Slate
February 28, 2011
After spending most of their lives in the United States and raising their family here, my grandparents moved back to Greece in the 1990s for their retirement. They settled in Athens, where their children (including my father) would visit them. When they passed away, we had funeral services in the local church, honoring their memory with prayers and bundles of flowers. None of us anticipated that—in 2011, in a First World country—a combination of government and state-church policies would lead to the desecration of their graves.
The Greek Orthodox Church believes that the body, as the "temple of the spirit," must be buried whole to make resurrection possible. Yet with land a valuable resource in Greece, the state requires the recycling of cemetery space. Some permanent plots are still available—but they can cost up to 150,000 euros (more than $200,000). If you can't afford this extravagance, you must rent a grave, and only for a maximum of three years. By law, once that time is up, a relative must appear at the gravesite to witness a cemetery worker (no priest is present) dig up the grave, exhume the body (often not fully decomposed), pry it from the coffin, and then collapse the bones into a container roughly the size of a shoebox for storage in a communal ossuary.
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