The dead wait: Material afterlives in sepulchral spaces

This essay examines the heterotopic and heterochronic material afterlives of cemeteries through acomparative focus on two cities of the dead: Zagreb’s Mirogoj Cemetery, which was establishedduring the late 19th century, and Thessaloniki’s Zeitenlik World War I Military Cemetery, whichentombs Allied victims from the Salonika Front. My principal aim is to highlight the contrasts andcontradictions between nationalized collective memories and unsettling imperial legacies thatdefine the material afterlives of each of these cemeteries. In Mirogoj, material afterlives takeshape as a palimpsest of eras, only some of which are monumentalized as collective memories.In Zeitenlik, the material afterlife of a single event of death-dealing, the Great War, constitutesan archive of bygone imperial socialities that defy the homogenizing logics of national identity inthe present.