Moscow's Novodevichy Cemetery: final resting place of famous figures

Moscow - The cemetery beside Moscow's Novodevichy Convent resembles a sculpture park. The city has one of those, too, but at a different spot. Here, behind high walls and among gnarled trees, lie the remains of many famous figures including writer Anton Chekhov, composer Sergei Prokofiev and former Russian president Boris Yeltsin.

The artfully chiselled gravestones, in the form of busts and full portraits, make a visit especially worthwhile. And the convent ensemble, one of Russia's best-known cloisters, is on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

Cemeteries reveal a lot about a country's culture. You can drive your car among graves in the United States, so matter-of-course is the automobile in American life. As for Russians, they are partial to monuments and memorial stones, which you can see both in Moscow's cityscape and in its cemeteries. Heads and whole bodies hewn from marble and granite rise above the graves, which is a rather strange sight for Western European visitors.

The gravestone sculptures usually convey the occupation of the occupant. A ministerial employee is depicted holding a telephone receiver to his ear. A pilot is shown with an airplane trailing vapour in the background. A scholar's likeness is reading a book.

The most common images, though, are those of serious, important-looking men whose chests are pinned with medals, each medal intricately formed. In Russia's patriarchal society, it is almost always sculptures of men that watch over the family graves. The wives' gravestones are usually small. One of the few exceptions at Novodevichy Cemetery shows a dancing ballerina - she must have been very good.

Novodevichy Cemetery, like the famous Cemetery Pere-Lachaise in Paris, is a tourist attraction. In Paris, they come to see the final resting places of figures such as Honore de Balzac and Jim Morrison. In Moscow, the really important people - Soviet leaders Josef Stalin and Leonid Brezhnev, to name but two - are interred in the Kremlin wall.

Still, Novodevichy Cemetery has plenty of big names. Maps for sale at the entrance show the location of noteworthy graves. The maps are imprecise, however, so the graves are hard to find if you have trouble deciphering the Cyrillic alphabet.

Russians' love of statuary helps. If you know, for instance, that the bust of onetime Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev is framed in black-and-white marble, then his grave is much easier to locate.

In the end, however, it hardly matters whether or not you find prominent people's gravestones since there is plenty to see just by wandering around. There is the urn wall and in front of every urn grave is a small ledge on which relatives can place photographs of the deceased, candles and flowers.

The Novodevichy Convent seems no less strange, mysterious, and otherworldly than the cemetery that bears its name. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2004. Dating from the 16th century, the ensemble of buildings serves as a convent to this very day.

Consequently, only parts of it are accessible to visitors, including the Smolensk Cathedral and the Assumption Cathedral, both of which have magnificent iconostases.

The convent is wealthy thanks to the widows and daughters from well-to-do families who bequeath it considerable sums upon joining.

Visitors passing through the convent's white walls are entering another world. While cars speed down the broad highway outside, birds chirp within. A wedding party gathers for a group photograph. Nuns flit past tourists sitting in the shade admiring the baroque bell tower. Less than four kilometres from Moscow's bustling centre, the Novodevichy Convent is an island of tranquillity.

Internet: http://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1097. (dpa)