Mausoleum

Mausoleum (pronounced maw-suh-lee-uhm or maw-zuh-lee-uhm)

(1) A stately and magnificent tomb or a building containing tombs (a burial place for the bodies or remains of many individuals, often of a single family, usually in the form of a small building).

(2) In casual use, a large, gloomy, depressing building, room, or the like.

(3) As one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, the tomb erected at Halicarnassus in Asia Minor in circa 353 BC.

1375–1425: From the late Middle English mausoleum, from the Latin mausōlēum, from the Ancient Greek Μαυσωλεῖον (Mausōleîon), from Μαύσωλος (Maúsōlos) (the tomb of satrap of the Persian empire and ruler of Caria, built at Halicarnassus in Asia Minor in circa 353 BC and one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World).  The general use to describe "any stately burial-place" (now usually one designed to contain a number of tombs) is from circa 1600.  Synonyms include burial vault, cemetery, coffin, monument, crypt, sepulcher, catacomb & grave.  Mausoleum is a noun and mausolean is the adjective; the noun plural forms are mausoleums or mausolea, the former now most prevalent.  Although “tomb” is now more common, mausoleum has long been used to refer to any large, above-ground tomb.

Mausoleum at Halicarnassus (1886), engraving by Frederick Knab (1865-1918).

The Μαυσωλεῖον τῆς Ἁλικαρνασσοῦ (Mausoleum at Halicarnassus) was one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World.  Built between 353-350 BC in Halicarnassus on the coast of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey), it was destroyed by a number of earthquakes from the twelfth to fifteenth century; when finally if fell, of the seven wonders from Antiquity, only the pyramids at Giza remained.  The name Mausolus  translates as “much blessed” and his wife Artemisia II of Caria was also his sister, something far from unknown at the time.  Nominally a satrap of the Achaemenid Empire, Mausolus was the ruler of Caria between 377–353 BC) having inherited the throne from his father Hecatomnus who became king after assassinating the previous Satrap Tissaphernes, something also far from unknown at the time and since.

The Valle de los Caídos (Valley of the Fallen) is a Roman Catholic basilica and mausoleum which lies in the Cuelgamuros Valley near Madrid.  When built, Generalissimo Francisco Franco (1892-1975; Caudillo of Spain 1939-1975) proclaimed the structure to be a "national act of atonement" and reconciliation.  On a monumental scale, the grounds are 5.25 square miles (13.6 km²) of Mediterranean woodlands and granite and towering over all is a 500 foot (150 m) high Christian cross, still the tallest on Earth and visible 20 miles (32 km) away.  Construction began in 1940, almost as soon as Franco took control of the state and it took some eighteen years to built, the inauguration ceremony held in 1959.  It was partly built by political prisoners of the regime but, in a nice touch, it was noted that in exchange for their labour, they received some remission of their sentences.

Something of a Valhalla of the south, for decades, of the forty-thousand-odd interred dead from both sides in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939), the most controversial corpse in the place was that of Franco himself, the Caudillo laid to rest there upon his death in November 1975 although, in a political irony, he was the only one there who didn’t actually die during the civil war.  There were objections to that but, because the mausoleum is also a basilica, under the rules of the Church, he’s anyway entitled to a place because of his role in “building the church”, a double irony being Franco himself specified he be buried elsewhere.  It was the government’s decision to place his body in the Valley of the Fallen and that ensured the structure would both become a shrine for those who venerate his memory and an ongoing controversy.  Although slowly fading from living memory into history, the civil war and the subsequent Franco years remain a fault-line in Spanish politics.  Successive governments have had their own plans variously to resolve or gloss-over the issues from those decades but it wasn’t until 2019 that Franco’s body was exhumed and taken to Madrid for re-burial.

Adolf Hitler visiting Napoleon's sarcophagus in Les Invalides, Paris, June 1940.

Hitler made only one visit to Paris, less as a victorious warlord and more as a tourist looking at the architectural highlights.  From years of somewhat haphazard study, Hitler was well acquainted with the buildings of the city and genuinely knowledgeable about details such as the interior fittings of the Paris Opera House but told his architect: “The moment in Paris where I saluted Napoleon's tomb was one of the proudest of my life.”  Hitler had always intended a mausoleum for himself in Linz, the centrepiece of which would be a Napoleonic sarcophagus in the centre of a Pantheon-like structure with an oculus directly above, exposed to the elements and thus “directly linked to the universe."  He made a number of sketches, all predictably in the classical style and distinguished mostly by their massive dimensions.

There is an urban myth that the chamber in which Napoleon's sarcophagus is placed was designed in such as way that if seen from the lower lever, the viewer must look-up as if in awe and if seen from above, one must bow.  However, Les Invalides was completed in 1706 and the two levels of the chapel were included so King might attend Mass with his soldiers; the lower level for soldiers & patients, the upper for the royal court.  Only in 1861 was the chapel converted to a mausoleum after Napoleon’s body was returned by the British, almost half a century after his death.