‘One man’s trash is another man’s treasure”. Few people emerging from Copenhagen’s Assistens Kirkegard could miss the oddly shaped capital letters, framed by the eave of a city building. But it takes an artist to appreciate the apposite nature of a message overlooking a graveyard, and the particular lengths taken to spray paint it.
“Just think of it,” our guide, Susanna McIntyre, says. “You’d have to be suspended upside down from the roof tiles, with someone having a good grip of your heels...”
McIntyre, who once worked as an artist in Dublin, has just given us her own inimitable tour of the Norrebro cemetery, which is to Copenhagen what Père Lachaise is to Paris. Graveyards can tell a lot about a city. Just a few months before, we’d spent several hours in the French cemetery with guide Thierry Le Roi, a fedora-wearing expert on its 70, 000 occupants .
Le Roi’s “safari” , as he calls it, summons up the spirits of Gertrude Stein, Molière and Chopin, while he gives a very special performance at the grave of the little “sparrow”, Edith Piaf.
As a self-styled "necro-romantique", he has the inside track on ghouls, while he extols Ireland's marriage equality referendum vote at Oscar Wilde's glass-fronted tomb. He also knows the story behind more recent installations, including a 21st-century pyramid, not yet occupied, which was built by an Egyptologist for his own eventual use.
Theatrical
McIntyre doesn’t wear a fedora, but shares Le Roi’s sense of humour and love of the theatrical. She also knows every corner of her Copenhagen equivalent where there’s a touch of the “
hygge
” – that almost untranslatable Danish term for cosiness – in every corner. Rock-star shrines at Assistens Kirkegard are few, but American jazz musicians Kenny Drew and Ben Webster lie there, as do Nobel Prize-winning physicist Niels Bohr, existentialist philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and storyteller Hans Christian Andersen.
What’s striking is that the graves are almost incidental to the layout of a verdant city garden, where families picnic, toddlers chase balloons, and small groups gather for yoga or a game of cards. Sighing boughs of tall trees provide long shade for a growing number of homeless in the Danish capital, including migrants on the move further north who have been halted by border controls recently imposed by Sweden.
Landscape garden
Originally designed as a burial site for the poor, Assistens Kirkegard was opened in Norreport or Copenhagen’s north port in 1760. When it was extended in 1805-06, its architect Jens Bang was influenced by the English landscape garden. Straight and long walkways were “tiring and boring”, Bang suggested, whereas “bending paths” would “please the eye”.
Storyteller Andersen, who shares his plot with close friends Edvard and Henriette Collin, found it a good spot to be both inspired and annoyed . It is said that he would often find solace in imagining that he was burying the people who had put him in bad mood. It was also here that he used his thinking time for stories like that of the little mermaid – still fending off vandals at her statue overlooking Copenhagen harbour – and still, presumably, working off her 300 years of good deeds as part of the author’s much-criticised effort to “blackmail” naughty kids.
One of the cemetery’s most striking pieces of stonework is more recent, with abstract figures in bronze remembering the “street people” who never had a home, and whose cremated ashes are buried beneath. For McIntyre, one of the most significant headstones marks the resting place of two brothers who transformed the lives of Danish women well over a century ago.
In 1893, Jewish brothers Joseph and FW Soldenfeldt paid for construction of a large red-brick property which overlooks Sortedam lake in the Osterbro district of Copenhagen. Designed in Italian medieval and renaissance style, it was built to provide a home for single women approaching retirement, namely “teachers, house keepers, seamstresses and maids”.
‘A certain age’
Just over a decade ago, tiny flats with shared bathrooms were transformed into en-suite apartments. The only pre-requisite for the 99 tenants of Sortedam Dossering is that they should be female, have Danish residency and be of a “certain age”, ie over 50. Shared space includes a studio loft, a basement ballroom, and quadrangular garden. The riot of hydrangeas, geraniums, lilies and tulips by the building’s entrance is maintained by McIntyre.
Another stipulation laid down by the Soldenfeldt trust no longer applies, or so we hope.
A series of “virtues” inscribed on terracotta medallions laid into the building’s facade include “temperance, diligence, patience, purity, humility and faith”, along with “hope, love, peace, vigilance, wisdom and truth”.
Even the little mermaid would have difficulty matching that list, our guide laughs, and look what happened to her . . .