At the Moscow Variety Theater, during the reconstruction of the roadway, ancient gravestones were discovered. The photographs show granite slabs with the inscriptions “born…”, “died…” and on one of the slabs there are a couple of dates dating back to the eighteenth century. Most likely these were curbs or some other elements removed during the improvement of the road on the Bersenevskaya embankment.
It is not surprising that at some time gravestones were used in economic activities, but I have this question …
Why is there an inscription on the end of the headstone? Maybe these are some kind of training stones? I don't quite imagine how such a tombstone in a cemetery could look like.
Some have noticed that there are no "ep", "yat" and other old letters. They hint at a remake also because of the fonts.
It must be understood that once the use of cemetery monuments in road construction was the norm. Today, in the ancient cities of Europe - for example, Prague - you can walk along the former gravestones. For paving in 1985, slabs from the Jewish cemetery were used here. The local community has repeatedly asked for the monuments to be handed over to them, but the city hall has repeatedly refused.
The practice of reusing granite in road construction in Moscow was normal in the 1920s and 1930s.
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But an interesting story happened in 2017 in Samara. During the replacement of the curbs, a part of the tombstone of the divisional commander of the Red Army Nikolai Shchors was found there. An accidental passer-by in the area of work saw a slab on which the inscription was clearly visible: “N. A. Shchorsu. He fell in battle near Korosten on August 30, 1919 . It turned out that the cemetery, where the grave of Shchors was, was closed in 1926. The slabs were taken for the curbstone, and the churchyard itself was leveled to the ground to build a factory there.
