Cimitirul „Eternitatea“ din Galaţi – monument de cultură urbană

Abstract

In the paper, we set out to present some of the heritage assets specific to an urban cemetery, in our case the “Eternity“ Cemetery in Galati, with a presentation of those to whom we owe the stone testimonies about localities who sleep in its perimeter.
In the first half of the nineteenth century appears the urban cemetery, which will be designed after the Western model, there is a great freedom to erect, build any model of funerary monument, which corresponded to the artistic taste of the one who ordered and fashion. In principle, those who were rich could afford architectural monuments with allegorical themes, busts, blazons, medallions, funerary effigies, inspired by Western art, symbolizing social status. Thus appear tombs, chapels, tombstones, obelisk, stele, crosses on high pedestals.
The main sculptors who will work on orders in Galati, for example, were the Greek sculptors Nicolaos Renieris, Ioannis Renieris, Dimitrios Lyritis, Simion D. Lyritis, Dimitrios Colios, N. Niforatos, I. Silicos and Vassillos Scutaris, who came from the Eastern Orthodox space, but there are other craftsmen, from other places, such as the Austrian Eduard Hauser. In general, orders for funerary monuments leave more freedom to these sculptors or stone cutters as they appear in documents, than in the case of civil constructions for example, but in order to be employed, they already had to be known, for the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Galați there were landowners, officials, navigators, ship owners, merchants, soldiers, doctors, magistrate etc., who had a certain financial status and wanted the eternal sleep to sleep in a tomb adorned with slabs, cross, tombstone, tombs, niches, arches, crypts, graves, etc. There are several typologies of commercial monuments with a funerary character.