Memorial to Va. Tech shooting victims to be unveiled

MORGANTOWN, W.Va.

Two years after the massacre at Virginia Tech, a new memorial has taken shape. This one is a 14.5-foot pillar that weighs 600 pounds and took nearly 200 hours to carve, by hand, from white oak.

The hunk of honey-colored artwork, which will be installed in front of Cheatham Hall in Blacksburg, Va., and unveiled sometime this summer, is the work Levente Denes, a visiting forestry professor at West Virginia University.

Denes, a Transylvania native, was a research associate at WVU on April 16, 2007, and was deeply moved by news of the slayings. Almost immediately, he began thinking that a Hungarian sculpture called a kopjafa would be a suitable monument to the 32 victims of student Seung Hui-Cho, who also took his own life.

The posts were originally used to mark graves in cemeteries, but Denes says in the last few decades, they have been placed at battlefields and other venues.

Historians say kopjafas were being erected in the region now known as Hungary to as far back as 896 A.D., according to a news release fom West Virginia University. They're also found throughout Transylvania, an area in Romania that was once part of Hungary. The sculpture's name means "jousting pole."

Generally, they have no inscription.

"Instead, the carvings denote every important detail about the deceased, such as blood relation, age, sex, marital and social statuses, occupation and cause of death," Denes said.

The Virginia Tech kopjafa has no names; rather, it has symbols including stars and crosses, which are symbols of death and rebirth in many cultures.

"This," Denes says, "is the biggest carving I've ever created."