Urban Cemeteries as an Architecture of Forgetting
ARTICLE PASSPORT
Research Project: “Architecture of Memory”™
Season: V. “Analytical Notes”
Season Concept: An analytical look at the memory industry: numbers, trends, the architecture of forgetting
Article: I. “Urban Cemeteries as an Architecture of Forgetting”
Author: Iskandar Kadyrov
Genre: philosophical-anthropological inquiry / cultural essay
Age Rating: 18+
Announcement
Ten years reading cities through their cemeteries — from Moscow to Florence. Forgetting isn't weakness. It's an architectural choice.
About the Season
Analytical Notes — a cycle of essays on the economy and industry of memory: the cost of eternity, cemetery design, the funeral-services market, and what lies behind a “beautiful” funeral.
Hashtags
#ArchitectureOfMemory #AnalyticalNotes #UrbanCemeteries #Memory #Architecture #Death #Eternity #CultureOfMemory #Anthropology #CulturalStudies #IskandarKadyrov
About the Column
“Architecture of Memory” is a research column about how people, cultures and cities learn to speak about death. Through architecture, ritual and space, it explores what remains after a person is gone and how different civilizations turn memory into form.
Research Project: “Architecture of Memory”™
Season: V. “Analytical Notes”
Season Concept: An analytical look at the memory industry: numbers, trends, the architecture of forgetting
Article: I. “Urban Cemeteries as an Architecture of Forgetting”
Author: Iskandar Kadyrov
Genre: philosophical-anthropological inquiry / cultural essay
Age Rating: 18+
Announcement
Ten years reading cities through their cemeteries — from Moscow to Florence. Forgetting isn't weakness. It's an architectural choice.
About the Season
Analytical Notes — a cycle of essays on the economy and industry of memory: the cost of eternity, cemetery design, the funeral-services market, and what lies behind a “beautiful” funeral.
Hashtags
#ArchitectureOfMemory #AnalyticalNotes #UrbanCemeteries #Memory #Architecture #Death #Eternity #CultureOfMemory #Anthropology #CulturalStudies #IskandarKadyrov
About the Column
“Architecture of Memory” is a research column about how people, cultures and cities learn to speak about death. Through architecture, ritual and space, it explores what remains after a person is gone and how different civilizations turn memory into form.
Urban Cemeteries as an Architecture of Forgetting
I. Architecture as a Sign
When you walk into an old cemetery — Vagankovo or Donskoye, say, built in the nineteenth century — you feel space.
The grounds aren’t vast, but they’re sufficient. The trees are tall and old. The markers aren’t standard-issue concrete slabs, but stories written in stone. There are sculptures, portraits, inscriptions. There are signposts that help you orient yourself.
The key thing: there’s a narrative. The cemetery tells a story. The story of a culture, an era, of the families who rest there.
Contemporary urban cemeteries are built on a different principle.
Since roughly the late 1990s, Moscow and other large cities have begun building a new kind of cemetery. They’re oriented toward volume, capacity, ease of maintenance (for the living employees of the funeral industry).
Standard rows. Identical slabs. Minimal vegetation, so machinery can pass through. No markers in the old sense. No signposts to help you remember who lies where.
The result: the cemetery becomes invisible. It exists, but it isn’t seen.
II. Forgetting as Urban Policy
This isn’t an accident, and it isn’t the result of a limited budget.
It’s the result of a particular urban policy: cemeteries are pushed to the periphery, further from the eyes of the living. They’re made functional rather than aesthetic. They’re stripped of the architectural expressiveness that would make us stop, remember, feel the depth of time.
Forgetting is more convenient. When you don’t see the cemetery, you don’t think about dying. When death is distant and faceless, it’s easier to ignore.
It’s an engineering solution to a problem civilization would rather avoid: the necessity of the living and the departed coexisting within one city.
But that engineering solution carries a psychological cost.
When we depersonalize the cemetery, when we make it invisible, we also depersonalize dying. Death stops being a passage into another state of being, and becomes simply a disappearance from our field of attention.
This has changed the contemporary relationship to death. Death has stopped being part of social reality. It has become an anomaly, a system error, something to be hidden away as quickly as possible.
III. The Standard Cemetery as a Failure of Urban Planning
I’ve walked through cemeteries built to Soviet plans from the 1950s–70s.
Even they, for all their flaws, looked better.
Because the Soviet cemetery had a logic. There were wide paths. Trees planted in a particular order. Zones that differed from one another. You could remember where a grave was by orienting yourself in the surrounding space.
Contemporary cemeteries on the outskirts are a solid labyrinth of identical slabs, identical paths, the same grey shade of concrete and earth.
I’ve met people who walked back and forth through that labyrinth and couldn’t find a loved one’s grave. Not because they were given the wrong address. But because there are no visual landmarks. Nothing for memory to catch on.
This is an affront to a basic human need for space.
IV. What We Lost
An old cemetery is architecture of memory. It’s designed so that a person can come every year, every month, every day if they wish, and find their way through feeling, through atmosphere, through association.
The trees remember. The markers remember. Even the earth remembers, if you’re attentive enough.
The contemporary cemetery is designed differently. It’s designed so a person comes as rarely as possible, tidies the flowers, leaves a coin, and leaves. Comes on remembrance days because it’s custom — not because it’s a natural wish to be near the departed.
The cemetery has stopped being a garden of memory. It has become a parking lot for death.
And I see how this affects the grief of the contemporary person.
Grief becomes sharper, lonelier. Because there’s no space to hold it. No architecture that says: your pain is normal, it’s natural, it’s part of human life.
Instead there is only function. Burial as a service.
V. A Way Back
I’m no archaist. I don’t believe we need to return to Victorian cemeteries with angels and sentimental sculpture.
But I do believe cemeteries need their status as architecture restored.
That means: trees — big, old trees that grow for decades; architectural elements that create space, not merely occupy it; markers that are individual, that tell stories; signposts that help orient not only logically, but emotionally; places to sit; places for the living to meet.
A contemporary city with no good cemetery is a city that denies death. And a city that denies death is a city that cannot live well.
VI. A Personal Note
A few years ago I designed a small cemetery together with a landscape architect. We revived nineteenth-century principles — trees, geometry, simplicity — but with a contemporary design language.
The result was different.
People who came there weren’t in a hurry to leave. They sat on benches. They walked. They talked.
Death didn’t disappear. But it became part of life.
The architecture of a cemetery matters.
More than it seems.
More than our culture, which prefers not to notice death and not to visit cemeteries, tends to say.
But if we want a healthy society, we need to give cemeteries back their place in the city. And in human memory.
When you walk into an old cemetery — Vagankovo or Donskoye, say, built in the nineteenth century — you feel space.
The grounds aren’t vast, but they’re sufficient. The trees are tall and old. The markers aren’t standard-issue concrete slabs, but stories written in stone. There are sculptures, portraits, inscriptions. There are signposts that help you orient yourself.
The key thing: there’s a narrative. The cemetery tells a story. The story of a culture, an era, of the families who rest there.
Contemporary urban cemeteries are built on a different principle.
Since roughly the late 1990s, Moscow and other large cities have begun building a new kind of cemetery. They’re oriented toward volume, capacity, ease of maintenance (for the living employees of the funeral industry).
Standard rows. Identical slabs. Minimal vegetation, so machinery can pass through. No markers in the old sense. No signposts to help you remember who lies where.
The result: the cemetery becomes invisible. It exists, but it isn’t seen.
II. Forgetting as Urban Policy
This isn’t an accident, and it isn’t the result of a limited budget.
It’s the result of a particular urban policy: cemeteries are pushed to the periphery, further from the eyes of the living. They’re made functional rather than aesthetic. They’re stripped of the architectural expressiveness that would make us stop, remember, feel the depth of time.
Forgetting is more convenient. When you don’t see the cemetery, you don’t think about dying. When death is distant and faceless, it’s easier to ignore.
It’s an engineering solution to a problem civilization would rather avoid: the necessity of the living and the departed coexisting within one city.
But that engineering solution carries a psychological cost.
When we depersonalize the cemetery, when we make it invisible, we also depersonalize dying. Death stops being a passage into another state of being, and becomes simply a disappearance from our field of attention.
This has changed the contemporary relationship to death. Death has stopped being part of social reality. It has become an anomaly, a system error, something to be hidden away as quickly as possible.
III. The Standard Cemetery as a Failure of Urban Planning
I’ve walked through cemeteries built to Soviet plans from the 1950s–70s.
Even they, for all their flaws, looked better.
Because the Soviet cemetery had a logic. There were wide paths. Trees planted in a particular order. Zones that differed from one another. You could remember where a grave was by orienting yourself in the surrounding space.
Contemporary cemeteries on the outskirts are a solid labyrinth of identical slabs, identical paths, the same grey shade of concrete and earth.
I’ve met people who walked back and forth through that labyrinth and couldn’t find a loved one’s grave. Not because they were given the wrong address. But because there are no visual landmarks. Nothing for memory to catch on.
This is an affront to a basic human need for space.
IV. What We Lost
An old cemetery is architecture of memory. It’s designed so that a person can come every year, every month, every day if they wish, and find their way through feeling, through atmosphere, through association.
The trees remember. The markers remember. Even the earth remembers, if you’re attentive enough.
The contemporary cemetery is designed differently. It’s designed so a person comes as rarely as possible, tidies the flowers, leaves a coin, and leaves. Comes on remembrance days because it’s custom — not because it’s a natural wish to be near the departed.
The cemetery has stopped being a garden of memory. It has become a parking lot for death.
And I see how this affects the grief of the contemporary person.
Grief becomes sharper, lonelier. Because there’s no space to hold it. No architecture that says: your pain is normal, it’s natural, it’s part of human life.
Instead there is only function. Burial as a service.
V. A Way Back
I’m no archaist. I don’t believe we need to return to Victorian cemeteries with angels and sentimental sculpture.
But I do believe cemeteries need their status as architecture restored.
That means: trees — big, old trees that grow for decades; architectural elements that create space, not merely occupy it; markers that are individual, that tell stories; signposts that help orient not only logically, but emotionally; places to sit; places for the living to meet.
A contemporary city with no good cemetery is a city that denies death. And a city that denies death is a city that cannot live well.
VI. A Personal Note
A few years ago I designed a small cemetery together with a landscape architect. We revived nineteenth-century principles — trees, geometry, simplicity — but with a contemporary design language.
The result was different.
People who came there weren’t in a hurry to leave. They sat on benches. They walked. They talked.
Death didn’t disappear. But it became part of life.
The architecture of a cemetery matters.
More than it seems.
More than our culture, which prefers not to notice death and not to visit cemeteries, tends to say.
But if we want a healthy society, we need to give cemeteries back their place in the city. And in human memory.
Season 5 — Analytical Notes
Iskandar Kadyrov
See also