Embodying paradise: silent cities and sacred groves on the margins of Europe. Roman Catholic cemeteries in Lithuania and Portugal

ENThis dissertation focuses on Catholic burial grounds located on the borders of Catholic Europe, and the influence that post-mortal imaginaries had on their development. An axis of the time frame of the research is nineteenth century – the period during which cemeteries were defined as an autonomous architectural typology. The removal of the burial ground from the churchyard took place over times of significant changes in the European mentality. Besides aiming to propose hygienic solutions, this newly created typology sought equally to fulfil a number of socio-political purposes. The place for the dead became then a stage for the perpetuation of civic and individual memory, as well as for the transmission of political and ideological narratives engineered by liberal philosophy. This unfolded nevertheless eschewing to contradict centennial religious traditions. Despite the predominance of the Catholic Church in both Lithuania and Portugal, their specific cultural and political contexts engendered different spatial conditions with respect to the territories of the dead. In order to understand these implications and how they reflected particular configurations, four case-studies were selected and architecturally deconstructed: two of them located in Vilnius, Lithuania, namely Rasos and Bernardines cemeteries, and the other two in Lisbon, Portugal, namely Prazeres and Alto de São João cemeteries.The dissertation traces the evolution of funerary landscapes in Western Europe from the earliest ages of Christianity. In parallel, it analyses the funerary customs of pagan Lithuania and the resistance of the Balts to the transformation of their thanatological proceedings imposed by the Holy See. The spatiality of the four burial grounds is examined in the light of their internal relations and the capacity of their elements to connect and communicate views on the notions of Death, Afterlife and Memory in regions far-removed from the epicentre of Roman Catholicism. On top of supporting historical and cultural interpretations, the study also employs methodologies of urban analysis, such as Space Syntax, in order to help dissect a social logic implicit in the design of the necropoles. In various cases in Europe, this new typology followed design inspirations from landscaping that were rehearsed in the previous centuries. Despite the recreation of mythological locations in picturesque gardens though, it is with the advent of the cemetery that the most complete representation of Paradise is achieved.This was due to the presence of death and its effect of incorporating in space a new dimension of the Beyond. This dissertation explores then a variety of architectural expressions that take root in the post-mortal imaginaries and the diverse understanding of Paradise in Christianity. While the canonical Catholic burial grounds established themselves as a version of Heavenly Jerusalem or a city of the dead, the cemeteries of the same period in Lithuania embodied the image of Sylvan Arcadia – the forest – and thus probably stood as the last stronghold of paganism of the Baltics. Key-words: Catholic burial grounds, architecture for death, Paradise, Lithuanian cemeteries, Portuguese cemeteries ii.