A Graveyard of Languages

Let's return for a moment to the Greek gravestones at Evergreen, which offer a masterclass in laconic subtly. Here the language and script choices on gravestones were often quite targeted, each producing multiple effects and engaging readers in different ways. As you read, it's always useful to ask: what kinds of information do these gravestones produce about the deceased or their communities? What languages (or alphabets) convey this information? How do the different language portions of the gravestone construct slightly different portraits of a human life?

Below are a few examples that showcase this pattern. Even though relatively simple in form, they collectively showcase a spectrum of choices made by members of the Greek Detroit community on the presentation of one's name to the world, which are now memorialized in stone:

Sometimes, gravestones take up the labor of presenting more than one face to the world in a rather literal way. Take the following family headstone below, which marks the resting place of a Greek family from Anatolia. On one side of the headstone, we find relatively common names in English beneath the family name of PHELPS.

But we need to circle around to the back side of the headstone, the side that is seemingly not as public-facing, to see that this family is of Greek descent:

Another pattern emerges across a smaller set of gravestones. These graves, seen in a select sampling below, display not only kinship status (husband, father, brother), name, and dates of birth and death, but also the region in the formerly Ottoman Empire that the deceased hailed from. Often, this region was Macedonia, but other places such as the island of Cyprus or Samos can be found.

These choices to display a region or city of origin should not be taken for granted. Notably, far more Greek gravestones at Evergreen opt to say nothing of their hometowns or even region of birth. But as we shall see in a moment, one of the most common and important things the gravestones of Ottoman immigrants in Detroit convey is exactly such information about birthplace. Conversely, when a gravestone elides a region of origin, this can also tell us something significant.

Take the following gravestones below, each of which marks the resting place of a Greek immigrant who hailed from Ottoman Anatolia. Unlike other immigrants from the Ottoman Empire, such as Armenians, Greeks often chose to not commemorate where the deceased had come from. While we do not know exactly why this was the case, we have some clues.

Although Detroit Greektown served as neutral meeting place for many Ottoman immigrants, there were still some real tensions within the Greek community. One major fault line extended between Anatolian Greeks and other Greek immigrants who came from different regions, such as the Balkans or Greece (which were folded into Ottoman territories as well). As local historian Ernest Zachary recalls, Anatolian Greeks often preferred to remain within their own smaller Greek community, or at least to stay among Armenian and other immigrants from Anatolia, rather than face ostracization by other parts of the Greek community in Metro Detroit. There were many reasons for this, but one is that Anatolian Greeks were sometimes conflated with "Turks" by Greeks from other Ottoman territories, remapping an old animosity onto members of the same ethnic group.

Below are a handful of gravestones from Anatolian Greek families, though these do not disclose that particular regional orientation to visitors in Evergreen:

But just because the gravestones of formerly Ottoman subjects in Metro Detroit do not always tell us where the deceased hailed from, that does not mean gravestones are silent on the question of origins altogether. We can see this in a simple way with the Greek gravestones, which after all still signal forms of "Greek-ness" through various presentations of names and alphabets. Still, other immigrant communities do this signaling about their origins through other means.

Not everyone desired to forget, or at least to not emphasize, the geography of their very recent past. For complex reasons, other communities in Metro Detroit simultaneously leaned into a story of loss, both as a way of celebrating who they were, and also to clarify how they thought of themselves even differently than other members of their ethnic group.

The Armenian case speaks to this paradoxical gain and loss in profound ways. Driven from the Ottoman Empire, and in many cases the survivors of the genocide in 1915 that marked the termination of a way of life, the Armenians of Metro Detroit found themselves looking backwards and forwards in complicated ways. Their gravestones preserve their histories, and the homes they left behind, in a pronounced manner that is not always as legible across the gravestones of other formerly Ottoman immigrant communities.

These are the burial places of a people who could not return home, even if they wanted to.

In fact, even a short walk among the Armenian gravestones of Evergreen evokes an absent geography, left behind but never entirely forgotten.

In this peaceful Detroit cemetery, we find ourselves moving from village to village, city to city across the former Ottoman Empire: a record of places forcibly abandoned and lives permanently altered.

Sometimes, the Armenian families who remembered their loved ones were not content even to simply name a city or town of origin.

Below are just a handful of gravestones that go a step further, emphasizing that the deceased was a native resident of a particular city or region (in these cases, Evereg and Sepasdia). There can be no mistake where these people were born:

All of these migrants and refugees longed for something, and that longing was not always the same. Likewise, the gravestones of these different communities chose to look backwards--and forwards--in different and complicated ways. Some, like the Armenians, sought to carry the cities they left behind with them, even in death. Others, such as the Sephardic Jewish community, at times simply wished to stress a shared past that both predated and outlived their experiences in the Ottoman Empire, placing Sephardic experience upon a much broader historical horizon. Still others, such as the Greeks of Metro Detroit, looked back in public places only very selectively.

These communities, like these gravestones, are rarely studied alongside one another. And yet, as we have seen here, the gravestones from one community actually help to clarify the conventions, the feelings, the hopes, and the memories of other communities, rendering them legible today, even though not all speak the same languages of remembrance. These gravestones ought to be read as distant interlocutors with one another, speaking at times a shared language in English, and at other times in less congruent tongues.

After all, in most of these examples, it only takes a short drive or walk to travel from one community's burial site to another, or from one language to another. The multilingual cemeteries of Metro Detroit invite us to remember different peoples who were sometimes uneasy neighbors in life, and yet still reside near one another in death.