In Buenos Aires’ Recoleta cemetery, visitors throng to an austere black family vault decorated with nothing but numerous flower bouquets.
Camera flashes go off throughout the narrow passageway. Here rests the queen of the cemetery, the final resting place of Argentina’s rich and famous: Evita.
“She herself would certainly not be happy to be buried here,” says Diego Zigiotto, author of a book on the cemetery.
The late president Juan Peron’s wife Eva Peron (1919-1952), a daughter of the people, who became a political legend, rests here among those she hated during her life – the rich and powerful members of the Argentine oligarchy.
Even after their death, Argentina’s rich continue showing off their wealth in Recoleta, Buenos Aires’ oldest cemetery, which is regarded architecturally as one of the finest in the world.
Located in a fashionable district of the same name in the north-eastern part of the city, Recoleta houses the remains of 21 former presidents, successful businessmen and significant scientists – names as big and heavy as the marble that graces the cemetery.
Being buried here is not cheap, a family vault costs between 30,000 and 1 million dollars.
Yet the early days of the cemetery – founded in 1822 – were not marked by prosperity. The first deceased to be buried here was the son of a slave.
It was not until Buenos Aires created a second cemetery with Chacarita, that the selection of one’s final resting place become a question of class.
There are 4,780 vaults battling for space in the tight corridors of Recoleta, each of them as large as a small chapel. Up to 12 coffins fit into each vault. Cremation was scorned upon at the time of the cemetery’s founding.
The coffins lie in stone bunks behind a simple glass door, visible to the public. Massive wood coffins have fine bronze decorations – the jewellery of the dead.
To keep them from beginning to smell, the wooden coffins are surrounded by a metal box featuring a gas cleaning system. “Back then, it was all about showing how much you had,” Zigiotto said.
In one part of the cemetery, a black cat squeezes sleekly through a wrought iron gate. Three steps from the finest Carrera marble lead to a family vault, with archangel Gabriel sitting enthroned atop the gable. Here, behind the double-bolted door, rests the family of 19th-century Argentine president Julio Argentino Roca.
The wealth of such private mausoleums shows off Argentina’s prosperity in the first decades of the 20th century – Carrara marble, bronze, gold, angel figures.
Yet now, many of the once proud and often pretentious burial places have fallen into miserable condition.
Marble has gone raw and ripped, slabs have burst, some coffins lie half-open. Black-and-white photos of the deceased have turned yellow.
Time makes even the memory of the powerful fade, leaving Recoleta a symbol of the fall of many once rich families in crisis-hit Argentina during the second half of the past century. – Sapa-dpa.
iol.co.za