Taphophilia.(dot) Com - Athens looks to Ancients to solve graves crisis

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Athens looks to Ancients to solve graves crisis

Written by DeadGirl
Monday, 14 March 2005
By Harry De Quetteville in Athens 3-13-05 The city of Athens, where ancient Greeks once laid out their fallen heroes on funeral pyres of aromatic cedar wood, is preparing to take on the powerful Orthodox Church for the right to cremate the dead again. Cremation, the traditional send-off for both the modest and the mighty, is banned in Greece because the Church condemns it as "an act of violence against the body". Now a grisly pile-up of corpses in mortuaries has prompted authorities to call for its reintroduction. "The cemeteries are completely full," said Athens's deputy mayor, Katerina Katrivanou. "People call me and ask me to find a tomb for their mothers or their uncles, but I can't. It gives me great pain. The Church tries to convince believers that burial is closer to Christian teachings, but the soil is not decomposing the bodies any more. Cremation is the only solution for us." Greece has long relied on a traditional method to solve overcrowding. Men such as Constantinos Aghas are employed to take up hammer and pickaxe and smash their way into the graves of Greece's recently deceased. He and four colleagues exhume corpses three years and a day after they were buried, returning their bones to relatives before preparing the grave for a new occupant. Nowadays, however, many of the bodies are so fortified by modern medicines and diets that they are not fully decomposed, and have to be reburied. Greece's most prestigious cemetery, which contains former prime ministers and notables, has run out of space, as have others around Athens. Bodies are piling up in mortuary fridges for up to two weeks. Vasiliki Batsari, who is in charge of the 12,500 plots at Athens' First Cemetery, said: "The lack of space is now a very serious problem. There are waiting lists to bury people, and it is getting more difficult to 'unbury' people." Families pay Ã‚Â£700 to rent a grave for three years, and Ã‚Â£30 thereafter to deposit bones in an ossuary. Some Athenians suspect the Greek Church, the only orthodox church to oppose cremation, of less than spiritual motives: priests would forfeit tips for praying over headstones if it were introduced. Even in death, power, contacts and influence can still make the impossible possible. Mrs Batsari said: "Sometimes we get a special call from the Ministry of Culture and then we can find a place for the body. And of course, the famous and powerful are not dug up after three years. They stay forever." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2005/03/13/wath13.xml&sSheet=/news/2005/03/13/ixworld.html

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Taphophilia?

taphophilia (taf′ō-fil′ē-ă)

ORIGIN:
From the Greek words taphos, meaning "tomb" or "sepulcher" and philia, meaning "attraction or affinity to something, in particular the love or obsession with something"

DEFINITION: 1. An excessive interest in graves and cemeteries. 2. A love or fondness for funerals, graves, and cemeteries. 3. In psychiatry, a morbid attraction to graves and cemeteries