Cillín
A cillín (from the Irish language, with the literal meaning "little cell", "little churchyard" or "little burial ground"; plural cillíní[1]), was a historical unconsecrated burial place in Ireland for children unbaptised at the time of death.[2] Suicides, shipwrecked sailors, strangers, urepentant murderers and their victims were also sometimes buried there—they were used for "infants and other ambiguous categories of individual".[3] Some of them are more than a thousand years old. Ancient pagan burial practices were sometimes later co-opted by Christianity.[3]
The word cillín is a common element in Irish place names, often anglicised as Killeen.[4] An alternative meaning of cillín indicates a small church, from the diminutive form of Template:Lang-ga, meaning church. The word is thought to come from the Template:Lang-la, meaning little church or oratory.[3] Another meaning for the word cillín is "cell" as in prison cell or monastic cell (many placenames are derived from the cell of a local monk/saint).
Sometimes these graveyards were called lisín, a diminutive form of the Irish term lios for a ringfort.[5][6] Also lisín leanbh as a variant form.[7]
List of cillíns
- Carrowkeel, County Galway.
- Corcullen, Moycullen, County Galway.
- Many others may easily be found marked on Irish Ordnance Survey maps.
External links
- Cillíní: historical and doctrinal background, cillini.org
- The forgotten dead: The cillíní and disused burial grounds of Ballintoy, County Antrim, Ulster Journal of Archaeology, Third Series, Vol. 58, 1999
- The Tradition of Separate Burials in Ireland: Cilliní and Place, by Emma Pankey, cola.unh.edu
- Böll’s artist son revisits sites where Achill’s unbaptised buried, The Irish Times, May 3, 2014
References
- ^ The Irish term cillín is the diminutive form of cill. See entry cill, at tearma.ie
- ^ Cillín. Placenames Database of Ireland. Retrieved: 2011-01-10.
- ^ a b c The origins of the Irish Cillin: the segregation of infant burials within an early medieval enclosure at Carrowkeel, Co. Galway. Brendon Wilkins. Paper presented to the Theoretical Archaeology Group, Columbia University, 2008.
- ^ Killeen. Placenames Database of Ireland. Retrieved: 2011-01-10.
- ^ lisín, tcd.ie
- ^ See entry lios, at tearma.ie
- ^ Some graveyards are listed here: Lisín na Leanbh - Lisheennalannov, galwaylibrary.ie