I mainly focused on graves of ordinary people and the expressing of ‘continuing bonds’ between the living and the dead. I was most intrigued by the way the Sunday Mass took place at the cemetery (see my blogpost: Sunday Morning at Rakowicki Cemetery). The place makes you also wonder if, due to the vast majority of Roman Catholics in Poland, this could be considered a ‘typical’ Catholic Cemetery. If ‘typical’ means an abundant number of crosses, angle statues, flowers and even more grave lights, this was surely it! It was quite a huge contrast with the cemetery in Aarhus (Protestant Denmark) I visited a week later …
All pictures were taken by Claudia Venhorst, Sunday May 7th 2017.