Death and Life

I've blogged before twice about my trips to the Protnekrotafeio, the big national cemetery in Athens. I go every year to see what is happening with the bone boxes. This year it was pretty well cleaned up, with just a few open boxes.  I decided to stretch myself again. I'd looked up the cemetery and found that there was a Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic section to it, and decided I'd find it.  I went with students, as I always do, because I like to think about the differences between American and Greek attitudes and customs related to death.  The combination of my long perspective and research with their fresh eyes is always useful.

This time I was primed in a different way, with conversations in class about Greek emotionality.  As the students and I noticed the photographs on nearly every grave, and the extensive text, and the images of beloved activities inscribed onto the graves, I connected to the observation that Greeks seem to express and perhaps even feel emotions we don't.  One student had talked to a Greek student who gave her a list of words to describe nuances of emotion that they have vocabulary for in Greek but not in English.  Another talked about the emotion and expressiveness with which Greeks speak (loud, passionate voices, broad gestures).  The cemetery seemed to be another place where in the US emotions are buttoned up and in Greece they are let out.  Details of the cemetery seem to encourage visitors to connect emotionally and perhaps even express their emotions.

Evidence of daily visits: potted plants with soil moist to the touch and a lit oil lamp.

This is hard to see-- in an abandoned grave, a small ceramic rabbit.  This must have housed a child.

So domestic -- this one has a pergola like someone's back terrace.

Not Greek, but incredibly touching. His wife was 86 when she died, and he wanted to memorialize his eternal adoration.

The Protestant section is not more uniform, but it is certainly less personalized than the Orthodox section.

I had made the observation in previous years that our cemeteries are excessively orderly:  neat rows of similar types of monuments (Arlington Cemetery is the epitome with its rows of identical crosses), manicured lawns, minimal information about the dead.  Greek cemeteries are sometimes orderly (particularly graves connected with war), but mostly not.  There is little uniformity and a lot of information about the inhabitants.  I've written about that multiple times, but this time I made a different connection:  about our willingness to feel painful emotions.  The Greek graveyards I've been to are striking in the emotions they stir, even for an outsider.  You connect to the inhabitants through their pictures, the information about them, or personal objects left there.  You have to remember that these were real people who lived and were loved. The connection begs you to feel grief over them.  I don't think our cemeteries ask you to grieve.  Remember, perhaps, but there is so little information, it is hard to connect.

These are from Monemvasia, a relatively new graveyard.  Here are pictures of a woman as a young woman and as she was closer to her death.  You see her live lived in the contrast.

An unbelievable view.

Another one with items that invoke pathos:  the informal picture of the young man who died in his 20s, the personal items in the windowbox...

  It made me connect to other conversations the students and I have had about Americans needing alcohol to let go and connect with each other, where the Greeks can find "kefi" regardless of alcohol.  About Americans who really like to communicate through social media which allows for editing, presentation of the "best self" and distance in relationships even while connecting people, whereas in Greece the Greek students we ask have been shocked at the idea that you don't call your closest friends daily at least, and "have coffee", which lasts a minimum of 2 hours, very often.  Then we went to see a performance of Elektra, and everyone was startled by the amount of physicality between brother and sister.  After the cemetery, I suddenly saw the play as realistic in the expressiveness of emotion, the amount of intense feeling that was happening.  I had the startling realization that maybe we are buttoned up tight emotionally and socially compared to Greeks. I think we might not only not express as much emotion, but we might not even allow ourselves to feel it.  I'm still thinking about this.