Tatyana Gennadievna Nedzelyuk,
Doctor of Historical Sciences, Siberian Institute of Management – A Branch of the Russian Academy of National Economy and Public Administration, Novosibirsk, Russia; Tobolsk Integrated Scientific Station of the Ural Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Tobolsk, Russia, e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Cemetery and Funeral Rites in the Picture of the World of Catholic Siberians (19th – 20th Centuries)
DOI: 10.31518/2618-9100-2024-3-22
The article is devoted to the characteristics of funeral rites in the picture of the world of Catholic Siberians at the turn of the 19th–20th centuries. The unity of the funeral tradition, the community of the memorial meal act as markers of confessional identity, express a sense of community of fate, which in practice is a manifestation of the “otherness” of the picture of the world of the living, remembering the inevitable death for everyone. In the canon law of the Catholic Church, there is no categorical prohibition of funeral prayers for anyone, including non-believers and atheists. Catholics, regardless of nationality, were traditionally classified as “non-Russians” in Siberia, so it can be assumed that their burials would have to be located separately from the Orthodox. In practice, this was not quite the case in Siberian cities. In Novonikolaevsk, the city churchyard was historically common to representatives of all faiths, but was divided into sectors: Orthodox, Muslim, Jewish, Catholic and Lutheran. Omsk Catholics received a plot of land for a cemetery in 1895 behind the Cossack cemetery. The Irkutsk burials took place in the Catholic part of the Jerusalem city cemetery. In some cases (the absence of a confessional necropolis, death at a railway station, burial of a soldier who died in a hospital), the deceased could be buried in other places. It is reliably known that in Tobolsk the deceased Catholics are buried in the Zavalny cemetery, in Barnaul there were several graves next to the building of the Catholic church. In Omsk and Tomsk, there were special chapels in cemeteries where the funeral rite took place. As a rule, St. Anthony of Padua was the patron saint of such chapels. The burden of maintaining the cemetery was distributed by the churchwarden among the members of the community. The villagers are more eager to preserve family traditions, and caring for the graves of their ancestors in their picture of the world seems to be a sacred duty of the living.
Publishing: 28/06/2024
The article has been received by the editor on 01/03/2024
How to cite: Nedzelyuk T.G. Cemetery and Funeral Rites in the Picture of the World of Catholic Siberians (19th – 20th Centuries) // Historical Courier, 2024, No. 3 (35), pp. 286–298. [Available online: http://istkurier.ru/data/2024/ISTKURIER-2024-1-22.pdf]
Links: Issue 3 2024
Keywords: Siberia; Catholics; worldview; the idea of death; funeral rites