Cemetery

I learned from an MGU professor of Russian language and literature that yesterday was the second Tuesday after Easter, the day when Russian Orthodox Christians visit the graves of departed loved ones. They traditionally clean the graves and leave Easter bread, eggs, and flowers.

That prompted me to visit the Church of St. Nicholas and the Russian cemetery after work.

I was a little distracted by a man repairing a mosaic...

 ...and I had to ask for directions to find the road up the hill to the cemetery, but soon I found it.

At the entrance, a small flower stall was selling pussy willows, which I learned the ancient Slavs associated with spring. Since the coming of the church to Russia, they have been associated with the resurrection.

Since it was the end of the day, not many people were still there, but I saw a few carrying paper flower wreaths or bread.

And I saw evidence that people had been by earlier.

 

The cemetery was quiet and peaceful, fragrant with lilacs, and lovely with irises.

Some graves had been tended; others were neglected—since many Russians left Tajikistan at the time of independence and in the subsequent civil war.

As I made my way up the hill, I saw that a section of the cemetery was devoted to Jewish graves. A caretaker with a little notebook approached me and asked if I was interested in a particular family grave. I later read that Bukhara Jews, once centered in Samarkand but spread throughout the Persian empire all the way to Dushanbe, have now mostly settled in New York City; they pay for upkeep of this area of cemetery. The Jewish population of Dushanbe peaked in the 1940s at 30,000, but by 1989 and the collapse of the Soviet Union it was down to 15,000. After that, the 1992 civil war in Tajkistan and the dismal economy made others flee, so there were just 300 in 2015.

What a lot of history in both of these places!