Greek death rituals, as John Kiriakou describes them, follow from a constraint of geography rather than of theology. Only about two percent of Greece is arable, and the good land is needed to grow food, so there are almost no cemeteries in the country in the sense understood elsewhere. Instead a grave is rented for five years.[1] His source is a book he found at a flea market or secondhand bookshop, Death Rituals of Rural Greece.[1]
Because the Greek practice does not embalm, the body is placed in the ground for five years and then, on the fifth anniversary of the burial, exhumed by the women of the village together with the village priest. Kiriakou notes the test embedded in the rite: by then the remains should be a skeleton, and “if you’re not just a skeleton by then, that means you went to hell” — in which case the body goes back in the ground.[2]
The skeleton is taken apart, washed with red wine, blessed by the priest, and placed in a small bone box in an ossuary — a bone house — where the boxes sit on shelves. When a new church is built, the bones are taken out and laid beneath its foundations. Asked why cremation is not simply used instead, Kiriakou is definite: “cremation’s forbidden. Strictly forbidden.” Neither he nor his interviewer finds a religious basis for the distinction; his own view is that “some guy one day had a bright idea and said, this is what we’re going to do now as a religion.”[3][4][5]
The ossuary on Rhodes
Kiriakou visits the ossuary in his family’s village whenever he returns to Rhodes. Its keeper is a man he has struck up a friendship with, who — in Kiriakou’s careful phrasing, “the nice way of saying it these days is he’s on the spectrum” — is unable to care for himself and was given the bone house to look after as a job. He lets Kiriakou go through the boxes looking for grandparents and great-grandparents; when he finds one, he photographs the box, opens it, and “give[s] them a kiss on the skull.”[6]
Beneath the ossuary floor is a trapdoor and a space that goes back to the nineteenth century, and no further: “The Turks burned all of our records, so we don’t know really anything about where we come from.”[7]
In an ossuary on the southern tip of the island he found his great-great-grandfather’s brother, a priest, kept above ground rather than buried beneath the church. The family account of his death was that he had been diving for sponges and eaten by a shark; a cousin who shares Kiriakou’s interest in the family genealogy told him it was not true. The Ottoman authorities had executed him for teaching children to speak Greek during the occupation, and thrown his body into the sea, where sharks ate it.[8][9][10]
Cemeteries generally
Kiriakou goes to cemeteries at least weekly, and almost daily when he is overseas, where he finds them more interesting because the customs differ so sharply — an interest that produced Remains of the Day and Whispers in the Dirt.[11][1]