The scale here is hard to take in. Twenty-seven thousand monuments form streets and districts of their own, a parallel city laid out for the dead. Its central gate opens on Kavkasou Street, where the boulevards of Thebes and Petros Ralli meet, and from there the rows of graves run on toward the boundaries of neighbouring municipalities. Several well-known Greeks rest among the countless others, but the cemetery's real character is in its ordinariness, the sheer democratic sweep of a place that holds an entire population of lives once lived in the surrounding neighbourhoods.

In the northwestern corner, where the edges of Nikaia, Korydallos, Agia Varvara, and Aigaleo all draw close, lies a Jewish cemetery, the second burial ground of the Jewish community of Athens. Its presence speaks to a community with deep roots in the city and a history marked by terrible loss. Greek Jewry was devastated during the Second World War, and a cemetery is among the most enduring things a community keeps. To set aside this ground, and to maintain it, is an act of continuity, a refusal to let memory be erased along with the people it honours.

This is not only a place of natural death. Within the cemetery stand monuments to the victims of two wartime atrocities committed nearby during the German occupation. The Executions of Kokkinia and the Aigaleo massacre took the lives of civilians in the working-class districts that surround this ground, ordinary people swept up in the violence of occupation and reprisal. To bury them and then to raise a marker over them is to insist that their deaths be remembered and named. The cemetery becomes, in these corners, a witness as much as a resting place.

The cemetery does not stand apart from the world. It is woven into the fabric of Nikaia, with the municipal gymnasium, a sports hall, and the General Hospital of Nikaia close at hand, so that schoolchildren, athletes, and the sick all pass within sight of its walls each day. There is something fitting in that nearness. The dead are not exiled to a distant field but kept near the rhythm of ordinary life, in a district that has known both the quiet of everyday loss and the sharper grief of history.