In previous essays I’ve written about the importance of grief rituals in the indigenous world, where the souls of the dead go neither to a Biblical heaven nor to a nameless void, but to the Underworld, or the Other World.
Many cultures imagine departing souls as journeying first through a liminal period between the worlds of the living and the dead. Liminal comes from the Greek word for threshold, which also gives us the word Limbo. Those souls are on a mysterious transition prior to being reborn into some new state of being. But the completion of the transformation, as in all initiations, requires the intercession of a greater community of beings who can facilitate the burial – both literal and symbolic – of the old, before the new can appear.
Many myths reflect the belief that death is a process, rather than a single event in time. They tell us that the dead require the focused acts of the living to complete their transition to the other world. But – of equal importance – the survivors also need this process to be completed, because souls who wander in the liminal space between the worlds as ghosts will inevitably cause suffering for the living. This is a common theme in ancient Greece. As Elpenor, one of Odysseus’ lost crewmen, tells him from the underworld,
Don’t abandon me, don’t leave me behind, unwept and unburied, lest I become a visitation upon you from the Gods.
The dead who have not been sufficiently mourned are condemned to haunt their loved ones – those who should have performed the appropriate rites. Such souls are stuck, betwixt and between, unable to conclude the last initiatory process – being welcomed home by their own ancestors.
In rural Greek villages, archaic pagan customs still underlie a thin veneer of Christian belief. The Church is not hostile. Anthropologist Margaret Alexiou writes:
The ancient figure of Hades has disappeared, but his popular successor is not God or Saint Michael but Charos, who is responsible for accompanying the dead to the Underworld, still known as Hades, and much more similar to its ancient counterpart than to the Christian concept of Hell...he is the servant of God, and so it is to him that mourners address their prayers to release the dead from their graves on the Christian festivals.
Charos is, of course, merely a modern name for the mythic figure Charon, and traditional people still place coins are on the eyes of the deceased to pay him,who has ferried the dead, pagan or Christian, across the river Styx since the beginning.
Travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor wrote, “Every Greek child has heard again and again the agony of the death rattle.” Even though death is no stranger, it is still a deeply disturbing and emotional event for all concerned. The community participates in ceremonies intended to serve the needs of the dead, to feed them, especially those who cannot enter Paradise (in the Orthodox tradition) without having had their sins forgiven. The oldest Greek literature was well aware of this. At the funeral of Hector, which ends the Iliad, we read:
They brought in singers,
Leaders of the dirges, who sang laments
In mournful tune, while the women wailed in chorus.
White-armed Andromache led their keening.
Once a deceased person has been washed, dressed and laid out on the bier, the face turned towards the east, the women begin improvised lamentations, sometimes assisted or led by professional mourners, or moirologists. The singing is divided into three stages: the traditional wake in the house before the burial, during the burial procession, and at the tomb.
During the wake, they may sing about the deceased’s life from childhood to death. Ro Kalonaros describes a typical scene:
When each woman finishes her part of the story, she both figuratively and physically transfers the lament to her successor, stretching her hand over the corpse to touch the hand of the woman who will continue the performance. As the woman crafts her story, the others continue their unceasing wails and moans.
They begin by lamenting the deceased. But they inevitably progress into mourning their own dead. At some point, it may be the mourner, not the deceased, who is at the center of the story. They sway their bodies rhythmically, beat their breasts and scarify their cheeks while tearing their hair. Until recently, they might also cut their hair to cover the face of the deceased. A candle is lit so the deceased may find the way to the next world. Doors and windows are shut to prevent Death from leaving the house. A person from the household beseeches Death to leave the deceased and prevent him from taking another in the household.
In some cases, the women sing all night and into the following afternoon, when they lead the procession to the gravesite and the lamenting reaches its peak. Then the priests arrive to complete the ceremony. Anthropologist Evy Johanne Håland describes the scene at a typical gravesite:
People might still send messages to their own dead by way of the deceased. Thus, letters, flowers, fruits, nuts and herbs are thrown on the body, who carries these gifts to the next world. An icon picturing the Panagia is resting against his wrist. Here are also yellow-brown pilgrim candles, gifts from the lamenting women. The other gifts, handkerchiefs and money, are placed on the deceased, followed by embraces and kisses on the forehead. Lighted candles are placed around the coffin, towards the right. The laments that are sung around the dead are “passed” in the same direction, as with everything else passed around the corpse, such as the censer at intervals, food or drinks. When the body is laid out for burial, the clothes must be without knots and the coat unbuttoned. Knotting and buttons are the opposite of unloosening, which is the desired effect at death.
The coffin is left open till the last minute and only lowered into the grave when everyone has had a chance to kiss the dead cheeks goodbye.
The goodbyes continue well beyond the day of the burial. On the third, ninth and fortieth days after death, and after one year, wine and water are placed on the tomb and in the house for the thirsty soul to return, drink and commune with the living, who offer more passionate singing. In the Latin / Catholic world, as is well-known, people welcome the temporary return of their dead on November 1st and 2nd. But the Greek Orthodox calendar has up to seven Saturdays of the Soul, when the dead may visit, as they did in the ancient Anthesteria festival.
But eventually, traditional people need to know if their loved one has completed the transition to the Other World. As I write in Chapter Twelve of my book Madness at the Gates of the City: The Myth of American Innocence, rural Greeks and other tribal people still practice a custom that researchers refer to as secondary burial.
Three to five years after a funeral, as moirologists sing, close relatives of the deceased disinter the body. They are searching for signs. If the body has not completely decomposed down to white bones, this may mean that the soul is not yet at peace and may have even become a vampire or werewolf, a vrykolakas (or, as they say in Viet Nam, a “wandering ghost”). The local priest may then determine that an exorcism is needed, after which the body will be carried three times around the church and then re-buried.
After some years, if another disinterment reveals the hoped-for pure, white bones, the community agrees that the soul has been forgiven, has completed the transition through the liminal realms to Paradise and is at peace. Then, the family ritually deposits the bones (or perhaps only the skull) in the bone house or ossuary. In large villages, each family has its own ossuary, while smaller villages may have only one. The empty grave then becomes available for another – temporary – resident.
The whole village becomes responsible for the care of the bones, which are thought to give everyone good fortune. There are historical descriptions of villages being forced by political or environmental circumstances to permanently evacuate. In these case, the people dug up the bones, placed them in special sacks and took them along to found a new settlement, as Nikos Kazantzakis described in his novel Christ Recrucified. If there was no time, as in the wars with Turkey in the 1920s, they burnt the bones to prevent them from being desecrated by the enemy.
Ideally, with the re-interment of the bones, the period of liminality for both the souls and their relatives ends, and everyone can move on, free of the weight of both grief and responsibility – except for the older women. Throughout these areas, we still see aged crones dressed completely, and permanently, in black, their heads always covered. After raising children and marrying them off, their primary duty is to mourn the dead.
There’s never a funeral without joy, nor a wedding without a tear. – Country saying
Long after the funeral, these women sing moirologia at the grave, where all transitions are recalled. Anthropologists have noted the similarity of these chants to wedding songs, a reminder of the mythic “marriage with death” that the maiden Persephone endured before becoming goddess of the Underworld.
Each human bride must undergo a similar transition from maiden to married woman (and eventually to crone), and each mother must give her up to go and live among the groom’s clan, where they may never see each other again. The bride steps over her threshold for the last time as a girl, her family bids her goodbye as they do for the dead and she replies with ritual complaints similar to those made by the dead in the old laments. Alexiou writes:
Closest to the laments for the dead in structure and form are those sung for the bride as she leaves her father’s house...a deliberate fusion is indicated by the custom, ancient as well as modern, of dressing those who died young in wedding attire. Popular belief viewed death and marriage as fundamentally similar occasions, signaling the transition from one stage in the cycle of human existence to another.
Part Two
That’s the cultural background to a slightly fictionalized story I want to tell. But first, some historical background.
When Nazi Germany invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Hitler decided that he needed to secure his southern flank. That simple decision set in motion a ferocious invasion of Greece and the eventual death, mostly by starvation, of between 300,000 and 600,000 Greeks. Perhaps a tenth of the population perished.
The graveyards were so overfilled that many families had to bury their loved ones outside of the cemeteries in mass graves. This caused much additional distress, since many believed that those buried in unconsecrated ground became vrykolakas and might return to haunt the living.
Armed resistance in Greece, especially on the island of Crete, was the fiercest in all occupied Europe, and it was met by the cruelest of reprisals in which the Germans massacred entire villages.
In 1999, driving along the south coast of Crete, my wife and I stumbled upon a memorial in Amiras, one of the villages in the Viannos area, a place where the Germans had destroyed over twenty villages and massacred some 350 people. My wife and I, two Jewish Americans, heard the only other people present speaking in German as they stared at the scene.
I was too shy to ask, but perhaps one of their parents had been there in 1943.
Viannos is 40 miles from the ruins of ancient Phaestos and the town of Tymbaki, which is mentioned in the story, written by Manolis Xexakis:
The Smile from the Abyss
Down in a glen I know there is a round ossuary where women come down and wash the heads of the deceased with wine on Saturday of the Souls. My mother has my grandfather there, and she visits him.
They bring the skulls down from the display cases, they carry them to the yard, and they lay them down on the side wall. The scene can give chills to an innocent passerby.
This whole business happens in the morning, the time when the day is lighting up and a murmur sprinkles through the olive trees, as do drops of sun. It can pull your heartstrings to see the harmonious figures of living bodies plant themselves by the bare bones in that deserted place.
They go and pour wine in copper buckets and then, carefully, softly, without dipping their fingers in the black holes, baptize the skulls for a long time and “caress” them. They say, “My ill-fated one, my unfairly killed one, once upon a time you were a human being too…”, and as the sun rises for good, the priest arrives and reads the prayers over a plate of memorial wheat, and as soon as he is finished the women talk among themselves about those who have left but are still present. By noon, they all leave the cenotaph and the area withers completely.
From stories, I hear that my grandfather was shot in his eighties.
The Germans surrounded the village and rounded the people up. They brought them down to a ravine with their hoes on their shoulders, and the interpreters kept telling them that they would be transported to the airport at Tymbaki for work. The captives spent hours in anticipation. The wind was blowing with sudden swirls, then it would disappear.
The procession of the morning frost was passing before their eyes. They had been arrested in retaliation for someone in the village who had disinterred two dead Germans so he could take their boots and clothes.
The Germans separated the women out. They arranged the men in a line. They made them dig the graves. A few shots were heard from a machine gun, and then the dull finishing shot. Later the women went as far as the ravine to the open graves, where they cleaned the bodies of the dead and covered the ditches, without a cross or writing or any special sign.
After three years they each identified the heads of those shot by the final gunshot hole in the skull.
But even now there is one skull that three women claim, and they do not know exactly to which of the dead it belongs. So on Saturday of the Souls all three wash and clean the skull together, and each believes that it is her loved one.
Well, in this treacherous world there are dead who belong to all of us, and we must all claim them. Otherwise, souls are stuck in the thorns and human deeds blown away by the wind.
Part Three
In the old tradition of hired mourners, these women were not simply performing, as Alexiou writes:
Being less directly and personally involved, they are equipped to give a more accomplished and professional expression to their grief. This does not mean that they suffer less; on the contrary, because they are required to fulfill an obligation to the dead, their grief may be more acute...sending a message through the dead man to their own kinsmen in the Underworld...in this way she could sing for her own dead, “I weep for my own, not for theirs”.
As recently as 1958, Cretan women were still lamenting the British soldiers and airmen who’d died defending their island in the battle of Crete. But the mystery – and necessity – of grief and remembrance in Greece does not end there. Having sustained heavy losses in the invasion and occupation, the Germans established several cemeteries for their own dead. The people of Crete still oversee and tend these places, where a custodian says:
At dusk you can often see a poignant sight; black-dressed old Cretan women lighting candles on the graves of past adversaries. When you ask them why, they reply, “They, too, have a mother, and she is far away or dead. We also lost our sons...We know how a mother feels. Now, we are their mothers.
