Memória e identidade: a narrativa histórica do Cemitério da Glória

Abstract

The Cemitério da Glória carries the importance of having been the first cemetery to appear in the then old Vila de Santo Antônio do Paraibuna, installed in parallel with its development, when it reached the rank of city in 1856. This was the year of delimitation of the land for the Cemetery of Companhia União e Indústria, denounced by the centenary mark of conical stone in oval point at the entrance of the space. Mariano Procópio Ferreira Lage, three years before, founded the Companhia União e Indústria to promote his development projects for the benefit of the said Village. The firm aimed to connect Juiz de Fora to Petrópolis, transporting agricultural products through a highway that would be built by it. In addition, the company also intended to form a colony of immigrants, to boost local agricultural production and flow trade in the region. In order to work in the workshops, Mariano Procópio decides to hire a group of twenty craftsmen in Hamburg. These craftsmen were specialists in the crafts of blacksmith, locksmith, carpenter, cabinetmaker, saddle maker and painter. Since these workers are of Germanic origin and professed Lutheran beliefs, the businessperson foresees the problems he would face with the local Church and installs on the company's properties, a vast land to serve as a cemetery and to bury his subordinates. This, since the holy field of intramural burials did not support the use by individuals who were not of Catholic religion. The arrival of the craftsmen was the prelude to the mass immigration that took place two years later, in 1858. Now, more than ever, the Cemitério da Companhia União e Indústria would have a fundamental practical value. In that year, the immigrants arranged in five boats embarked in Hamburg: Tell, Rhein, Gundela, Gessner and Osnabrück. They came from the Duchy of Schleswig (ancient Danish fief), the County of Holstein, the Kingdom of Prussia, the Grand Duchy of Hessen, the Grand Duchy of Baden and the County of Tyrol in Austria. Of these, the Tyroleans were the largest group, with 26% of the total settlers. Therefore, if we analyze, the number of Tyroleans is higher among the other groups that came in 1858, and the migratory process can be identified as a Tyrolean Immigration, and in this case, the first to take place in Brazil. As the number of Catholic immigrants was also greater, the cult of God through the devotion of Nossa Senhora da Glória was brought by them. In Juiz de Fora, this devotion guaranteed the maintenance of the regional and Catholic identities of the settlers who settled there. Its first manifestation took place at the consecration of the Companhia União e Indústria Cemetery as Nossa Senhora da Glória Cemetery. As soon as chapels appeared in her honor and the entire village of Estação flourished from the settlement of part of those immigrants in the surroundings of the Cemetery. The Cemetery, which is commonly considered a place of intimate relationship with death, began to exercise an opposite relationship: that of giving life to the community that was emerging, keeping the faith of immigrants alive, and keep the flame lit of Catholic and Lutheran traditions. It is in the Cemitério da Glória that the manifestations of the Germanic presence in the city are most expressive. Their religious and linguistic identities, as well as their relationship with death, are lines that intersperse the history of the Cemitério da Glória and the German and Tyrolean Immigration of 1858 in Juiz de Fora.