There are few local committees in Rijeka that have two parishes and two churches as Drenova. In fact, three churches, because the Chapel of All Saints in ancient times was the only church on the Drena in which Holy Mass was served.

Actually, there's more. Namely, the chapel on Veli Vrh, since it was renovated, occasionally serves as a place of pilgrimage, and just before the construction of today's church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel, next to the old parish apartment, there was, and has long since been demolished, a chapel of Our Lady of Mount Carmel.

However, if it is questionable that Drenova is the exception by the number of parishes and churches, by the number of cemeteries it is certainly in the first place!

There are currently three cemeteries in operation at Drenova. There was a fourth, and it's also about the fifth.

Let's start with this, the fifth. In Kablari there is a hamlet Patersko. According to the story of the older Drenovci, it was named after the paterians, members of the Jesuit order who came to Rijeka in 1627. In order to be able to support themselves and undertake their construction ventures, they were given the administration of a spacious Kastav estate, which they managed from 1630 to 1773. It is believed that the area of Patersky was assigned to paters who lived there, worked on the estate and there, as it is said, buried their dead members.

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On the stone frame of the entrance door of the oldest house in Patersko, the year 1698 is carved and a characteristic sign of the Society of Jesus IHS with a cross and three nails, which could be evidence that the patriarchs really lived here, and since they did not have a cemetery anywhere near at that time, it is easily possible that they buried their deceased members on the estate itself.

On the roof of the house there is a sign of the cross as another proof that the patriarchs lived in it. It is interesting that on another house in Benaši there is the same sign on the roof.

The second Drenov cemetery, in fact the first officially, no longer exists today.

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It was located in an area near the building where today's Drenov library is located. It was buried in 2006 at the time of the construction of the University settlement, and the remains were transferred to a joint osario in Kozala.

There is no written record of the exact date the cemetery was opened. As far as I know, Mons. It was Gabriel Bratine in 1837. On the old map from 1842, from the holdings of the State Archives of Rijeka, which they kindly copied and allowed to use for the purpose of this material, you can see a marked cemetery.

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One interesting feature on the map above is the place where Gornja Drenova is marked, approximately in today's area of Brdin and eastern.

On the 1869 Austro-Hungarian map. 1887 also shows the cemetery.

Source: http://mapire.eu

Using the above link, it is possible to compare the map with the planted map of today and we can see that the position really corresponds to the mentioned place of today's Drenov library.

Since, unfortunately, we don't have a single photograph of this graveyard, I asked Alberto Mihich-Bertić, our famous amateur painter, to paint the graveyard for me the way he remembers it. I rely completely on Bertic's excellent memory, so I'm sure that the cemetery looked like this:

The remains of the cemetery are also visible on the plane footage from 1998, where, like Bertićeva Street, you can see the chapel, the last resting place of the parish priest Ivan Cvetko.

The cemetery was used until 1906, when most of the deceased were exhumed and moved to the Old Cemetery.

In 1884, 14 years after his transfer from Drenova, Ivan Cvetko, the founder of the parish of Our Lady of Carmel, was buried at that cemetery. He was a Drenov pastor from 1837 to 1870, when he was transferred. His remains were taken to the so-called Old Cemetery to the tomb of Pastor Mariottini. In 2012, the tombstone was damaged by vandalism and a new one was erected.

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The mentioned Old Cemetery, the third Drenov cemetery, was built in 1903 and is still in operation today.

In the parish book of the Church of Our Lady of Mount Carmel we find the record of the then pastor

Isidore Gudca, who says:

The first burial was at the new cemetery. Lucija Frančetić, 84 years old, 29.12.1903.

In 1914, Ivo Grohovac, poet, journalist and ardent fighter for the Croatian language and national identity of Rijeka, was buried at the Drenova Old Cemetery, and in 1924, Professor Fran Franković; Father of the Magisterium of Istria, first director of the Teacher Training School in Kastav, author of the first Croatian beginner and one of the founders of the Public Reading Room Drenova.

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It is convenient to compare the design of the cemetery from 1902 from the holdings of the State Archives in Rijeka and the drone photograph of Raul Jereb from today.

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On the page of KD Kozala you can find information about all Rijeka cemeteries, updated on 31 December 2019, about the area and the number of buried, so the incidental information that this cemetery has 5560 m2 and that the number of buried 1169.

Gornja Drenova, as we know, in 1924, the border was left without a church, a school and even a cemetery. Ivo Jardas wrote: Podbregon cimitera nimaju, but the dead carry to bury your St. John's womb. Matthew. Today's cemetery on Gornja Drenova, on Orešje, was built in 1940. It is also the final resting place for the Hlača brothers, Ružica Mihić and many NOB fighters, as well as William Štefan, a chronicler of Dreno's customs and history. A little statistic: surface 1699 m2, number of buried 497.

Daina Glavočić writes about the Gornja Drenova cemetery in the monograph of the Kozala Communal Society:

Like most suburban cemeteries, the Gornja Drenova cemetery is located in a valley, a shallow sinkhole, in a karst area, surrounded by a predominantly deciduous forest and a cypress plantation. Almost isolated, in isolation, the Cemetery is surrounded by a low wall with an entrance with an iron gate, and over them is a portal flat beam bearing the inscription - Eternal Rest, and the year of the arrangement of the cemetery in 1940, although the first burial was registered in 1905. (Marija Perušić).     To the right of the entrance is a small simple cottage with a morgue.

The tombs are located on two levels. The central burial field is at a lower level, at the bottom of the sinkhole. The burials were carried out in neat transverse horizontal series of simple bedding graves, and with one series of small, white children's graves. Approximately in the middle of this field is a somewhat wider alley bordered by a cypress plantation. It connects two important points of the boundary line of graves at an elevated level, which are located along the fence wall of the perimeter of the cemetery. At the right end of the alley is the central cemetery stone cross, and on the left is a larger, simple cubic stone monument to the fighters fallen at the very end of World War II in the struggles for the unification of Rijeka with Istria in 1945.

In accordance with the time and social circumstances in which this cemetery was founded, it does not have artistically valuable monuments because during the post-war reconstruction there was no possibility for special artistic design. Only interventions on the renovation of the older tombs and their enclosure with ubiquitous black or red marble slabs are visible.

This cemetery is intended for a smaller local community, only in the city was built without the morgue and is far from a settlement with which it is not connected by urban transport.

On average, only four burials are carried out here per year, so the interest of citizens is turned the new Central City Cemetery Drenova.  

Upper Drenova Cemetery, today

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Finally, the fifth Drenov cemetery, the Central City Cemetery Drenova opened in 1988, is the largest cemetery in the city of Rijeka with as much as 412,000 m2. The number of buried on 31.12.2019 was -13.428.

It is located in the wider area of Obrš, which was once dominated by the All Saints Chapel, built in 1575, which still serves for the last farewell of the deceased.

The cemetery is dominated by a central building with a hall for the funeral of the deceased, with a modern architectural appearance, opposite the old chapel with which it forms an interesting harmony.

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The cemetery also houses the Alley of Defenders on which the fallen defenders of the Homeland War rest.

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