Photos from the municipal graveyard

I decided I wanted some quiet instead of the noise and activity in the center of town, so I walked to the municipal graveyard, a huge affair with very closely spaced plots.

There were a larger number of people than I was expecting for a work-day out tending their family plots, adding flowerpots, watering the flowers already there, raking the gravel level, and other work.

For the photos I’ve posted here, there are color and a black-and-white versions. I’m up in the air on some of them as to which makes the better picture.

One of the first sights I encountered was one of several areas they have with arrays of the dead from World War I (click on any photo for a larger image in a new window):

A different plot nearby had another World War I fatality, someone who had been decorated for their service (the engravings of the medals are dimly visible in the circle of the horn scribed in the marble):

There were some rather large monuments and crypts present as well. Here is the top of one:

This is the same dome, but zoomed in on the cross at the cap of the dome:

This is the interior of the domed monument that you can see above. I liked how the iron gate mirrored the marble cross inside the monument:

Some monuments were literally dissolving. I was not able to get a photo of one of them that looked to be centuries old and resembled in no small part the 13th century church close to my apartment. I plan to return to photograph it.

Other, more recent plots also were in ruins:

There was a plot against one of the exterior walls of the graveyard that had no marble headstones, but instead had metal nameplates scattered around on the ground:

Finally, a slightly more contemporary monument had in addition to a bronze relief of the deceased in the black marble back, a full statue beneath a black marble roof:

It was a very well-done statue. I need to see if it is a copy of a more famous work, or if it is an original. I wouldn’t mind having a copy of it.

I have a few more photos, but these should be sufficient to tax those on dial-up for now.

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I love walking in graveyards. Thanks for the pictures.

Good essay.

I have played with monochrome a few times in the past ten years. Great for creating mood. I confess that I have had little success with it, and getting b&w film processed is almost impossible - there is one lab in Auckland and it costs about $25 for d&contact print for a 36 frame film. Compare with $15 for C41 colour…

Good work. I admire!

A very nice photo essay. Thanks.

Still, my first thought on seeing the lead picture of the WWI portion of the cemetary was to wonder how long it will be before the Islamists start to protest the effront to their sensibilities of all of those crosses displayed so publicly. Kinda sad, isn’t it?

Thank you for the compliment.

Regarding the remark on the over-reaction of some Muslims and some public officials with respect to finding offense where none exists unless you create it in your own mind, I cannot speak with respect to the attitudes of Muslims today, but I took the photo from the angle I did because there were many (between 8 to 10%) of the headstones that were not crosses, but instead were for Muslims and shaped like a conventional headstone with a peak on the crest of the arc on the top. Since it broke the symmetry of the photo, I moved to a position where none were visible. Perhaps I should go back and take a photo that shows how many Muslim headstones were in that field.

That was 90 years ago, but many Muslims died in that war “defending the West” against the “dreaded Hun”. Somewhere along the way, something changed. Perhaps we should figure out what did change, why it changed, and how we can end this war we are in now without resorting to the tactics of annihilation.

War, like sex, is rather difficult put an end to mid-stream. Beyond a certain “point of engagment,” the participants in both cases tend to become increasingly insistent. More problematic still is the fact that any serious attempt at “conflictus interruptus” requires that both parties are sufficiently reasonable to recognize that their respective and mutual long term interests rest with a peaceful solution rather than continued armed and escalating conflict.

When the avowed goal of one of those parties is the wholesale destruction or mass subjugation of anyone who does not swear total allegiance to that party’s point of view, prospects for compromise are clearly diminished. This is all the more so when that same party fervently views its own destruction as a glorious form of reward for faithful service.

Where the primary responsibility of this, or any US President is the protection of innocent American life and the removal of the threat of international Islamist terrorism, the terrorists by contrast have no such concern for innocent life to be protected.

This is, sadly, a situation where the least worst answer may well be that the idealists of whatever partisan stripe withdraw to contemplate the frustrating unfairness of it all, foreswearing their rationalizations and apologia, while leaving the warriors and the “hard men” to do the job for which they are so splendidly suited and trained.

In a world of bio-weapons, dirty bombs, and ultimately nukes, there can be no other answer. War IS hell. That’s the point.

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