Yeah, I like me a good cemetery. I think cemeteries give Grubb the heebie jeebies though he claims to like the skulls and bones in catacombs. He always gives me the “oh brother, here we go” look when I suggest we go see this one or that one.
I am not an extremist about this. You know, like some people (Grubb!) and their Caravaggios. I don’t have a cemetery bucket list. But if one is in the vicinity, I can’t pass it up.
According to Wikipedia, being drawn to cemeteries is a thing. Taphophilia, One can be placed in this category if one is pulled by the history (meh), are in search of ancestors (there’s the internet for that), love to do grave rubbings (maybe when I was 20 and could stay on my knees that long), and a few other things including art and reading epithets.
I’ve seen some stunning cemetery sculptures and read a few colorful inscriptions. It’s a sobering delight.
Sometimes, it was the grave’s resident that did the designing, or writing. So, how much of their remaining days, weeks, years even was devoted to planning how to mark their death? And why?
Other times, it was family or friends who commissioned the art or wrote the epithet. What blast of emotions possessed them? Who was this person that merited so much more than a simple memorial gravestone? did they really?
Anyway, when Grubb suggested we go to a park he’d found on the map because it had the name ‘Albuquerque’ in it, I expanded my google map to check it out. Oh. It’s just a circle of grass circumvented by a big roundabout and there is a wee dot in the middle signifying maybe some kind of monument. We looked at the attached picture which had been taken from some distance. Ho hum. Big eye roll from me this time. This is what you want to traipse across Oporto to see?
Then I moved the map around a bit and wow! A cemetery. Just a block from the green circle.
Bicker, bicker, bicker…but we didn’t have a whole lot else lined up for this Easter Monday holiday.
Okay, so the monument in the park was a stunning surprise and the graveyard? Not so much. Don’t tell Grubb i said that.
And that was a long prelude to this. I put together an album of photos of the cemetery just for you who are into such things.
We love cemeteries too and never miss a chance to see one. In England they often had a lot of (dead) people named “Richards”. In Italy they put photos of the dead on the grave, which I thought was a nice touch. Also in Italy your relatives had to pay rent for your grave site. If no one was left to pay it, you were evicted, the stone moved to the side in a pile of other discarded stones and the real estate reused. Also a pretty good system if you think about it. We saw at least a dozen of cemeteries on our last Camino even though we only went 110 miles.
Any of you who know Moira well know that she has a strong interest in war graves, particularly graveyards of world war one soldiers. The Americans and British do these cemeteries beautifully; the French not so well. At Verdun their crosses are all cement and all say “Morte pour la France.”