Heart-burial is a type of burial in which the heart is interred apart from the body. In medieval Europe heart-burial was fairly common among the higher echelons of society, as was the parallel practice of the separate burial of entrails or wider viscera: examples can be traced back to the beginning of the twelfth century.[1]Evisceration was carried out as part of normal embalming practices, and, where a person had died too far from home to make full body transport practical without infection, it was often more convenient for the heart or entrails to be carried home as token representations of the deceased.[2] The motivation subsequently became the opportunity to bury and memorialise an individual in more than one location.
Medieval
Notable medieval examples include:
Henry I (d. 1135), whose body was buried in Reading Abbey, but his heart, along with his bowels, brains, eyes & tongue, is interred at the Cathedral in Rouen, Normandy.
Robert the Bruce (d. 1329), whose body lies in Dunfermline Abbey, but whose heart is at Melrose Abbey in Roxburghshire. He wished his heart to rest at Jerusalem in the church of the Holy Sepulchre, and on his deathbed entrusted the fulfilment of his wish to Sir James Douglas. The latter broke his journey to join the Spaniards in their war with the Moorish kings of Granada, and was killed in battle. He had kept the heart of Bruce enclosed in a silver casket hanging round his neck.[3] The heart was subsequently recovered and buried in the Abbey.
Ebrach Abbey, Germany, heart burials of the Bishops of Würzburg: beginning in the 13th century, the bishops of Würzburg had their hearts brought to the monastery in Ebrach (with their entrails going to the Marienkirche, and their bodies to Würzburg Cathedral). About 30 hearts of bishops, some of which had been desecrated during the German Peasants' War, are said to have found their final resting place at Ebrach. The prince-bishop Julius Echter von Mespelbrunn (d. 1617) broke with this tradition and had his heart buried in the Neubaukirche.
Leopold Anton Eleutherius Freiherr von Firmian (d. 1744), Prince-Archbishop of Salzburg, had his heart buried in the chapel of Schloss Leopoldskron, the final palace he commissioned to be built in his lifetime, while his body was interred in the Salzburg Cathedral.[4]
Louis-Charles de France or Louis XVII (d. 1795), uncrowned claimant to the French throne, had his heart removed and placed in a crystal urn in the 1830s, after having been stored in distilled wine before that time. The urn eventually had its formal reburial in 2004 at St Denis Basilica.
Pierre David (d. 1839), mayor of Verviers (initially in the United Netherlands, and afterwards in Belgium), whose heart was removed to be buried separately. Disagreements over type of memorial and funding meant that the heart sat in storage at the city hall for four decades before being interred in a fountain.[5][6][7][8] The heart was rediscovered when the fountain underwent extensive renovation works in 2020.[6]
Frédéric Chopin (d. 1849), composer. Before his funeral, pursuant to his dying wish, his heart was removed. It was preserved in alcohol (perhaps brandy) to be returned to his homeland, as he had requested. His sister smuggled it in an urn to Warsaw, where it was later sealed within a pillar of the Holy Cross Church on Krakowskie Przedmieście, beneath an epitaph sculpted by Leonard Marconi, bearing an inscription from Matthew VI:21: "For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also." Chopin's heart has reposed there – except for a period during World War II, when it was removed for safekeeping – within the church that was rebuilt after its virtual destruction during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising. The church stands only a short distance from Chopin's last Polish residence, the Krasiński Palace at Krakowskie Przedmieście.
Thomas Hardy (d. 1928), novelist and poet. His ashes were interred in Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey, while his heart was buried in his beloved Wessex alongside his first wife. A recent biography of Hardy details the arguments over the decision, and addresses the long-standing rumour that the heart was stolen by a pet cat so that a pig's heart had to be used as a replacement.[9]
Queen Marie of Romania (d. 1938). She requested that her heart should be put inside the jewelry box, that she received from the Romanian noblewomen, when she arrived in Bucharest in 1893, as her first wedding gift from the Romanians, and be placed inside the Stella Maris Chapel at Balchik, her favorite residence. After the Treaty of Craiova and the subsequent occupation of Southern Dobruja by Bulgaria, the heart’s box was brought to Bran Castle, an estate she received as a gift from the people of Brașov after the Great Union. There, her youngest daughter, Princess Ileana, who had inherited the castle from her mother, built a copy of the Stella Maris Chapel and a marble crypt, inside the rock at the castle’s base, where she put the box. After the communists overthrew King Michael, the Royal Family was forced to leave the country, Ileana tried to take the heart into exile with her, but she couldn’t open the marble sarcophagus, thus the heart remained literally in the heart of Romania. In 1968, the director of the museum created after the castle’s nationalization, secretly opened the crypt and took the box to study it, until 1971 when the authorities discovered the desecration, and took the box to the National Museum of History where it remained until 2015. At the wish of the Royal Family, the heart was moved during an official ceremony to Pelişor Castle, and displayed in the Golden Room, where Queen Marie had died. The rest of her body was buried, according to her wish, inside the legendary Argeş Monastery, the necropolis of the Romanian Dynasty, near her husband’s resting place, King Ferdinand I.
Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria (d. 1943). In 1994, his heart was interred in the Rila Monastery. Due to several removals by different regimes, the main portion of his body has gone missing.
In the 1994 movie Legends of the Fall, the character Samuel (Henry Thomas) is killed while serving in the Canadian Army in World War I. His brother (Brad Pitt) cuts the heart out of the body and sends it home to be buried on his father's ranch in Montana.[10]
See also
Herzgruft; a burial chamber that protects 54 urns containing the hearts of members of the House of Habsburg.
Badham, Sally (2019). "Divided in death: the iconography of English medieval heart and entrails monuments". Church Monuments. 34: 16–76.
Bradford, C. A. (1933). Heart Burial. London: Allen & Unwin.
Dru Drury, Godfrey (1927). "Heart burials and some Purbeck marble heart shrines". Proceedings of the Dorset Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club. 46: 38–58.
Dietz, Armin (1998). Ewige Herzen: Kleine Kulturgeschichte der Herzbestattungen. Munich: Medien & Medizin Verlag. ISBN3-8208-1339-X.
Hartshorne, Emily Sophia (1861). Enshrined Hearts of Warriors and Illustrious People. London: Robert Hardwicke.
Warntjes, Immo (2012). "Programmatic double burial (body and heart) of the European high nobility, c.1200–1400: its origin, geography, and functions". In Spiess, Karl-Heinz; Warntjes, Immo (eds.). Death at Court. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz. pp. 197–259. ISBN9783447067607.
Weiss-Krejci, Estella (2001). "Restless corpses: secondary burial in the Babenberg and Habsburg dynasties". Antiquity. 75 (290): 769–80. doi:10.1017/S0003598X00089274. S2CID161843486.
Weiss-Krejci, Estella (2010). "Heart burial in medieval and early post-medieval central Europe". In Rebay-Salisbury, Katharina; Sørensen, Marie Louise Stig; Hughes, Jessica (eds.). Body Parts and Bodies Whole: changing relations and meanings(PDF). Studies in Funerary Archaeology. Vol. 5. Oxford: Oxbow Books. pp. 119–34. ISBN978-1-84217-402-9.
Westerhof, Danielle (2008). Death and the Noble Body in Medieval England. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. ISBN9781843834168.
