Material Religion

The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief

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A Gallery of Ghosts: Death and Burial in Lands

Marked by Trauma

Catherine Wanner, Zuzanna Bogumił, Sergei Shtyrkov & Ketevan Gurchiani

To cite this article: Catherine Wanner, Zuzanna Bogumił, Sergei Shtyrkov & Ketevan Gurchiani
(2023) A Gallery of Ghosts: Death and Burial in Lands Marked by Trauma, Material Religion,
19:2, 191-199, DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2023.2224161

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Published online: 04 Aug 2023.

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in conversation
 a gallery of ghosts: death
and burial in lands marked
by trauma
catherine wanner , zuzanna bogumił , the dead can be identified, materialized, and
sergei shtyrkov and ketevan gurchiani
Although there are strict laws and taboos against
desecrating corpses and graves, it happens all the
time. Especially in regions with traumatic or
contested histories, arousing the dead and obliging
them to speak is an effective means to articulate
political demands. The dead can be used to assert a
shared heritage and support land claims. Their
mutilated or discarded bodies can be posited as
evidence of injustice that demands compensation
from a perpetrator for victimization. Part of
mobilizing the dead for the political purposes of
the living involves exhuming bodies, reburying
them as ancestors, and creating new memorial
grave sites that begin to correct the affront. The
prevalence of such practices prompted Katherine
Verdery (1999) decades earlier to declare “necro-
philia” a key tenet of postsocialist political culture.
The tremendous attention to where and how past
victims of injustice should be (re)buried gave dead
bodies active “political lives.”
Catherine Wanner is Professor of Anthropology and History at the
Pennsylvania State University and author most recently of
Everyday Religiosity and the Politics of Belonging in Ukraine (Cornell
University Press, 2022) and editor of Dispossession: Anthropological
Perspectives on Russia’s War Against Ukraine (Routledge, 2023).
cew10@psu.edu
Zuzanna Bogumił is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the
Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of
Sciences and co-author most recently of More than Alive: The
Dead, Orthodoxy and Remembrance in Post-Soviet Russia (Peter
Lang 2023) and co-editor of Memory and Religion from a
Postsecular Perspective (Routledge 2022).
zbogumil@iaepan.edu.pl
Sergei Shtyrkov is Research Fellow at the Groupe Sociétés,
Religions, Laïcités, CNRS-EPHE-PSL Research University, Paris,
France.
191 sergei.shtyrkov@ephe.psl.eu
Ketevan Gurchiani is Professor of Anthropology at Ilia State
University, Tbilisi, Georgia. Her most recent publications
include "Rivers between nature, infrastructure, and religion."
Central Asian Survey (2022): 1-20 and “Nested Liminalities:
Death, Migration and Pandemic among Georgians in Russia”
with Mariam Darchiashvili, in Revue Européenne des
Migrations Internationales (REMI) January 2023.
ketevan_gurchiani@iliauni.edu.ge
Material Religion volume 19, issue 2, pp. 191–199
DOI: 10.1080/17432200.2023.2224161
© 2023 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
In regions that have experienced traumatic
violence, the details of who died where and how
are often elusive. The very absence of burial sites
offers only nagging questions without answers.
And yet, there is a tacit acknowledgement that if
animated, they can become powerful agents in
pursuit of justice and longed-for change. Below, we
A Gallery of Ghosts: Death and Burial in Lands marked by Trauma
compare several instances of how exhumation and
reburial in specific gravesites are used in Ukraine,
Russia, and the Caucasus to respond to victimiza-
tion in the recent and deep past even when the
material traces of lives and deaths have been
deliberately erased.
Catherine Wanner –No Rest for the Unknown
Dead in Ukraine
Few moments illustrate the reverence dead bodies
command more than when they are buried
unceremoniously. When a tragic death occurs, or
Catherine Wanner et al.
worse, when the identities of the dead are
unknown, they cannot be honored with a proper
burial in a timely fashion. This intensifies the grief
and destabilization a community experiences in the
face of death. Under conditions of war, this pattern
becomes routine.
The hybrid war in Eastern Ukraine from
2014-2022 produced two contradictory postures
toward those slain in combat. In some instances, the
usual Eastern Christian burial practices became
more elaborate. After 2014, when a dead soldier was
brought home to be buried, people lined the streets
on their knees as the hearse passed by in public
acknowledgement of the sacrifice the soldier and
Volume 19
his or her family had made. Clergy “sealed the grave”
before soldiers were buried in specially created
Issue 2
sections of cemeteries reserved for those killed in
combat. Granite headstones with highly detailed,
engraved photographic images were placed on
manicured graves along with the preferred foods,
flowers, and objects of the deceased. At regularized
commemorative intervals of mourning, candles and
incense were added. These objects and images not
only identified the deceased, but also personalized
the soldier and fostered a sense of familiarity. Such
forms of ritualized mourning and burial create social
cohesion and regenerate communal life in the face
of loss. By mitigating the threat death poses to
communal stability, the glorification of these graves
also sustains a will to fight.
The hybrid war also yielded an antithetical
problem. Some bodies were not claimed and
Material Religion
therefore could not be buried. Among the factors
In Conversation
that made this a hybrid war was that it was not a
battle between state-sponsored armies. A wide
spectrum of mercenaries, volunteers, and private
militias were among the combatants. As the fighting
 Fig 1
A section of the historic Lychakiv cemetery in Lviv where soldiers killed since 2014 in the war with Russia are
buried. Photo by author.
progressed, unidentified corpses of unknown origin
and affiliation began to pile up in morgues in Eastern
Ukraine. Either the dead had no family or no family
nearby. The unidentified corpses were cataloged
and moved into refrigerated trucks to be identified.
As the number of corpses mounted, it became
untenable to keep so many in a liminal state of no
longer living and not yet buried. They were interred
in a special cemetery for unclaimed bodies, opposite
a traditional cemetery, with the hope that they
would be later identified, exhumed, and reburied. A
simple wooden cross, Roman not Byzantine, that
bears the corpse’s number marks each grave in a
cemetery designed to house the nameless dead
temporarily. The impersonal materiality of their
192 impermanent graves signals the dehumanizing
circumstances of their death.
Even worse predicaments regarding burial and
reburial emerged after the full-scale invasion began
on February 24, 2022. Using satellite imagery and
remote sensing, Ukrainians began to identify
veritable traumascapes of mass burial grounds. In
Bucha, Mariupol, Izium, and elsewhere, a jumble of
unidentified, mutilated bodies were discovered in
shallow unmarked graves, their presence betrayed
only by mounds of fresh dirt.
Near Mariupol, satellite imagery revealed linear
rows organized in four sections in an area adjacent
to the town’s cemetery. Over a three-week period,
the unearthed area grew to double the size of the
actual cemetery. Once exhumation at this site
began, a mass burial ground, potentially containing
up to 9,000 bodies, was discovered. In September
2022, an unmarked burial site in Izium was found
with approximately 450 bodies. In each instance,
men in sanitized garb, who claim to “work like
machines” devoid of emotion, exhume disfigured
corpses and catalog the dead. They examine the
bodies for mutilation and signs of torture, injury, or
other clues to the source of death, then they label
and rebury the corpses in temporary graves. Again,
each corpse is assigned a number that is inscribed
on a bare wooden sign or a makeshift, nominally
Christian cross, all of which only reaffirms the
disturbing unknown qualities of the life and death
of the body below.
Numerical cataloging facilitates later re-exhu-
mation and reburial, if and when the bodies are
identified. The systematic, bureaucratic marking of
bodies masks the fact that some corpses reveal
torture or violent postmortem castration or
beheading. When corpses are violated and
wantonly discarded in burial pits with no material
markings indicating who lies where, it conjures up
the fear of what Ukrainians call the “unquiet dead,”
and creates a phenomenon of presence in absence
 that, following Jacques Derrida, anthropologists
claim leads to states of “hauntology.” The lack of
ceremonial closure alters the possibilities for family
and friends to mourn and grieve. Actively stimulat-
ing grief during ritualized mourning animates the
attachments the living have to the dead and
reaffirms the debts that hold these relationships
together. “Not one of us will return from this war,
even those who actually return. At the same time,
everyone will return, even those who will never
return,” asserted Yuriy Hudymenko. In a war crimes
court, dead bodies will speak as witnesses and tell of
what transpired. They spare the living the pain of
recounting trauma. There will be no rest for the dead
who lead such active political lives. (See Figure 1).
Zuzanna Bogumił –Modes of Living with the
Dead on the Solovetsky Islands
Bucha, Mariupol, and Izium raise questions as to how
to live with the dead who died tragically. Earlier, the
humiliation of dead bodies mostly affected the
remains of kings, nobles, or servants of the church
whose dead bodies were perceived as the body
politic of the former regime. In the twentieth
century, dead bodies of entire national and political
groups were subject to humiliation. This experience
of mass violence resulting from national, colonial,
and totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century
forced the living to rethink what it means to live with
the dead. This also prompted a new human rights
paradigm, which stresses that all people are equal
and each human being has a right to a dignified life,
death, burial, and commemoration. At the same
time, however, it privileges the right of the no-
longer-living to testify about the violence they
experienced during their lives over the living’s right
to mourn. Consequently, dead bodies are treated as
forensic evidence of human rights violation. This
predominance of a necropolitical regime of forensic
truths over the right of the dead to a proper burial
often results in conflicts between human rights
activists and descendants of the dead. This is
because forensic practices and religious and funerary
practices offer alternative ways of being with the
193
dead. However, conflict is not inevitable. The
possibility of coexistence of different modes of living
with the dead on the Solovetsky Islands serve as a
great example.
During the Soviet period, unknown bones of
prisoners were regarded as the remains of
enemies. Thus, they could be treated inhumanly.
In the late 1980s, the social perception of those
laying in mass graves changed. It became urgent
to transform landscapes inhabited by the dead.
The first step was to mark and commemorate all
dead regardless of their nationality and religion.
Local communities, relatives, activists from the
Memorial Society, foreign delegations, museum
workers turned contaminated landscapes into
sites of memory. Interestingly, in the beginning
they cooperated. However, the more memory
activists engaged in memory work, the more
they discovered bones resting in graves with
different nationalities, political backgrounds,
and faiths. As a consequence, the dead were
A Gallery of Ghosts: Death and Burial in Lands marked by Trauma
interpreted differently by different memory
regimes. This makes the Solovetsky Islands a
very unique place with differing ways of
coexisting with the dead.
The first monument, the Solovetsky Stone
established in 1989, was located on a prerevolutionary
monastery cemetery, where it is assumed warriors in
the ‘Kremlin Plot’ were shot in 1929. Even if the
inscription, “To Solovetsky Prisoners,” indicates that
the monument is established for all dead, the location
of the monument stresses this heroic deed. The same
year a symbolic grave with bones of unknown
Catherine Wanner et al.
prisoners (zekhs) was erected at the local communal
cemetery. As the Solovetsky settlement is located on a
former camp, the locals often find bones and skulls in
their gardens. Antonina Melnik, a local memory
activist, collected human remains and buried them
with a secular funeral in the local cemetery so that
everyone could come and mourn. With time, other
bones and skulls were discovered on the Solovetsky
Island. They were stored in the Church of St. Philip, a
prerevolutionary funeral chapel. Some bones passed
through prosecutorial forensic investigations before
finally being buried with an Orthodox rite in the
second symbolic grave of unknown zekhs in the local
cemetery in 2018. The human remains were buried
according to Orthodox tradition during the Feast of
Volume 19
the New Solovetsky Martyrs and Confessors on
Issue 2
August 23, which inaugurated a new way for the
living to commemorate dead prisoners.
A few years earlier, forensic excavations took
place on Sekirnaya Gora, a former detention and
execution site. It is remembered as a space of
trauma, where thousands of people were killed.
After the excavations, it was turned into a ceme-
tery. Each ditch is marked with a cross and the
number of dead bodies found in that ditch.
Sekirnaya Gora significantly differs from
Golgotha Hill on Anzer Island, where many
prisoners died in the camp hospital, including
Hieromartyr Peter (Zverev), Archbishop of
Voronezh. Even if there are many unknown mass
graves on the slopes of Golgotha, only the relics of
Peter Zverev were excavated in 1999. As a result of
Peter Zverev’s canonization by the Russian
Material Religion
In Conversation
Orthodox Church in 2000, a chapel was built on his
grave on Golgotha. The Golgotha and Sekirnaya
Gora are perceived as the most traumatized spaces
in Gulag history of the Archipelago. However, the
grave of St. Peter (Zverev) transforms Golgotha into
 a sacred place, while the cemetery on Sekirnaya
Gara provides forensic evidence for Soviet crimes.
Nevertheless, all three Sekirnaya Gora, Golgotha,
and the grave of St. Peter (Zverev), are a part of the
religious landscape of the Solovetsky traumaspace
and projected on the icon of the Sobor of the New
Russian Martyrs and Confessors. The icon testifies
to the material and spatial as well as spiritual,
moral, and transcendental dimensions of the living
coexisting with the dead. (See Figures 2 and 3)

Fig 2
The funeral of the remains of unknown camp prisoners in a municipal cemetery on Solovki Island, August 2018.
Photo by author.

194

Fig 3
Mass graves on Sekirnaya Gora on Solovki Island, August 2018. Photo by author.
 Sergei Shtyrkov –“They Want the Bones”: The
Politics of Archaeology in North Ossetia
A person’s death increases attention to his or her
corporeal materiality. It is this materiality that
becomes a challenge and a subject of intellectual,
emotional, and physical activity of those who are
considered to be responsible for dealing with dead
bodies in a given society–relatives of the deceased,
medics, and ritual specialists. The process of
preparation for the funeral and the funeral itself can
be interpreted as lowering the degree of material
presence of the deceased in the world of the living
(Hertz 1960 [1907]). The body is put away in an
inaccessible place or destroyed. Individual cases of
conscious preservation and display of dead bodies
(for example, relics of saints) are used and
perceived as a kind of sacral pathology, which look
especially bright and distinct against the
background of common practice. Together with a
sharp or gradual lowering of the presence of
corporeal materiality of the deceased in the space
of the living, a new mode of his or her
representation is established. This implies the use
by the living of other material forms of
representation of the deceased—for example,
images and tombstones, memorabilia, or those
means of mediation that are not usually attributed
to the sphere of the material, but can, from a certain
perspective, be interpreted in terms of “material
religion” as well. The deceased may become the
protagonist of narratives and the addressee of
prayers, and appear in dreams and visions. But his
or her bodily appearance in the life of the living
after the rites of the “last separation” is mostly
perceived as an excess and triggers an already
existing or occasional mechanism of social drama.
The meaning of this drama depends on the actual
social processes that take place in a given society.
And, of course, such events force the dead to
become part of the political life of the living.
In the fall of 2020, archaeological excavations
of a medieval burial ground were conducted in one
of the North Caucasus regions of Russia, in the
republic of North Ossetia-Alania.
When several local ethnic activists tried to stop
195
this work, a major public scandal ensued, revealing
several points of view about the social nature of the
bodily remains that archaeologists found and the
very work of archaeologists.
Of course, this was not the first excavation of
an ancient burial ground that had been conducted
in North Ossetia. Such researches are often made
there, and the work of archaeologists is considered,
on the one hand, important and prestigious, and on
the other, rather routine. Here, the problem was
with the aforementioned medieval building. The
fact is that it is considered the tomb of Os-Bagatar,
the last king of Alania, a medieval kingdom
destroyed by Timur in the fourteenth century and
considered the first (and last for this moment)
national state of Ossetians (the word Alania is
therefore included in the name of this republic).
The fact that this is the tomb of this prominent
figure was assumed by archaeologists in the
mid-twentieth century, but soon it became part of
A Gallery of Ghosts: Death and Burial in Lands marked by Trauma
oral tradition and local historical memory, and by
now almost everyone in the republic is convinced
of this. That is why this humble building is one of
the main symbols of the national identity of
modern Ossetians.
Other burials found around this tomb were
interpreted as graves of the last king’s warriors and
relatives. And although there are several families in
Ossetia who are considered direct descendants of
this king, the logic of the modern national
imagination says that in fact all Ossetians are heirs
of the people buried there. In this context, any
Catherine Wanner et al.
Ossetian can call the bones found at this archaeo-
logical site “the remains of our ancestors.”
The high status of the people buried in this
medieval cemetery makes the question of who will
interpret the results of these excavations and how
the results ought to be interpreted sensitive and
politically charged. After all, who they were also
determines who “we” are for modern Ossetians—
they, who lived in an independent nation-state, are
the real, better version of “us.” So, for example,
their religious identity is very important. If the
excavations show that they were Orthodox
Christians—for example, if their neck crosses are
found—it would be very upsetting for those living
in modern North Ossetia who believe that
Volume 19
Ossetians had their own ancient ethnic religion
Issue 2
that was fundamentally different from Christianity.
Not surprisingly, the first people to disturb the
excavations were local supporters of this religious
nativism, who sent out a voice message on social
media that some unknown archaeologists were
desecrating the graves of their ancestors. They
started a campaign to stop archaeologists who
were “desecrating” the graves of their ancestors.
They insisted that the leaders of the local Orthodox
Diocese, who were allegedly going to plant
“Christian artifacts” in the burials, were behind that
research. This question was at the center of the
public debate about the site.
Even more important, though not as widely
discussed, was the ethnicity of the buried. Most
people understood this ethnicity exclusively in
terms of the genetic relationships between
Material Religion
In Conversation
contemporary Ossetians and the people buried
next to the tomb of Os-Bagatar. Analyzing local
media, social media, and my personal conversa-
tions with people on this topic, I realized that many
 Fig 4
The beginning of archaeological excavations of a burial ground around the chapel in the village of Nuzal (Republic
of North Ossetia-Alania, Russia). 6th of September 2020. Photo by author.
people believe that the sole purpose of this and any
other excavations was to obtain data for DNA
analysis that would confirm their presumed
relationships to those buried near Os-Bagatar.
Those who tried to stop the excavations feared the
bones of their ancestors might be taken away and
used to prove that the people buried near the
national shrine were not related to contemporary
Ossetians genetically. The phrase that flashed in
that first message of the religious nativists reflects
the primary concern among of those who wanted
to stop the excavations: “They want the bones.” For
these activists, the most important feature of the
bones was that they carried the “correct” genetic
information, that which materially connects the
196
living and the dead, the ethnic group and the land
on which they live. And it is this connection that
can be broken by outsiders, such as archaeologists,
who just cannot appreciate its importance and
fragility. (See Figure 4)
Ketevan Gurchiani –The Resilient Materialities
of Cemeteries in Tbilisi
Burial grounds are places where spirits are
materialized and animated. The unity of spirit and
body spills over to the materiality of cemeteries.
The materiality of graveyards can be theorized as a
third component in an entangled unity of soul and
body. Memorial inscriptions, gravestones, and
statues encapsulate the dead person. The matter of
cemeteries emerges as a “bundle” where material
and symbolic qualities are fused together. The
concept of bundling implies that material is always
caught up with different qualities and meanings
(Keane 2005: 187). Material objects can incorporate
ideas, emotions, and physical matter. As such, they
have their affordances and constraints. Different
times actualize different affordances and mute
constraints.
The complexity of materialities connected with
graveyards is visible in discussions of infrastructure
from the 1930s in Tbilisi, Georgia when the
gravestones from abolished cemeteries were used
for construction work. In the 1930s, an attempt to
abolish cemeteries in the center of the city was
launched. Lavrenti Beria, head of the communist
party of Georgia, orchestrated the construction of
the socialist city. The General Plan for the Recon-
struction of Tbilisi from 1934 considered the
cemeteries of Tbilisi as part of the “green belt”.
According to this plan, the old cemeteries were to
be dissolved and the green areas there were to be
connected by new gardens like a belt. The
gravestones were to be used as building material.

Fig 5
Demolishing Vere cemetery in Tbilisi in the 1930s. Archival Photo.
At that time, a plan for very fast industrializa-
tion was made. The construction sites often lacked
the building materials to realize this plan. The
project of abolishing cemeteries and transforming
them into a green belt was also part of Soviet
atheistic policies. With the use of the grave
materials in infrastructural projects, one brought
out the material qualities of the stones and silenced
their symbolic qualities. Therefore, the abolition of
cemeteries in the city center contributed to the
realization of several plans: the creation of a green
belt, the provision of building materials and, above
all, the abolition of the religious way of life, in which
visiting the cemeteries played a major role.
In the infrastructural projects of the 1930s, the
"thingness" of the stone was actualized: stones with
or without inscriptions were reduced to just stones.
Many decades later, muted ideas and beliefs,
197 bundled together in the gravestones, resurface. The
tombstones that still look like memorials are
perceived as particularly disturbing. Since the
inscriptions on the memorial stones consolidate the
link of the deceased with matter, it is difficult to
silence the stone.
Gravestones that come to light unexpectedly
cause dismay. When a 1930s bridge in Tbilisi was
renovated in 2018, workers replaced old stones
with the new ones. In the pile of discarded stones,
passersby saw that these were old gravestones with
inscriptions. Some inscriptions were very personal,
others showed names and dates.
A Gallery of Ghosts: Death and Burial in Lands marked by Trauma
Catherine Wanner et al.
"No wonder we can’t move forward, all this is
haunting us", was often heard in the discussions
about the photos of the stones. People no longer
knew what to do with these stones, which were
once gravestones, then building materials, then
construction debris for some, but still gravestones
for others, who returned them to where they
belonged.
Volume 19
Some of the tombstones are louder than
Issue 2
others. The materiality of gravestones causes
different emotions in infrastructure, such as roads,
bridges, public buildings like the Tbilisi Circus on
the one hand and in residential houses on the other
hand. Residents are frightened when someone
points out the memorial stones that have been
used as a building material of their houses. One has
the feeling that the boundary between the dead
and the living has been violated. This is the case in
an elite apartment in Tbilisi. Gravestones are still
visible on the 100-apartment house on Heroes
Square that was built in 1938 for the Soviet
intelligentsia. Whenever there is a picture of
gravestones on the wall of this building posted on
social media, the residents protest. They look for
excuses, dismiss the claims, and think it is part of a
smear campaign.
Material Religion
In Conversation
The view that the material used for the
infrastructure can be viewed as "improper" implies
that materiality is caught up with affects and ideas
as well. The construction materials are not
reducible to their material parts only. The context
 Fig 6
Construction debris with gravestone
inscriptions in Georgian around the
“the dry bridge” in Tbilisi, Georgia:
2019. Photo by author.
actualizes the importance and value of certain qual-
ities bundled in an object (Keane 2005: 188). The
entanglement is usually invisible but when a crisis
happens this complexity becomes very visible. In
2015, after a river flooded in Tbilisi on Heroes
198
Square and in the Zoo, infrastructure built with
materials of former cemeteries or churches became
“immoral” and “improper.” The crisis actualized the
muted symbolic part of the bundle.
The materiality of gravestones as a bundle can
become an opportunity for different actors.
Sometimes the affordance of materials is used
tactically by investors to tear down a Soviet
building in Tbilisi. This was the case when a
high-rise Biltmore Hotel was built on the former site
of the Institute of Marxism and Leninism (called
IMELI Building). The developers declared at one
point that the construction work revealed the entire
basement to have secondary materials made from
tombstones. Thus, some argued, the building was
improper and should be erased. This logic was used
heavily in the arguments in favor of the demolition
of the building. It could survive only thanks to the
counter-argument that the building
had a value as a place of memory.
Ideas about death determine the meaning of
graves, their design, and make them a site of
practices of care. The understanding that the spirit
after death maintains some bodily qualities, its
anthropomorphic nature, leads to practices that
have cemeteries as central elements in Georgia. The
mixture of soul and body merges with the materiali-
ty of the grave—be it stones, statues, or plants.
Cemeteries, as the sum of all this, are an actant in
 urban space. The materiality of the cemetery
becomes part of the web of the spirit and body. The
merging of substances creates resilient materialities.
(See Figures 5 and 6)
ORCID
Catherine Wanner http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6079-8542
Zuzanna Bogumił http://orcid.org/0000-0002-6774-7235
Ketevan Gurchiani http://orcid.org/0000-0002-9974-1049
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Verdery, Katerine. 1999. The Political Lives of Dead Bodies:
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Catherine Wanner et al.
Volume 19
Issue 2
Material Religion
In Conversation