If you carry on living in Oulu, you will eventually die. As part of a new series on death in Oulu, 65DN explores Oulu's graveyard.
Most graves are plain.
Almost everyone in Finland gets buried, and walking around the city’s enormous cemetery, freshly interred bodies are marked by piles of earth awash with a sea of flowers. Yet the most striking thing about the place is its simplicity. Almost all graves since about 1950 are a plain slab of black or grey stone, with the name and dates of birth and death of the person lying beneath, and a picture of a cross. Or at least that’s the basic model.
As you pass grave after grave, you start to notice very subtle differences - little ways that Finns mark themselves out from each other even in the equality of death. And the further you venture into the older part of the graveyard, the more obvious the differences become.
People like ‘Gustaf Bergbom (1785 – 1860)’ have had their graves marked by imposing iron crosses. Almost all inscriptions are in Swedish and make as clear as they can the high social status of the skeleton under your feet. He is a ‘land owner’ or a ‘diplomat’ or she is a ‘pastor’s widow.’ Some stones are enormous, fenced-off monuments; in a few cases, carvings of the faces of the deceased sit atop detailed descriptions of their glorious lives.
A very few modern graves have portraits. As you move forward in time, pomp is dropped in favour of modest graves - either crosses or, in most cases, stone slabs that indicate name, dates and profession.
According to Finland expert Prof. Patricia Lander, ‘In comparing Finnish hierarchy with other national hierarchies . . . there is higher esteem for higher education in Finland and for technical professions’ – and this is reflected in people letting you know about their jobs even after they’ve passed on. Work Supervisor Aaro Johannes,’ reads the ‘Kärkkäinen' stone. Around the 70s if not later, the habit seems to gradually die away and almost no recent graves tell you the profession of the deceased.
With very modern graves, the big issue is crosses.
For most, it’s just a plain cross. The grave of Eino Siitonen has some flowers growing beneath. With some graves there’s an angel next to the cross or a flower beneath it or the sun behind it and in a few cases there’s a diagonal cross stuck through the cross to make quite clear that, ‘I am Orthodox. I am not Lutheran.’
Since the 1970s, many other little quirks have started to appear. Carvings of birds are now very popular. Erkki Angeria’s grave includes what looks like two ducks flying through the air. Many other graves have little miniature swallow statuettes – often painted gold – attached to the top, while others include statuettes of angels. According to Estonian anthropologist Prof. Ilmar Talve, Finnish folk religion involves the belief that the soul leaves the body in the form of a bird and that birds circle the south west corner of heaven.
A grave with an image of an angel
Then there’s the issue of lighting the grave.
Do you put a lantern next to the grave or have a gravestone with a glass enclosure which a lantern can be placed in? On All Saints Day, Finns visit the graveyard and illuminate these lanterns, as well as laying down candles in memory of their dead, so it’s an important question. Some leave flowers at the grave, some lanterns, some statuettes of angels.
‘It’s amazing how diverse Finnish graves have become, just in the last twenty years,’ comments local priest the Rev’d Päivi Jussila. ‘Twenty years ago they all just had crosses but now maybe there’s a plant beneath the cross or an angel or something else or maybe no cross and just a bird."
"They’re becoming more and more different and it’s the same with the death announcements in the newspapers.’
How you decorate your grave is not the only dividing line. Age is also a big issue. A poignant ‘baby section’ is mostly populated by little tiny gravestones complete with an image of an angel. Sometimes the stone has just one date, meaning that the baby was either still-born or died the day it was born. In some cases, the baby has lived to around a year before passing away. ‘Angel baby’ is a Finnish term for such brief little lives.
And there’s also a separate Muslim graveyard, which has around twelve people in it. Here the gravestones are radically different. For a start they’re in Turkish, Kurdish and, in one case, English. In many cases the graves seem to be unmarked and where there’s a stone there’s sometimes a photo of the deceased.
Solemn as the graveyard it is hard to forget that is also a thriving business. Throughout the new part of the cemetery there are empty spaces between graves. In the empty spaces are little advertisements on stakes saying that the plot is free and can be leased. Then there are wide gravestones with the name of the dead on one half but nothing on the other. It waits to be filled in when the man’s wife passes away as well . . . and why spend money on a whole new stone when that happens?
In one case, the husband died in 2005 and the wife’s part of the stone has actually been engraved to include her name and her date of birth. Her date of death will presumably be filled in when it actually happens.
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