Inscribing Funerary Spaces

30 March 2023

Wherever people commemorate their dead, they use written artefacts. What do funerary inscriptions look like in different cultures, who do they target, and what do they reveal about a society? From 30 March to 1 April, the international workshop ‘Inscribing Funerary Spaces’ explores these questions.

Lesen Sie hier die deutsche Version des Interviews.

The workshop is organised by Kaja Harter-Uibopuu, Leah Mascia, and Peter Schmidt, who are all part of the Cluster's Research Field on 'Inscribing Spaces' (RFB). In our interview, Kaja Harter-Uibopuu talks about some of the main questions the workshop will focus on. The full programme is available here.

Kaja Harter-Uibopuu, for three days you and your colleagues will be talking about grave inscriptions – or more specifically, about written artefacts in the context funerary spaces. What is so interesting about these artefacts?

Death and how to deal with it is something that has preoccupied all people, regardless of era or culture. They all had to ask themselves how they wanted to remember their dead. With very few exceptions, every culture uses written artefacts to express this memory. These written artefacts reflect people’s views of themselves and the world in different epochs, but also their social circumstances. It is this comparability that makes it so appealing to deal with grave inscriptions.

There is usually not much to read on graves, though. Birthday, date of death, a family name – what is so revealing about that?

This picture already points to a modern Protestant background – and thus to a certain relationship to death. In Protestantism, gravestones are indeed very simple and not very individual. Before God, they imply, everyone is equal, regardless of whether they were mayor or gardener in life. In Catholicism, more detailed information tends to be given about who someone was, about their family background, and so on.

There have also always been cultures in which epitaphs referred less to the deceased person than to the bereaved and their grief over the loss, which was expressed in poems, for example. And in Greek and Roman antiquity, for instance in Asia Minor, funerary inscriptions often fulfilled a protective function. For one thing, there were legal texts that regulated exactly who could lie where; moreover, some tombs were emblasoned with curses that threatened great misery to anyone who dared to plunder the tombs or bury someone there unlawfully.

What do the conventions for grave inscriptions depend on and how do they change?

These are two of the questions we want to address in our workshop. One important factor is, of course, how the places of the dead are separated from or connected to the places of the living. For example, if they are secluded and only visited on certain holidays, the inscriptions will not have the same audience as in the cemetery of a church, where the whole community gathers every Sunday and which is a central place of social life. In such cases, graves often serve to prolong hierarchies among the living beyond death. The size, decoration, and location of a grave are distinctive features, but so are the texts on it.

Cemeteries are then no longer places of remembrance alone, but take on something of the character of a museum.

What other written artefacts besides grave inscriptions play a role in dealing with death?

On the one hand, there are some cultures, for example in ancient Egypt or China, in which the dead were buried with certain pieces of writing. In Egypt, these were usually religious texts. In China, extensive biographies were enclosed, providing information about offices held and how they were carried out.

On the other hand, there are inscriptions that do not refer to individual graves but structure the funerary space. In large cemeteries, such as those in Vienna or Ohlsdorf, they give directions that lead visitors to the graves of famous personalities. Such written artefacts are very revealing as well. Their presence indicates that someone expects a public audience with certain interests to come here. Cemeteries are then no longer places of remembrance alone, but take on something of the character of a museum where you go to see something interesting.

Speaking of Ohlsdorf: what does the way we design and inscribe graves in Central Europe today say about our own society?

The Ohlsdorf cemetery publishes a comprehensive brochure in which you can find out about different types of graves and choose one according to your personal taste. On the one hand, I find it remarkable how strongly regulated cemeteries are – you can’t just put up any gravestone you want, but there are very clear guidelines as to what is permissible in a certain area and what is not. And of course it is no coincidence that, especially in our time, people are treated as consumers even when it comes to their graves, and that there is an increasingly diverse range of offers for different target groups.

There is also a noticeable trend towards burials in forests and anonymous graves. Instead of a precisely marked spot, many prefer to be buried somewhere in a meadow or under a tree, in harmony with nature. Does this have something to do with the dissolution of classical family structures? Is this an urban rather than a rural trend, and if so, why? These are precisely the kinds of questions that we can better grasp when we look at written artefacts in the context of death.