The authorities of the suburbs of Paris did not accept money from Moscow for the maintenance of the Russian cemetery

The authorities of the suburb of Paris, the city of Sainte-Genevieve-de-Bois, did not accept money from Moscow for the maintenance of the Russian part of the local communal cemetery. This can lead to reburial in the plots of the new deceased. The newspaper Le Monde writes about it.

There are 5,220 graves in the Orthodox part of Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois, among the buried are prominent representatives of the Russian emigration: writers and poets Ivan Bunin, Zinaida Hippus, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, Nadezhda Teffy, Alexander Galich and Gaito Gazdanov, artist Konstantin Korovin, participants of the White Movement , Soviet non-returning dancer Rudolf Nureyev and other famous people.

Now this part of the cemetery looks abandoned, according to Le Monde. Since 2005, the Russian government has taken over the maintenance of graves and the lease of plots for the dead, whose burials are not cared for by their relatives. This stopped after the beginning of the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

The material says that the lease period for 22 plots in the Russian part of the cemetery expired in an hour. However, the release of seats will continue over time. In addition, about half of the buried ones are in a dilapidated state and need to be restored, but due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the war, the project was abandoned.

After the city refused money from Moscow, the Committee for the Care of Russian Orthodox Burials in Sainte-Genevieve-des-Bois, which was monitoring the graves, began to look for other sources of funding, the material says. The City Hall did not comment on the article for Le Monde journalists.