A city cemetery is the most detailed archive it leaves in the open air

Almost everything in a cemetery is dated, which is rare

Most of what a visitor can see in a city is undated. A building might be from any of three centuries, a street name might be recent or ancient, and a district’s character is the sum of changes nobody wrote down. A graveyard is different, because nearly every object in it carries a year.

That makes it a rough but honest timeline of the population. The distribution of surnames, the languages used, the professions people thought worth carving, the religious symbols and their gradual replacement by secular ones — all of it’s anchored to dates, so change can be measured rather than guessed at.

The limits are worth stating plainly. A monument records the people who could afford one, and the poor are largely absent from the visible record even where they are physically present in the ground. What survives is skewed towards the prosperous, and reading it as a portrait of a whole city would be a mistake.

Cemeteries moved out of the centre for public health reasons

For a long time burial in most European cities happened in churchyards inside the walls, which worked while populations were modest and failed badly when they were not. By the later eighteenth century intramural burial was being restricted or banned in one country after another on sanitary grounds.

What replaced it was a new kind of place: a large landscaped cemetery on the edge of the built-up area, laid out with avenues and planting, and run as an institution rather than as an extension of a parish. Père Lachaise in Paris, opened in 1804, became the model that a great many cities followed.

Because those grounds were sited at the edge, and cities kept growing, the majority are now well inside the built-up area and surrounded by later housing. That is why a nineteenth-century cemetery is so often a large mature green space in a dense district, and why it functions as a park whether or not anyone intended it to.

A stone records a trade, a language and sometimes a disaster

Occupations carved on monuments give a direct reading of what a city did for a living, and the sequence changes as industries arrive and disappear. Ship’s masters in a port, mine officials in a coalfield, railway servants along a main line, merchants in whatever commodity built the place — the vocabulary is specific and it dates itself.

Language and script are the clearest signal of migration. Separate sections or separate grounds for different communities, inscriptions in a language no longer heard in the streets outside, or a shift from one language to another within a single family plot across three generations, are all common and all readable at a glance.

Clusters of dates are the sombre part. A run of burials concentrated in a few months, particularly of children, usually marks an epidemic, a flood, a mining accident or a wreck, and local historical societies have generally established which. It is one of the few places where a statistical fact is visible as an object.

War graves are deliberately different and the difference is the point

Military cemeteries maintained by national commissions look unlike civil ones because uniformity was a founding principle: identical headstones regardless of rank or wealth, standard planting, standard dimensions. That was argued about bitterly when it was adopted, since families wanted individual memorials.

The result is that these sites read as institutions rather than as accumulations, and they are maintained to a standard no municipal cemetery could sustain. They are also spread across the countries where the fighting happened rather than the countries the dead came from, which is why they appear in unexpected places.

Visiting them is normal and generally welcomed, and registers at the entrance are provided precisely so that people can find an individual grave. Quiet is the only real expectation. Some are enormous and some hold a few dozen, and the small ones on the edge of a village are frequently the more affecting.

These are working places, not attractions, and the etiquette follows

Burials continue in most city cemeteries, so at any hour you may be sharing the place with a funeral or with a family visiting a recent grave. Keeping away from a gathering, keeping voices down and not photographing people are the whole of the etiquette, and none of it needs a sign.

Practicalities vary more than you would expect. Many cemeteries close at dusk and lock their gates, some charge for entry to a famous section, several require modest dress, and in some traditions there are conventions about which paths to use or about washing hands on leaving. Local signage is usually clear.

The most rewarding way to visit is without a target. Looking for one famous grave turns a cemetery into a scavenger hunt and you learn almost nothing; walking a couple of avenues and reading whatever presents itself gives you the trades, the languages and the shape of the city’s last two centuries.