A cemetery, a corpse and a soul as imagined by the Kalisz press in the second half of the 19th century

Abstract

The cemetery – institutionalized place for the laying of bodies, in the form known today, is the result of revolutionary changes brought about by the Enlightenment in Europe. Its main feature is the location of necropolises away from human settlements. The official action of relocating cemeteries coincided with the need to cultivate the memory of relatives who died. Such revolutionary changes could not remain unaffected by the perception of death. The article is an attempt to sketch the views, beliefs and fantasies about Christian cemeteries in the second half of the 19th century among the Kalisz intelligentsia. The collected source material comes from “Kaliszanin”, published in the years 1871–1892. Most of the analyzed texts concern cemeteries in Kalisz, but statements about other cities and those contained in literary fiction were not omitted. Due to the complexity of the issues, the focus was on three selected problems. The focus is on the perception of necropolises and their “inhabitants” – the dead. Cemeteries are places to store human remains and to cultivate the memory of the dead. However, due to their connections with eschatology, they are places that elude rational categories. The resulting ambiguity is undoubtedly worthy of the researchers’ attention. Much attention was paid to people’s perception of the second half of the nineteenth century of the remains already laid in the grave. It is the title “corpse”. Another area of interest is the soul – a hypothetical form of human posthumous existence. In Christian culture, belief in resurrected bodies is closely related to belief in an immortal soul. The cemetery is not only a place where bodies await the resurrection, but also a zone where “ghosts” can appear to people. Hence, it is impossible to ignore the views and fantasies on this subject. At the same time, an attempt was made to interpret the collected material, hoping that this contribution would be useful for further research on the issue.