Village Cemetery, Babtsy 2014. Могілкі, Бабцы (Докшыцкі раён) 2014 г.
Village cemeteries are witness to the rootedness of a nation.
In a broader sense, cemeteries reveal the depth, the dignity of a culture. After all, what are more elemental measures of human decency than proper burial and honoring of graves?
Visits to cemeteries in Belarus, Ukraine, Lithuania or Poland drive home these points. These points might seem self-evident. However, one only needs look at the contrasting, and by now long-standing, practice of burying the dead without honor, or furtively cremating their remains in mobile crematoria, elsewhere nearby.
The cemetery in Babtsy, just off the main Mjensk-Polatsk road 65 miles north of Mjensk, drew national attention in 2011, when a leading cataloguer of Belarus’s architectural patrimony (in Russian: http://globus.tut.by/index.htm) publicized the existence of more than a score of stone-cross tombstones (interview in Belarusian: http://dzedzich.org/wp/2011/08/08/10295/).
This number of stone crosses in one place is certainly noteworthy. However, the Babtsy cemetery is a rich testament to Belarusian culture in many other ways. The photos of the day over the next week pay homage to the villagers of Babtsy, living and dead.
General Setting, Babtsy Cemetery. Агульны від, могілкі ў Бабцах.
Regrettably, in 2013 local authorities cut down a stand of large trees which had shaded the older section of the cemetery, leaving the area to grow over with tall grasses and other trash shrubs.
