Another example of a typical Slavic tombstone with inscriptions in two languages—again, we suspect that “OUR SON” came with the stone, and the inscription in Slovenian was supplied to order. The cross was not originally blank: if we look very carefully, we can trace the faint outlines of a crucifix in shallow relief that has eroded almost completely away.
The stone has eroded so much already that only the outline of the crucifix is visible in the Byzantine cross. The inscription is still very legible, however; the monument was probably put up when Mike P. Sapsara died in 1932, but old Pa Pitt suspects the inscription has been recut, replacing an illegible original. Note that the inscription is a hybrid of Croatian and English. The photograph of Mike P. Sapsara is in poor shape, but you might still recognize him if you met him on the street.
This is almost the archetype of the Slavic tombstone, with a fine folk-art crucifix to decorate it. With the help of Google, Wiktionary, and other Internet resources, we translate the Polish inscription thus:
HERE LIES
MARIAN
FABISZEWSKI
DIED MARCH 14, 1924.
—
Say a Hail Mary for Me
Two of these mass-produced iron crucifixes from the 1880s can be found in St. Peter’s Cemetery [Correction: After another walk through the cemetery, we have found at least four]. Their weakness as monuments is that the individualized letters fall off, though “Hier ruhet” is molded in the metal and perfectly legible. Fortunately there are other Amrheins buried in the same plot with legible stone monuments, so we can be confident that the letters AMR—I- represent AMRHEIN. The first name (-ACK-B) is probably Jackob. The birth and death dates are also illegible, though we can make out the decade of death as 188-.
The epitaph is perfectly legible, because it is cut in a stone base:
Ruhe sanft in deiner Gruft
bis dich Jesus wieder ruft.
Rest softly in your grave
till Jesus calls you again.
A Lithuanian tombstone in a good state of preservation. European immigrants tended to bring with them their memories of what a gravestone should look like, so we find very different styles in different ethnic groups. This is a common East European style. The East European tombstones here were often decorated in very shallow relief, much of which has vanished in a century or so of erosion; but this crucifix is still visible in outline, though the details are lost.
With the help of Google Translate, here is the inscription:
IN MEMORY OF
WIKTORIA BERNATOWICZ
BORN 1860
DIED FEBRUARY 9, 1918
ETERNAL REST
