No project found: development of the nineteenth-century unplanned cemetery

Abstract

This paper through a use of syntactic descriptive tools explores a presence of Catholic morphological implications that are discreetly woven into the organic spatial configuration of Bernardines cemetery – culturally and historically significant afforested scape. A case study is approached as a sum of internal connections, able to communicate attitudes to death and memory in the nineteenth-century Vilnius, Lithuania. The article involves overlaying axial network, topography, burial directions and chronological occupation data over each other, aiming at understanding correlation between them, and how they help to explain the configuration of unplanned burial ground. Bernardines cemetery functioned as a suburban branch of overcrowded churchyard burial ground that was in need of extension. A chapel was built 15 years after cemetery foundation. Even today chapel is a central figure in the spatial composition of Catholic cemeteries – in Bernardines cemetery the centrality of the chapel is not that apparent. After processing topographical and syntactical analysis it was possible to detect network’s structural potential gathered around the chapel, its configurative relation to the burial directions and the location on the highest altitudes of the whole plot. In this case spatiality of religious hierarchy was implemented discreetly, but a tight dialogue with the natural terrain enabled Catholic cemetery to be identified with a pagan forest necropolis.