Мълчанието на камъните: визуалните дискурси на местата за вечен покой
The silence of the stones: visual discourses on the graveyards

Summary/Abstract: Seemingly, cemeteries are the most silent place in the city. Hidden behind high walls from the dust and calamities of the daily life, put under control of traditions, cemeteries are the last sanctuary of the sacred in the disenchanted world of presence. What tell us, however, the places of eternal peace, approached from the perspective of the sepulchral aesthetics and their changing canons? We shall look for the respond to this question through comparative visual analysis of three historic cemeteries: Per Laches in Paris, Kerepesi temeto in Budapest, and Central Cemetery in Sofia. Although the first two are turned into tourist heritage sites and fulfil their traditional functions only in exceptional cases, while the Bulgarian cemetery is ‘alive’ and it still functions, they reveal different approaches to the existential problem of coping with death, and different politics of cultural memory with its three key elements: narrating, oblivion and keeping silence.

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