Cemeteries are multidimensional cultural and spatial entities where memory, architecture, and ritual converge. In the Greek context, they reveal a dual nature that reflects both monumental heritage and living social practice. Urban cemeteries, often inactive within the expanding city, function as ‘urban voids of memory’. Despite their extraordinary wealth of funerary sculpture and architectural expression, they frequently remain isolated enclaves or as repositories of past social and religious values but detached from contemporary daily life. By contrast, rural cemeteries retain their vitality as public spaces embedded in village life. Through ritual practices such as tomb cleaning, lamentations, offerings of food, and commemorative gatherings, they sustain a living relationship between the community and its dead, transforming the cemetery into a site of continuity and collective identity. This duality highlights the distinctive position of Greek cemeteries within Southern Europe. Unlike Northern European cemeteries, which are often harmonized with natural landscapes and ecological concerns, Southern examples emphasize monumentality, geometric order, and symbolic references to antiquity. Greek cemeteries thus operate simultaneously as sites of religious devotion, architectural landscapes of memory, and social arenas where identity is materially inscribed and ritually enacted. The purpose of this paper is to analyse Greek cemeteries, in both urban and rural contexts, as complex urban and social cells. Through comparative analysis and field observations, the study argues for their reinterpretation not merely as places of burial, but as vital public spaces where past and present, memory and community, converge.