"In the holidays I had to go to the Eastern part of Latvia, to Alūksne region. As I love car trips, I always choose the longest way and at this time I decided to make extra 100 km and to visit Rūjiena and Valka. To say the truth, I had never been there, so the trip could be considered as a tour, but it had also some additional goals - I had an idea to visit Jeru cemetery near Rūjiena that previously was called - Krievu kapi i.e. Russian cemetery, because there the Orthodox believers of Rujiena vicinity were buried. There I hoped to discover the grave of Mārtiņš Bērziņš, and I was rather sure that the Priest Kārkliņš should be buried there also. The inscriptions on their headstones could bring some information on them, I hoped.

I should add for those who joined ROOTS recently that both persons were mentioned in the previous discussion concerning the life of Nikolajs Bērziņš who was the grandfather of Neil Foley's wife. The main problem with N.Bērziņš genealogy is that he (and his father) was an Orthodox believer and the Orthodox records are not easy to find.

In Valka I planned to have a walk through the Cimzes cemetery that once was called Lugaži cemetery, and where Nikolajs Bērziņš was buried. To find the grave of N.Bērziņš here was a quite logical idea because Neil Foley sent obituary to our newsgroup and it was made available in the Website ROOTS=SAKNES. This obituary informed that N.B. was buried here.

I sometimes visit Latvia's cemeteries. Some of them live an active life, some of them seem to be abandoned and forgotten, as, for example, the Jewish cemetery in Smiltene, or the Polish cemetery in Preili.

The first impression on the Orthodox cemetery in Rūjiena is that it was once abandoned and now the people there try to renovate it. There were several places in this cemetery where a group of graves were marked on a flat area. Green rectangles of graves and black paths between them, all identical like at a mass grave - no crosses, no flowers. Small wooden rods with names (sometimes only the first names) were pinned at some graves. A man I met in this cemetery told me that this cemetery recently came into supervision of an Establishment (in Latvian - pansionats) nearby. Elderly and ill people live there till their death. Then they are buried, of course, and as they usually have no relatives or their relatives have forgotten them, their graves are the most simple possible. The living inhabitants of this institution care on the graves, however, so the graves do not look abandoned. Nobody asks what religion the deceased people once belonged to, and it does not matter that the cemetery once was intended for Orthodox believers. A priest (I do not know of what confession) comes to each funeral and says some appropriate words. I was told that the Establishment recently acquired a plan of old burials of the cemetary and principally it could be possible to study the names of the buried people.

I had no time to search for the responsible person, and I thought that it would be enough to have a walk through this small cemetary and to find the graves of interest. No luck, unfortunately. I did not find the grave of M.Berzins. Maybe he was not buried here, maybe the grave never had a gravestone, though I hoped that his son Nikolajs was well-situated enough to erect a stone.

The grave of Kārkliņš, the Priest, was not found also. Maybe he was buried under the stones the inscriptions on which I could not decipher, or his grave was vandalized, but I still think he should have been buried here, because his colleague - the Priest P.Znamensky, who died in 1870, was."

A picture of the grave of Rev. Peter (Pyotr) Znamensky in Jeru (former Krievu) cemetery of Orthodox believers near Rujiena. A stone with the built-in cast iron cross was once erected on the grave. Unfortunately, the cross was brocken off by vandals, and now it is lent against the stone. I tried to photograph also the inscription on the cross but without success - the lighting in the cemetery was rather bad, and the day was cloudy. The inscription was in Latvian - Rujenes mahzitais Pehter Snamenskij 1820 - 1870 (Priest of Rujiena Peter Znamensky).

The conversion to the Orthodox religion took place here in 1850s, so this Priest was one of the first or even the first Orthodox Priest in this region. There were several Orthodox priests named Znamensky in Livland at the end of the 19th and at the beginning of the 20th centuries. By the way, the name Znamensky belongs to so-called "church names", the names that peasant boys acquired joining a seminary.