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