Csernus Lukács - Triff Zsigmond: The Cemeteries of Budapest - Our Budapest (Budapest, 1999)
gárd Graveyard in Kolozsvár or the Kerameikos in Athens, which have been in continual use for centuries, has survived the enormous development which Hungary’s capital has undergone. It is in various museums that tombs and grave furniture from the most ancient period of the city, predating the Magyar conquest of the Carpathian basin, can be seen. The Roman period is represented by a particularly rich collection of exhibits in the National Museum and fine tombstones can also be seen in the pedestrian subway at Flórián tér. The practice of burying the dead around churches came to an end after the waning of the Turkish crescent over Hungary; only a few of the tombstones set up in earlier centuries survived here and there as most of them were carved over and reused as construction material. Even in church crypts it is the relics of later periods that we can now find, for the simple reason that medieval churches themselves had mostly perished. The first district cemeteries resembling those of our time emerged after the expulsion of the Turks from the country. Legislation regulating funeral practices was passed under Maria Theresa. It was she who decreed, for example, that crypts should contain a separate cell for each dead body and that the cell be walled in as soon as the corpse was deposited in it. Those who died from a contagious disease were only allowed to be interred in separate graveyards designated as plague cemeteries, where the bodies were covered with lime as “public safety comes before respect for the dead”. Funerals inside city walls and in graveyards surrounding houses were discontinued, and plots in outlying areas were to be acquired, preferably out of public funds, for the establishment of new cemeteries. Records of tombs were to be kept by parish priests or ministers. The expiry of tomb plots was set at thirty years. In order to avoid entombing the oniy apparently dead, it was found expedient to enact that physicians’ quarters should be built by the cemeteries. Thirty years after a cemetery was filled to capacity, it was to be levelled to the ground. The cemetery opened under the pressure of circumstances when Buda was retaken from the Turks in 1686 became a public cemetery of sorts. It lay in the vicinity of today’s Southern Railway Station. Its location is marked by no sign whatever, even though this as well as other abandoned burial sites deserve some kind of reminder. Relocated in 1785 to an area bordered by Szilágyi Erzsébet fasor, Kútvölgyi lejtő and Virányos út the cemetery was renamed Vízivárosi [Water Town] Cemetery, although due to its distance from those using it the graveyard should 4
