A Graveyard as a Home to Ghosts or a Subject of Scholarly Research? The Czech National Cemetery at Vyšehrad

Abstract

Confirmed by a variety of sociological research, modern Czech society is considered deeply secular, non-believing, rejecting religious institutions and traditional forms of religion. This paper focuses on a field study of religiosity, namely on funeral artifacts in Vyšehrad, the Czech national cemetery in Prague, the Czech Republic’s capital. Based on the findings of ethnographer Wilbur Zelinsky, the paper assumes that gravestones in particular record very private, innermost feelings, messages, tidings, and personal values, which can provide us with important knowledge about (especially) the bereaved persons’ attitudes to human ultimate things including religious issues in the moments of a great loss of a loved one, i.e. in the situation of so-called existential crisis. The aim of the paper is to answer two key questions: firstly, how religion (or non-belief) is presented in the Czech national cemetery and secondly, to what degree is the gravestones’ character influenced by significant historical events of modern Czech history. In other words, how much the image of religion in this nationally important cemetery corresponds with the degree of religiosity researched by standard sociological means.