The Archeology and Museums area of the Dénia City Council has organized the guided route Dying to Dénia. Necropolis, maqbars and cemeteries. It will be on Saturday, November 4 and Sunday, November 5, with the aim of bringing citizens, and visitors, closer to the funeral rituals that our ancestors have built throughout history.
The walking route is scheduled at 11:00 a.m., departing from Valgamediós Square. Prior registration is required by calling 96 642 02 60, from Tuesday to Sunday, from 10:00 a.m. to 13:00 p.m.
The entourage will begin the funeral journey with the first sign of our city, the collective burial, dated 5.000 years ago, in a cave on the hill that constitutes the omphalos of our geography and on which, many centuries later, Iberians and Romans would settle. and Muslims, and where the town of Dénia would be founded: the castle.
The procession will approach the space and time of the Roman necropolis, its tombs and funerary epigraphy; in the tombs of the Visigothic Dénia and in the Islamic cemeteries, maqbars, where the remains of poets, philosophers and who knows whether Mujahid, the great king of the Taifa of Daniya, rest.
Afterwards, he will stop to contemplate, from the perspective that time offers, the cemeteries after the Christian conquest, the moat of the town's church and the crypts of the city's churches, to shed a ray of light on this aspect that remains in darkness.
The funeral pomp will conclude in the cemetery, whose foundation dates back to 1843, 180 years ago. Josefa Morand Cardona, representative of one of the families with the greatest social impact, left 4.000 pesetas in her will to create a suitable funerary site where the prosperous and bourgeois Dénia of the second half of the XNUMXth century would be buried. Since then, illustrious men and women, patrons, politicians and merchants rest in sumptuous pantheons, where the iconography reflects ideologies or professions and other interesting aspects of the lives of those people who marked an entire era.
A walk through the garden spaces of the cemetery will allow us to get closer to mournful events such as the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, the executions of the War of '36 and the repression that occurred, or those related to National Socialism. But also, naming characters from our most beloved intrahistory such as Carmen Martí Palop, the first female councilor of the Dénia city council in 1925; Mercedes Colveé, sculptor; or the historian Chabàs; the painter Domingo Llorens or the tenor Cortis, artists, teachers or industrialists, whose life, and death, constitutes a unique source of information to learn first-hand about our contemporary history.
