Bone Boxes

We are used to bee boxes (portable hives that are brought in to the benefit of both the apiarst and the farmer), but bone boxes are something else.  I went on one of my favorite field trips this week to the Protonekrotafeio (First Cemetery).  I've been gradually letting the students do more travel on their own, but I really wanted to go on this trip because of the bone boxes.  I was talking a Greek friend who lives in Athens who confirmed that the custom of renting a grave for 3 years and then digging up the bones and moving them to an ossuary is still the norm (though now the reason given is about space).  In a village, if the flesh wasn't completely decomposed, that meant that there was some unfinished business that needed to be taken care of, but here, the bones are simply moved to the part of the cemetery with better soil to finish their business.  It sounds gruesome to American ears, but I wonder if it isn't psychologically healthy to have final confirmation three years after a loved one's death that the person is really and truly gone.  Death is so unimaginable that perhaps one needs a visceral experience to truly accept it.  I actually really like the Greek death rituals and found them helpful when I lost my mom (I spent the second year after her death in Greece).

Bone Boxes 2011

The bone boxes 2012

The boxes are stacked up, some still with photos of the inhabitant on the outside, some left open to the elements.  Are they people who were abandoned by their families and never dug up?  But 3 years isn't a long time... Are they people whose relatives emigrated and couldn't care for them?  Is this the "village ossuary" for Athens?

These same boxes were open last year.

This is the most startling  box.  It is on top of a large pile, so perhaps the caretakers can't see that  it is open?

Apartments surround the cemetery, and the boxes are just on the other side of the church at the entrance.  People were looking at us from the church (there was a funeral happening on our way out), but I don't think they had any idea of what we were looking at.