I really, really like cemeteries. Actually, I don't get them spooky at all - except possibly when visited at night, with mist wafting around the cool air, and owls calling out through the blackness.I've gone out of my way to see a lot of them. I wish the local such as the very modest grave of famous explorer Simon Fraser who gets a large river and university named after him out west but back east rests just land the route from me in a tiny pioneer plot, long neglected but recently set up.'m also fascinated by the exotic, like the Land War Graves Commission cemeteries I've visited in Stanley, Hong Kong, Kanchanaburi and Chungkai, Thailand, Kranji, Singapore, and even Gander, Newfoundland (a tiny plot beside the march of the airfield, largely for crashed fliers). I have searched for Evita's grave in La Ricoleta Cemetery of Buenos Aires (unsuccessfully, but it does take some of the fanciest crypts anywhere on or below the earth), and Marx's grave in London's Highgate Cemetery (successfully, but somehow I expected more than a medium-sized rectangular granite block with a semblance of his mind on top, too big to be socially egalitarian, but too little to be his global influence).I've heard about colonial elephant stompings bringing an untimely end to colonial ambitions in the British Garrison Cemetery of Kandy, Sri Lanka, and inter-tribal warfare leading to endings among the Batak people of Lake Toba, Sumatra (okay, I couldn't get any cemetery photos, but I linked to a few shots of the country by somebody who knows how to get a photo).Among the most atmospheric cemeteries I get ever visited are those of Lithuania. At Saules Kapines one finds an organized riot of common natural growth, grey headstones, and mountain goat paths wind through a splendor of eastern crosses. In the 1st photograph of the mailing you see the entry to this parish cemetery of the nearby magnificent St. Peter and St. Paul's Church. Below, the graves cascading down a hillside.
My favourite grave markers were beautiful intricately carved wooden monuments like the one below, which seemed to mix elements of Baltic Viking mythology, Christianity, and naturalist fantasy.You can run your Lithuanian language skills on the entrance plaque for Saules Kapines.
Nearby is the much more famous Antakalio Kipines, mainly a military cemetery, where you see the final resting places of tons of Lithuanians, Russians, Poles, Germans and others stretching over two centuries. So many graves from so many conflicts, it's tough to separate out who fell at the reach of whom, and still more hard to see out why. Because of its central position among traditional European powers, conflict has unfortunately washed over usually less powerful Lithuania time after time (notwithstanding the rather powerful Grand Duchy of Lithuania period), with Lithuanians before forced to choose sides for or against the latest invaders - and not always agreeing on whom to support.
Here is another of those great carved wooden monuments, this one with a lots more military focus on the 2nd World War (you can post the 1941-1945 half way down the inscription).And here is the most distinguished of the monuments in the cemetery, to the Soviet dead between 1941-1945. Those statues may seem a little low in the view of the photo, but in reality they are huge!In the plaza leading up to the statues there are dozens of collective memorial tablets, organized by military unit including partizan brigades. The 1943-44 period appears to have been a particularly hard time.While the Lithuanians keep all areas of the graveyard in an immaculate state, they have decided to sniff out the Soviet eternal flame at the foundation of those giant socialist-realist statues.In the next close-up, you see the statues recognize both female (nursing) and male (combat) war roles, faces permanently set in equally grim determined resolve.
The Lithuanians also seem to get removed spot lights set on surrounding hillsides which would have bathed those statutes in a stony night time ethereal glow.I plant the most moving portion of the necropolis to be the wooded hillside filled with Polish graves from 1919-20, each carefully bedecked with its own ribbon in Poland's national colours. The graves were the effect of the Polish-Lithuanian and Polish-Soviet Wars.Wandering aimlessly around as I incline to do in cemeteries (there is a reason I never found Evita's tomb), I never experience what I might get across, like this monument to former Soviet airmen placed off in a corner far off from the Soviet WWII graves.The office of the graveyard with the most current national significance, seen above, dates from what is known as the January Events of 1991, and contains the graves of the civilians who died in clashes with Soviet troops over Lithuania's assertion of independence. Each grave is laid out about a semi-circle courtyard, with a single sculpture of the beat being comforted (seen in the upper left of the photo) watching over them.Though the cemetery mostly had a smattering of foreign tourists present when I visited, it's reassuring to recognize that the local old and young still visit now and so to remember and think what was, and what could be again.
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