Ongoing volunteer and research activities take place at the historic cemetery on Kapushanska Street in Uzhhorod, bringing together long-time city residents and internally displaced persons. Participants host regular clean-up events to clear overgrown vegetation, uncover forgotten graves, and restore the historic pathways of the necropolis. In parallel, scientific documentation is carried out as researchers photograph monuments, translate and analyze multilingual epitaphs, reconstruct the biographies of individuals buried there from various ethnic communities, and log all coordinates and descriptions into a unified digital registry. This practice helps safeguard the historical urban landscape from development pressures and preserves the city's multicultural memory.
Our small centre of the world is an old cemetery on Kapushanska Street in Uzhhorod.
The cemetery has existed since at least the 1850s. Over generations, it became the final resting place for people from many different communities that shaped the city: Hungarians, Jews, Germans, Rusyns, Ukrainians, Slovaks, Czechs, Roma, White Russian émigrés, soldiers, victims of political repression, and countless ordinary residents whose lives are now remembered only through names carved in stone.
For us, this place is much more than a cemetery. It is an open-air archive of the city, where history can be read through monuments, epitaphs, trees, paths, and traces of lives that once intersected here. It is also one of the few places where Uzhhorod's multicultural past remains visible in a tangible form.
Together with a growing group of volunteers, we participate in regular community clean-ups aimed at caring for this neglected space. What begins as a response to concerns about the cemetery's future gradually evolves into something larger. As we clear vegetation, document monuments, and uncover forgotten graves, we also uncover stories. The cemetery serves as a place where people gather not only to work, but to share knowledge, memories, and conversations.
Many participants are long-time residents of Uzhhorod, while others arrived here after being displaced by the war. Spending time together in this space creates unexpected connections and a sense of common purpose. What starts as volunteer work becomes a form of collective care—for the place itself, for local memory, and for one another.
Throughout the fellowship, we continue documenting the cemetery through photography, archival research, and historical writing. We are particularly interested in reconstructing the lives of people buried here, exploring the artistic language of the monuments, interpreting epitaphs, and tracing the social and cultural history of Uzhhorod through the cemetery's material heritage.
At the same time, we continue building a digital record of the site. As each monument is cleaned and documented, we record its condition, location, inscriptions, and historical context. Our long-term aspiration is to contribute to a comprehensive digital archive that preserves this knowledge regardless of what happens to the physical site in the future.
This work is shaped by a growing awareness of the vulnerability of both historical landscapes and collective memory. In a rapidly changing city, where development pressures increasingly threaten historic and green spaces, the cemetery stands as an important reminder of the many communities that contributed to Uzhhorod's identity.
Through research, documentation, public writing, and community engagement, we hope to make this place more visible—not only as a burial ground, but as a cultural landscape, a historical resource, and a shared space of memory. Ultimately, our goal is to help ensure that the stories preserved here remain accessible to future generations, whether through the continued life of the cemetery itself or through the archive we are creating together.
