Death in Greece

[mistermack]

I watched a documentary yesterday on how they handle death in Greece.

It's absolutely unbelievable. They have NO cremation at all in Greece. Every time someone applies for a licence, it's stopped by the all-powerful Orthodox Church. And they are making a fortune from burials.

They system is, that you RENT a plot in a graveyard, for huge sums of money. Then, after about three years, when the money runs out, you pay for the body to be exhumed, and the bones cleaned off, (often of flesh that hasn't yet rotted) and then the bones are put in an ossuary, or bone-box, and stored in a warehouse-type building, where people still go and leave flowers and burn candles etc.

If people don't pay, the bones are shoved in a giant underground digestor with the bones of countless thousands of others, and even these are becoming over-full.

Of course, the church gets the money for all of this, so it's a no-brainer for them.
Whenever someone wants to allow cremation, they quash it.

In the cemeteries in the big cities, they are so full, it's strictly one-in, one-out.
You can only get buried, when someone is exhumed, and then, you're only likely to be there for three years.

Bunch of morons. It's no wonder they are broke.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-34920068

[cronus]

They can't do burials at sea because of crowding issues either. And cremation might give the Germans ideas. You gotta get inside the Greek mind.

[Svartalf]

Yeah, the church is easily the richest organisation in Greece, thing is, people keep donating money or stuff (real estate and whatnot) to it...

[mistermack]

They can't do burials at sea because of crowding issues either. And cremation might give the Germans ideas. You gotta get inside the Greek mind.

I seem to remember a couple of years ago, the Swedes came up with a good idea.
You freeze the body to extremely cold temperatures, and then it's so brittle, when you break it, it collapses into powdery dust.
Then you can either freeze dry the powder, and scatter it like ashes, or just dump it still frozen at sea, for the wiggly things to eat.
I like that idea.

Edit. I just looked it up on wiki, and it's still going :

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Promessa_Organic