The dead wait: Material afterlives in sepulchral spaces

Abstract

This essay examines the heterotopic and heterochronic material afterlives of cemeteries through a comparative focus on two cities of the dead: Zagreb's Mirogoj Cemetery, which was established during the late 19th century, and Thessaloniki's Zeitenlik World War I Military Cemetery, which entombs Allied victims from the Salonika Front. My principal aim is to highlight the contrasts and contradictions between nationalized collective memories and unsettling imperial legacies that define the material afterlives of each of these cemeteries. In Mirogoj, material afterlives take shape as a palimpsest of eras, only some of which are monumentalized as collective memories. In Zeitenlik, the material afterlife of a single event of death-dealing, the Great War, constitutes an archive of bygone imperial socialities that defy the homogenizing logics of national identity in the present.