Rest Isn’t Eternal for Most Greeks

ATHENS — The bureaucratic notice came by mail, reminding the family that its three-year lease on the burial plot was expiring. The family was advised to contact the Athens First Cemetery to arrange for exhumation of the deceased.

Lucas Zamanos, a retired banker, answered the summons expecting something more dignified for his late father-in-law than the scene that ensued--a scene still etched in his mind seven years later:

A cemetery worker wearing a surgical mask dug up the grave and, finding the body not fully decomposed, stood on it and pried it from the coffin piece by piece. As Zamanos watched in horror and his wife fainted, the masked man wrapped flesh and bones into a sheet and pushed them in a wheelbarrow to a corner of the cemetery for unceremonious reburial in a shallow, unmarked ditch.

After six months there, the bones were ready to be dug up and moved again--for storage in a vault across town.

The banker went through a new ordeal two years later when his own father died. The route to his final resting place was quicker but covered more miles and involved extraordinary costs and red tape: He was cremated in Poland.

Such is the macabre choice of journeys Greece offers its dead. Although it is unable to provide everyone an affordable plot for permanent burial, the country forbids cremation on religious grounds, the only country in continental Europe with such a ban.

Zamanos and others are leading a crusade against regulations that, in their words, make Greeks “migrants in death.” A bill being drafted by the Socialist government and supported by a majority in Parliament would legalize cremation in the country that claims to have invented the practice thousands of years before Jesus was born.

But the cremation movement is running up against the powerful Greek Orthodox Church, which deems the practice contrary to Greece’s constitutionally recognized state religion. The church, which has baptized more than 90% of Greece’s 10.7 million people, sees the debate as a challenge not only to its political clout but also to its sway over a people trying to reconcile their religious identity with the values of an increasingly unified Europe.

Senior clerics say they no longer object to cremation for the non-Orthodox in Greece. But once crematoriums are built, the clerics say, they doubt that any legal measure can stop Orthodox Christians from using them. Controversy over the practice now centers within the church on whether funeral services should be allowed for members who ignore Orthodox teaching and choose cremation.

The dispute pits Christian tradition against the modern realities of Greece’s overcrowded cemeteries.

According to tradition, widely accepted in Greece for the past 1,500 years, the human body is a temple of God; burying it intact after death is the ideal way to prepare it for the resurrection. Any meddling in the natural process of decay is condemned as a desecration of the temple, an offense against God.

Burial, declares Archbishop Christodoulos, primate of the Greek church, is “the ancient custom of civilized peoples.”

For the Departed, Burial Is Temporary

But according to modern reality, burial in Greece is usually temporary. It’s only the beginning of a process that, in the eyes of many Greeks, desecrates the body in its own way.

“We’re talking about a lack of responsibility for the dead,” said Zamanos, 70, an Orthodox Christian who believes that cremation is something pure and glorious. “Exhumation is humiliating for the deceased. It’s barbaric, beyond tradition.”

To a casual visitor, the First Cemetery, where the banker’s father-in-law was exhumed, looks like a splendid showcase of Greek burial culture--a 42-acre museum of sculptured memorials shaded by tangerine trees. A sailboat piloted by three angels glides over wavelets, all in white marble, atop the tomb of one shipping magnate. An astrology buff’s mausoleum features a colorful mosaic of the zodiac.

“People come often to clean their family plots,” said cemetery administrator Dimitra Kollia, walking among graves topped with fresh flowers and lighted candles. “They need a specific burial space where they can sit, reflect and have some contact with their departed.”

But much of that space is not theirs to keep. “Look at the social differences here,” she said, pointing out that the cemetery has separate sectors for grave owners and renters--the equivalent of rich and middle-class neighborhoods.

Owners pay $18,750 to $118,750 for permanent family plots in the First Cemetery. Renters pay $650 to $1,050 for a three-year burial, with the option to stay up to one year longer at $155 per month. After that, exhumation is mandatory, as it is in most other cemeteries, to make way for new bodies. (Tombstones are recycled into public works; one was mistakenly laid face-up last year as part of a new sidewalk in Athens’ central Syntagma Square.)

As Athens runs out of room for new burial ground, prices for both kinds of plots are rising and renters have begun to outnumber owners. Nearly every family has had to dig up a loved one’s bones and move them to an ossuary, a compact vault that cemeteries rent for about $60 a year.

This, for many Greeks, is an indignity compounded by dread; the overworked soil in most urban cemeteries can no longer decompose a body in three or four years. Many Greeks simply stop paying rent, prompting cemeteries to move abandoned remains to common pits or dissolve them with chemicals.

“It’s a daily tragedy,” Stelios Kanakis, director of the Zografou Cemetery in Athens, said after supervising seven “administrative exhumations” in a single morning--not enough to make way for the 15 burials scheduled that day.

Kanakis interrupted an interview to deflect pressure on him from City Hall on behalf of a corpse languishing in the morgue. “Tell the mayor we have no space!” he shouted into the phone.

Efforts to End Church Ban on Cremation

Orthodox Christian advocates of cremation have seized on the rising costs and repulsive consequences of burial in urging their church to change its position, which is based on tradition rather than sacred doctrine.

“We need a more tolerant stance that can be reconciled with our faith,” said Maria Damanaki, a member of Parliament. “Besides, Greece is in Europe. We cannot appear to be so backward.”

Damanaki wants the Orthodox clergy to follow the Vatican, which favors the Christian tradition of burial but stopped opposing cremation in 1963. Roman Catholic teaching now forbids cremation only when it is meant to show a lack of faith in the body’s resurrection.

All Eastern Orthodox churches ban cremation for the faithful, but the clergy in many countries sometimes ignore the ban and hold funeral rites over ashes or bodies bound for the fire. In such predominantly Orthodox countries as Romania and Bulgaria, cremation became legal under Communist rule, leaving Greece and the isle of Cyprus as the only European countries still forbidding it.

Bulgaria is the most popular venue for Greek cremations. One undertaker in the Greek city of Salonika says he arranges transport to Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, and cremation there for about eight Greeks per month, for a price of $2,500 each.

“You get a priest to perform a funeral rite in Athens, tell him you’re burying the deceased in his native village and go to Bulgaria instead,” said cremation advocate George Vlassis. As for resurrection, those supporting cremation argue that if God can raise the bodies of good Christians to heaven, he can surely figure out how to recompose them from ashes.

Cremation Seen as ‘a Foreign Tradition’

Pro-cremation groups boast 10,000 members. Their movement includes the undertakers union, which believes that the practice will be popular enough to turn a profit, and many prominent Greeks. “I sort of like the idea of having my ashes thrown into the Aegean,” Foreign Minister George Papandreou said in an interview.

Still, no one is predicting that cremation will soon become the norm in a country where many young churchgoers echo the fundamentalism of their elders and reject the practice as “a foreign tradition.”

Yiannis Stavrou, a 25-year-old social anthropology major at Athens University, described how he and some uncles took pleasure in exhuming his grandmother in her village recently, washing her bones with wine and rearranging them to make room for her just-deceased husband in the same grave. The student said the experience brought him closer to her--a feeling he might have missed, he believed, had he watched a cemetery worker do the job.

“Digging up a loved one is a horrible experience only if you are lukewarm in your faith in the resurrection,” he said.

Church officials, likewise, chide Greeks for being squeamish about corpses. More fervent prayer, they suggest, could speed the decomposition of a buried body and minimize the odds of a ghastly exhumation. Some advocate expanding cemeteries upward with catacomb-like vaults to assure every Greek a permanent resting place.

If cremation were to become the norm, fundamentalists say, Orthodoxy might overlook would-be saints. Some Greek churches display mummy-like corpses of venerated saints whose sanctity is based in part on their mysterious resistance to natural decay.

What is most remarkable about this debate--in seminars, televised round tables and newspaper columns--is that it has been blessed by a church that wasn’t so willing to listen when cremation advocates made their case before.

Religious opposition crushed previous efforts to legalize the practice--even when doctors demanded it to speed the disposal of bodies piling up in morgues during World War II and the deadly Athens heat wave of 1987.

“When I was elected and started talking about this issue, they wanted to burn me alive,” quipped Vassiliki Verykaki, who as mayor of an Athens suburb joined a pro-cremation drive in the early 1990s and is active in the latest lobbying effort.

Church Finds Itself in Awkward Position

The government’s agreement to draft a cremation bill has put the church in an awkward position.

Orthodoxy is enjoying a revival, reflected in rising approval ratings and church attendance. Christodoulos, since May 1998 the church’s dynamic leader, says it’s OK for young worshipers to wear miniskirts and body-piercing jewelry during Mass and livens up his sermons with one-liners.

But while he may be more popular than any politician, Christodoulos can hardly afford to challenge a government that pays his clergy’s salaries and has pondered, as recently as last year, a formal separation of church and state. The church’s influence has already been diminished by the introduction, over its objections, of civil marriage and legalized abortion in the 1980s.

The expected advent of cremation is another blow. “The bishops are hypersensitive to any attempt to reappraise tradition because they themselves are so deeply invested in that tradition,” said Nicholas Constas, professor of theology at Harvard Divinity School. “Ultimately, it’s their own power and privileges they’re fighting for here and not so much the fate of the soul in the afterlife.”

Acknowledging the government’s “every right” to legislate free choice, Christodoulos has said the clergy have the same right to “take pastoral measures” against “children who will not obey the mother church.”

“Is now the time for our traditions to be harmed without serious reason?” he asked at a recent church-sponsored seminar. “If we remove this stone today and another stone tomorrow, in the end the house that shelters us will fall on our heads.”

But Christodoulos does not have the last word. The church’s ruling body, the Holy Synod, is to meet in October, and at least one bishop has voiced the dissenting view that there’s no difference between cremation and burial. Church spokesman Theoklitos Koumarianos says the church is listening to its flock.

“The life of the church is not a static thing,” he said. “We cannot ignore the needs and the culture of the people. We do not impose tradition. The church comes and sees what the people want and recognizes it.”