Comments on: PASO LOS DÍAS EN LA CIUDAD DE LOS MUERTOS

By: Hugh Green

Hugh Green — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:09:50 +0000

Here - practise your Spanish by learning about Dublin.

http://www.rtve.es/alacarta/#484569

By: Conor McCabe

Conor McCabe — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:39:13 +0000

“monumental enquiries”

That is brilliant!

I must call up. Cheers Bartholomew.

By: Bartholomew

Bartholomew — Fri, 22 May 2009 22:19:33 +0000

Others buried there – William Wilde and Speranza, William Carleton, William Rowan Hamilton, all the Williams… and my favourite, Gideon Ouseley, right next to Wilde. He was a Galway landlord who converted to Methodism in the 1790s and spent thirty or forty years preaching in the open air, in Irish, on a white horse, all over Galway and Mayo. It’s an obelisk (if I remember right) with a fantastic inscription on it.

The whole cemetery is full of victorian statues of angels and mad mausoleums. Twenty years ago it was like a lost city in the jungle, everything covered in a thick carpet of creepers, a real trip, a ‘ciudad de los muertos’. Now it’s clean and tidy (unfortunately). There’s also a Muslim (I think) plot, as well as a large huguenot plot, with some wonderful names, where they reburied all the bodies from a city centre graveyard. And on the way in, an office with a big sign saying ‘Monumental Enquiries’. Worth a few hours of anyone’s time.

By: Conor McCabe

Conor McCabe — Fri, 22 May 2009 07:02:29 +0000

Cheers for the comment, Bart. I didn’t know that Synge was buried there. I must go up and visit his grave. I’m a great admirer of his work.

By: Bartholomew

Bartholomew — Thu, 21 May 2009 22:03:44 +0000

“The more well-maintained the grave, the more relevant the person is, I suppose, to the lives of those alive today.”

I used to live near Mount Jerome cemetery and went there a lot. In the eighties it was completely overrun by ivy and creepers, and seemed to me to symbolise the decline of the Protestant community in Dublin. The worst kept grave of all was that of Synge - the words on the gravestone were metal and many had fallen off, and the earth was collapsing in the centre. The cemetery was cleaned up completely during the 90s, on a series of Fás schemes I think, but Synge’s grave was still the same. And yet the Playboy seems to be on somewhere at all times, and is toured abroad as the best of Irish theatre. (I’m not arguing with you Conor, just musing!)