Why Greeks are exhuming their parents

Cemeteries in Greek cities are so overcrowded that bodies are often only kept in the ground for three years. Then families have to pay for exhumation - and for the bones to be kept in a building known as an ossuary. But many cannot afford to pay even for this limited degree of dignity in death.

   Katerina Kitsou stands weeping by her father's grave in Thessaloniki's main cemetery. She has come to watch as her father Christodoulos is exhumed. He was buried seven years ago, but his children cannot pay for his grave any longer. "We paid for an extra four years to keep him there but we cannot afford it any more," says Katerina. It's clear that for her the occasion is deeply upsetting.

   "It's your beloved. You imagine him like a person and then you see only the bones. It's like a second funeral."

This is something most Greeks know they will have to face at some point in their lives - most feel obliged to attend the event out of respect to the dead.

   Over the last 50 years, Greece's urban population has exploded. More than half the country's people are now concentrated in the two biggest cities, Athens and Thessaloniki. Urban development has left cemeteries encircled, with no room to expand.

   That's why graves are now usually rented on a three-year lease with an escalating price scale for any additional years. The prohibitive costs are meant to act as a deterrent so that the space can be reused.

Petros Bakirtzis, one of the cemetery's gravediggers, currently averages 15 exhumations a week. Each is started off by a mechanical digger, then Bakirtzis jumps into the hole and finishes the job with his spade.

  Sometimes no relatives come to watch. He talks as he exhumes another body. "It is lucky this one has fully decomposed. I was a bit worried you might have to see something nasty," he says as he begins gathering up the human remains.

   A long black sock with a shoe on the end is removed from the earth with the shin bone still inside and the suit jacket is shaken for the bones to fall out. The remains are piled up on a simple white sheet and the clothes tossed into a large green wheelie bin next to the mound of rubble and earth by the grave.

Πηγή: BBC.com