When half of the population lives in one city, where do you bury the dead?

Fresh plants and a lit candle -- someone was here today.

The students all have class during the week (every day!) so the weekends are our really big field trip times.  Today we went to the Agora, the Acropolis Museum, some shopping in Plaka and then we split up.  I (Leslie) went with 3 others to the Protonekrotaphio (the main cemetary of Athens, like Pere LaChaise in Paris or Highgate in London) where all the notables are buried.  We also went to the National Gardens.

Inside a family crypt.  It is like a little chapel.

 The Nekrotaphio was utterly fascinating.  There has been a lot written about traditional Greek burial customs, and I've read it all.  The customs are so different than what we do in the US, and maybe are more humane than ours.  Quick summary:  The family takes care of the body, washes it, and dresses the person.  The body is taken to the cemetary and buried, with much emotion -- in the past you could even hire professional mourners.  Then you have regular obligations to the dead person that lessen over the first three years:  daily the first 40 days, then periodically the first year, then on particular holidays after that.  You bring an offering of food, clean the grave, light an oil lamp, and chat with the person.  You bring the news.  In return, perhaps your loved one visits you in dreams.  What I like so much is that there isn't the sharp distinction between life and death; there is a slow shift.  Death is a process, not a moment. 

Then, after three years (again, this is traditionally, and I don't know how much it happens in Athens), you dig up the bones, wash them in wine, and inspect them.  If they are clean, you deposit them in the village ossuary, and they become essentially part of the village ancestors, bones mingling with everyone else's.  If they are not, there is some obligation that needs to be fulfilled.  The bones are reburied, then dug up later and reinspected once the obligation has been cleared.  You don't buy a gravesite, you rent one.

Tomb with a photograph of its occupant.

Photographs are common on the tombs, which makes the occupant much more real for visitors; you get a sense here of Mom in the photograph above.  But I don't think the point of the custom is to make visitors feel pity.  I think the point is to help visualize the person when you are talking to them.

The dead are humanized and death is made real through these customs.  You touch the body and the bones, giving yourself visceral understanding of what has happened.  In our culture, the body is whisked away as fast as possible, and some family members may never see the body.  In a culture where parents and children can live apart, so that they are already primarily known as disembodied voices, lacking the sight and feel of the body can make it very hard to process a death. 

All of this was in my head when I was visiting the nekrotaphio. I know what I read was done in the past, in villages, but I've no idea what they do in Athens, and this is the only modern cemetary I've seen, so I'm very curious.  5 million people in Athens, and they are crammed in the valley and hillsides.  Where would you bury the dead?  In the Nekrotaphio the graves are mostly family graves, so clearly people are buried tightly together... too tightly for lots of coffins. 

Family grave with more buried here than could possibly fit.

Then there were other things:  Is the picture below for cremations or is it an ossuary of sorts?  Not sure. 

Cremations?

Finally, there was the strangest thing we saw.  We were wandering around on a hillside in the cemetary, and were trying to find our way down.  We followed a path and found ourselves going down a staircase near a sheer drop... to hundreds of boxes of bones.  We know they were boxes of bones because some were open, and you could see skulls and bones.  Each box was about the length of a man's leg bone, and about a foot or so tall.  Some had photographs on them; one had a flower-holder, as if at some point they were visible.  They seemed to be being stored in these boxes, but not so carefully as several were open to the elements.  I've no idea what to make of that.

They seemed to be about the size of the squares in the picture I thought might be for cremations, and some had pictures and one even had a holder for flowers, so they might well be.  No idea what this was:  a storage  area for those skeletons whose families had finished paying the rent?

I've centered an open box on one of the rows towards the front.  You can see the round skull and the other bones beneath.