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Near the old Carreta Cemetery, hidden among ramshackle houses of informal settlers, is a small cemetery that made the headlines last month when about 13 of these settlers were told to vacate their houses in favor of the property owners, the Catholic Church. This cemetery, accessible via a narrow alley from the old Imus Road behind the San Miguel public market, is a wonder to behold ? and I?m not being morbid about this.
For here in this small corner of the city can be found the mausoleums of the Escaņos, Aznars and the Cuencos, now abandoned, their mortal remains transferred to ?safer? locales due to presence of informal settlers. But the grand Osmeņa Mausoleum, a monumental structure built in the 1920s, with coffered ceiling and Ionic pilasters, continues to house the mortal remains of Doņa Estefania Chiong-Veloso, first wife of President Sergio Osmeņa and other prominent scions. In its sunken crypt are the remains of many of the Osmeņas, including Serging, Don Sergio?s millionaire son and namesake who was a Cebu City mayor and governor before bravely running against Ferdinand Marcos in 1969 during what is considered the bloodiest and dirties presidential elections of the pre-Martial Law years.
Near this is another mausoleum, unnamed but of equally monumental proportions, topped this time with a dome and buttressed by double pilasters of the Corinthian order. Inside we espied an above-ground burial plot covered in solid marble slabs decorated here and there with art-deco designs. Its sides were interspersed with low relief carvings of scenes of the Stations of the Cross. The artist is, alas, unknown but I suspect this to be the work of Dante Guidetti, the lone Italian sculptor in pre-war Cebu who left his indelible mark in the Cebu art scene through high relief carvings of Classical Greece that can still be found on the pediments and pilasters of the old Vision Theater.
Another burial plot, a smaller uncovered memorial had a life-size marble statue of a woman beside a marble cross in so pristine a condition as if it was carved only yesterday ? again perhaps another Guidetti work. In still another plot was a large upright marble slab carved with the words ?Marcelino Sotto + Febrero 5, 1890/ Pascual Sotto Y. de Sotto + Julio 30, 1904? with a low-relief carving above this of an angel with wings as if about to fly.
With my heritage buddies Carlos Apuhin and Arnold Carl Sancover, I toured this pocket of mortuary artistry two weeks ago, recalling the days when, as a graduate student in Germany, I would spend weekends touring cemeteries there. My most unforgettable one was when Joy Gerra invited me to spend six weeks of summer in Hamburg. Now head of the Cultural Heritage Program of the Ramon Aboitiz Foundation Inc., Joy at that time was still studying for her doctorate in archaeology at University of Hamburg, a degree she eventually obtained a year or two later. We shared the same passion for archaeology and so it was no coincidence that we decided to spend a weekend in the world?s largest civilian cemetery, Friedhof Ohlsdorf.
With a 391-hectare burial ground, 12 chapels and over a million burials, Friedhof Ohlsdorf actually stretches some 17 kilometers that it virtually takes weeks to go through every section and street (yes, it has streets inside!), many of which are replete with one-of-a-kind marble sculptures. Such is the value of this 120-year old cemetery that it actually has touring facilities and a map for tourists! Contrast this with what we recently visited and one wonders why the Osmeņas and those of their illustrious political and economic contemporaries have allowed their mausoleums to go to seed.
For some it may indeed be morbid to tour cemeteries but the artistry these places may contain makes them equally valuable to culture as an ancestral house or a museum. Perhaps it is time to take a second look at our century-old cemeteries.
