Seppovaara, Juhani
Elävä hiljaisuus. Hietaniemen hautausmailla
[Living silence. In the Hietaniemi burial grounds]
Helsinki: Otava, 2002, 159p., ill.
ISBN 951-1-18024-x
€ 38,70 (US$ 38), hardback

There are many ways of telling the story of a city. Most often it is a question of describing the development of its settlement and population, or of assessing its economic or political role in the history of the region and the nation. But there are other perspectives on urban life, perspectives that can tempt us also to observe the city from the point of view of the everyday lives and personal histories of its inhabitants. This is precisely what the photographer and writer Juhani Seppovaara has managed to do in his book about Hietaniemi cemetery, which is Helsinki’s best known graveyard, and now also the one in active use that is most centrally located.
     Death is something very personal and everyday. Each day it harvests its victims in the city. Sooner or later it either snatches us away or alternatively liberates us from earthly life. And above all, it makes itself felt through the existence of urban graveyards, which are full of memories of numerous human destinies.
     During the last decade, Seppovaara has published several books of photographs, which in an ingenious way focus the attention of readers and viewers on forgotten monuments of everyday life, such as the outhouse, the youth hostel and the elementary school. In his book about Hietaniemi cemetery, he goes more deeply into this subject and develops his dialogue between text and image into an exceptionally solid whole.
     This is not a chronological survey of the graveyard’s history, but rather an artistically and imaginatively documented walk through the picturesque glades of death. The book’s subtitle reminds us that it is really a question of several consecutively established cemeteries with different names, which arose at the same time as the small port town near the massive sea fortress of Sveaborg (Suomenlinna) developed into the centre of the nation. For the sake of clarity, however, since 1971 the district has been called Hietaniemi cemetery.
     The embryo of this later extensive graveyard along the western shore of the Helsinki promontory came into being in 1815, a few years after Finland had become a Russian Grand Duchy and Helsinki its capital. The Russian garrison on Sveaborg was given permission to establish an Orthodox cemetery in the most southerly outskirts of the present-day complex. Helsinki’s rapid architectural transformation meant that the city’s Lutheran congregation followed hard on their heels. In fact, in 1829 the decision was taken to establish a new graveyard immediately to the north of the Orthodox cemetery.
     Some three decades later the expansion continued northwards, and in the early 1930s a third major burial ground was consecrated. Because of the Second World War, this was to become the foremost national monument – the heros’ graves, with Marshal Carl Gustaf Mannerheim’s gravestone in granite in the centre. Parallel to these Lutheran enlargements two Jewish cemeteries were opened, a Moslem counterpart, two funeral chapels and a crematorium in neo-classical style.
     Seppovaara goes carefully through these fascinating cultural milieus, catches the reader’s gaze with an evocative photograph of a rusty iron cross or a melancholy grave-monument, reminding us that the now so beautifully designed park district was originally a bare sandbank by the sea, where the graves were chosen rather haphazardly. When the cemetery also became more crowded, the graves were allocated more strictly and a more uniform style of decorating the gravestones was introduced.
     In the 19th entury it was not thought strange to emphasise the deceased’s social status with titles, imposing epitaphs and beautifully ornamented gravestones. Even in the early 20th century really well-off families their own terraced graves built, with a view of the glittering gulf in the west.
     Seppovaara remembers to place the best known grave statues in an art-historical context, but shows a quite special interest in individual gravestones that exemplify the different way in which people lived their lives, and how they met their deaths. In the Lutheran cemetery we find a single gravestone with the inscription ‘The painter P.L. with four children’, which bears witness to the high rate of infant mortality and the fact that it could be too expensive to have all the dead infants’ names engraved on the stone.
     Near the grave-monument of the writer Zacharias Topelius (1818–1898), with a guardian angel by the sculptor Walter Runeberg, the son of the national poet J.L. Runeberg – there is a small gravestone in memory of two of Topelius’s children, who died at a tender age. Topelius reproduced his last farewell to his son Rafael in the story ‘The summer that never came’, where one stands by his grave but is unable to find the voice for a hymn. But then a little bird is heard singing in the clear blue sky and at the same moment Rafael’s guardian angel takes his soul and flies high above the earthly grave to God’s paradise and eternal summer.
     Another of the book’s merits is a number of short biographies of interesting people who received their last resting place in a corner of Hietaniemi cemetery. We form an acquaintance with cavalry captain Carl Mauritz Ridderstorm (1797–1838), whose hero’s grave with an antique battle helmet, sword and shield with the family’s crest in the oldest part of the cemetery was financed with public funds. Ridderstorm came from an old Swedish military family, made a career in the Russian imperial army and finally died as a consequence of injuries he received in a battle against the Turks in 1828.
     Not far from Ridderstorm, in the old Orthodox cemetery, is the modest grave of Anna Vyrubova, once lady-in-waiting to Russia’s last empress, Alexandra. Her life was surrounded by imperial luxury, war, revolutions and life-threatening disasters, until she decided to settle down in Helsinki and live a simple life, until 1964. For a short time she was unhappily married to an officer of the guards named Vyrubov, but after her divorce readopted her original family name, Tanayeva, which can also be seen on her gravestone.
     As already mentioned, Hietaniemi includes two Jewish cemeteries with a funeral chapel of their own, something that is made necessary by the fact that according to holy scripture the dead must be buried within twenty-four hours. Here the visitor is constantly aware of how important the Jewish contribution to Helsinki’s artistic and economic life has been.
     The Moslem cemetery, situated next to the Jewish burial ground, entered into official use in 1871, and since then has functioned as life’s terminus above all for Helsinki’s Tatar community, which like the Jewish community came into being when their forefathers, after completing service in the Russian army, were given the right to settle in the Grand Duchy. Under a spreading birch tree there is an unpretentious stone with almost invisible Cyrillic letters over the grave of the Persian prince Akber-Mirza Kadzar, one of the hundred or so sons of the Azerbaidjani governor Bahman Mirza, who died in Helsinki in 1919 as a Russian general.
     But it is equally rewarding to stroll around Hietaniemi without any particular plan, to stop by a beautifully dilapidated grave and to glimpse in the background a wooded slope with a chapel in its midst. Seppovaara’s meditative photographs demonstrate with emphasis how important it is to experience the different seasons in the cemetery. The flowery splendour of summer stands in contrast to the winter’s grim snowdrifts above the heroes’ graves.


     Translated by David McDuff



 
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