Kwartalnik Historii Kultury Materialnej (Jan 2016)
Nekropolie Radomia w drugiej połowie XVIII wieku
Abstract
CEMETERIES IN RADOM IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 18TH C. The article concerns the cemeteries of the Old Radom and New Radom parishes in the second half of the 18th c., which provided the fi nal resting place to representatives of all the classes of the Polish society of the time. The period to be investigated was chosen due to the availability of sources: the burial records of the church of St John the Baptist in New Radom — since 1748, and of St Wenceslas in New Radom — since 1761. Furthermore, at the end of the 18th c. cemeteries started to be moved out of towns for sanitary reasons and Radom provides a perfect illustration of many of the factors that induced that process.Within the area which is now embraced by city of Radom there were seven possible places of burial in the 18th c. In the parish of Old Radom the major one was the cemetery at St Wenceslas’ church. Since the church was small and had no burial chapels, very few people were interred inside (1.8% of the recorded burials). The parish of St John the Baptist had fi ve necropolises, including two parish cemeteries. The largest one was the cemetery around the parish church, inside the town walls, where 79% of the recorded dead were buried, while c. 10% in the years 1748–1795 were interred inside the church. This was conditioned by several factors, including the church having several burial chapels, the cemetery being relatively small and New Radom parishioners usually enjoying a higher material status than Old Radom parishioners. The choice of the burial place was very often linked with the deceased person’s social status; the most prestigious option was the chapel of St Mary Magdalene, founded by the Kochanowski family, where mostly people of noble origin were laid to rest. In the suburbs of Radom there was another cemetery at St Leonard’s church, which functioned until 1794, where 10% of the dead were buried. That one provided the last resting place mostly to poor peasants, beggars, vagabonds, suicides, and corpses found in the woods or on the road. Monks and friars, but also lay people were buried in monastery and friary churches and on adjacent small cemeteries. The research does not confi rm the assumption previously held by some scholars, that the new regulations concerning burials outside the densely built-up area were followed in Radom as early as in 1792. In fact, it was only in 1795 that a cemetery was opened in Piotrówka, to inter people from both St John the Baptist’s and St Wenceslas’ parishes. The opening of the new cemetery led to the closure of the church cemetery in New Radom but the cemetery at St Wenc-eslas’ church functioned almost to the end of the 18th c., serving both the Old Radom and the New Radom parishioners. Between the opening of the cemetery in Piotrówka in February 1795 and September 1797 27% of the dead from the two parishes were buried at St Wenceslas’ cemetery. It was only in 1798, due to the strict regulations introduced by the Austrian government, that people ceased to be interred in the old cemeteries and churches in Radom, although exceptions may still have been occurring. The process of translocating burials from the old necropolises of Old and New Radom to a new cemetery outside of the densely populated and built-up area confi rms historians’ findings concerning other cities. Almost everywhere the new regulations on burials far from parish churches were opposed and were only accepted slowly, despite the efforts of the Polish clergy and of the occupant administration. Radom was no exception. The new cemetery in Piotrówka was opened in 1795 (functioning till 1812), but it took several years and new strict regulations to make the local community give up the old necropolises where their ancestors were interred and where the burial place refl ected the social and material status of the dead.
