“Towards the ignored paths of Eden”: An intimate chronicle of a melancholic man

“Hacia las sendas ignoradas del Edén”: crónica íntima de un melancólico

In the 19th century romantic ideas emerged in Europe, but it was in South America that they found fertile ground to put down roots. Soon, the nostalgia and melancholy of Romanticism permeated the writers and cultural life of the United States of Colombia, but also left a mark on some people who had approached these ideas. This journalistic chronicle exposes the suicide of Francisco y Orjuela, arrested in the prison of Salamina in 1884, which at that time was part of the Sovereign State of Antioquia. Orjuela composed, as suicidal notes, some poems that reflect his melancholy and nineteenth-century romantic influence, but also nostalgia for a love harmed by jail bars. Here is the journalistic reconstruction, based on the original criminal summary, of his last moments, that also portray a society that was still marked by the process called “Antioquian colonization”.