The Père-Lachaise quiz
Funerary Art
The ten questions in this series
Obelisks, mourners, chapels: reading a cemetery like an open-air museum. Each question stands on its own, with its story — or can be played as part of the full series.
- A simple stone silhouette is enough to identify his grave in Division 18: an obelisk, with no other ornament. Which scholar, decipherer of Egyptian hieroglyphs, does this monument honour?
- Appointed by the prefect Nicolas Frochot, an architect laid out the overall plan of the young cemetery in 1804 — its great roundabouts, its green squares, its first chapel. Who was he?
- Built between 1887 and 1889, the crematorium at Père-Lachaise remained for a long time the only one of its kind in Paris. To overcome public reluctance towards cremation, what kind of complex did its promoters build around it?
- The mausoleum of Countess Demidoff, a white marble colonnade more than ten metres high, dominates Division 4. A persistent legend attributes an unusual will to her. What did it promise?
- He himself rests in Division 39, but his name remains attached above all to a genre: the bronze medallion portrait, of which he produced around a hundred for his famous contemporaries. Who is this sculptor?
- A recurring sculpted figure on nineteenth-century graves, she is shown bent over, her face hidden or her body slumped with grief. What is this type of funerary statue called?
- On some graves, an actual small structure replaces the plain tombstone: four walls, a roof, sometimes stained-glass windows. What is this type of monument, very common at Père-Lachaise, called?
- Père-Lachaise cemetery has enjoyed official protection since 1962, and several of its graves, including those of Chopin and Oscar Wilde, have since been granted even stricter protection. What is it?
- Since the ban on pesticides in Parisian public green spaces, a phenomenon has become increasingly visible on the old graves at Père-Lachaise, overrun with ivy, moss and wild grasses. What does the press often nickname the cemetery because of this?
- Now adjoining the crematorium, the columbarium at Père-Lachaise holds the ashes of several thousand deceased in small individual niches. What is this type of funerary niche called?