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Gravesites

By Ray Chatelin
Photos By Toshi

Vienna has great graveyards. But so to does Paris and Philadelphia, places where the great and famous are buried.

And there's a place near Salzburg - the Wallfarhtkirche in Arnsdorf at the church where Silent Night, Holy Night was composed - where if you walk to the back, near the rear entrance you find a line of skulls behind a mesh wall.

Each is inscribed with a family name and a date. They were moved because in three centuries of burials the town had run out of room and the earliest now had to make room for the latest.

We North Americans don't like graveyards. We don't go to them and we tend to think that anyone who does is a bit goulish. After all, just think of all those stories we grew up with about ghosts that walk at night and what a full moon can do to the mind of those who visit graveyards.

But when you travel, graveyards really should be on your list of places to visit. They give you a more personal relationship with history and with the people who shape their own and our worlds.

There are the famous war cemeteries that everyone knows about at Gettysburg in Pennsylvania and in Washington, D.C. or at Normandy where we constantly see political leaders laying wreathes at ceremonial moments. But there are others, less famous, that are worthy of attention.

In Vienna, for example, is the Central Cemetery (Zentralfriedhof) where in sections 32C and 14C you find the Grove of Honor. It's final resting places of Beethoven, Schubert, Brahms, the Strauss family, Gluck, Schoenberg, and Hugo Wolf, among others – all with a few steps of one another. Across town at the Cemetery of St. Mark, laid out in the 18th Century, is where they buried Mozart in an unmarked grave in the Masonic style of the time.

When I was young and living in Europe, my father asked that I visit Pere Lachaise cemetery in Paris, and bring back a photo of Chopin's grave.

A bit weird, I thought at the time, and I made the trip with some reluctance wondering if my father had had a sip too much. But when I walked through the gates, I found myself walking past the gravesites of people whose work or influence was affecting my own life at that moment. And the effect has stayed to this day.

Here were Chopin, Bellini, David, Comte, Hugo, the Bonapartes, Rossini, Bernhardt, Delacroix, Balzac, Bizet, Proust, to name just a few. And when I finally came to Chopin's final resting spot, there was a fresh rose on the grave site. A rose is left every day, and has been for years, placed there by someone for whatever reason.

Years later, on a bicycle trip through the high plateau country of northern France my wife and I came across three cemeteries in the middle of nowhere - on a battleground of the First World War.

There were an Italian and French site on one side of the road, and a German site on the other. The Italian and French sites - they being allies in 1914 - were well kept with flags fluttering in the breeze. The German was a bit on the ragged side and there was no flag to mark the site.

But the head markers at all three were inscribed with personal messages by mothers and wives who had come after the war to visit their sons and husbands one last time. The war of 1914-18 became more than pages in books or photos from a collection. At each grave there had been tears and sorrow.

At Vienna's Central Cemetery or at Paris' Pere Lachaise, where the greats of history lie buried, tourists come to stand in awe of the great talents that are buried below.

At that First World War cemetery, there is also something to be learned in the simple, faded messages written by unknown people.

Photo by Toshi Chatelin of Chatelin Features.

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