THE DEAD are haunting me tonight. It happens when I’m worried: those I’ve loved who’ve gone, visit with advice and raised eyebrows. Not real, of course, just memory. Unlike Aunty Ivy with her mauve hair and red glasses who ‘saw’ things. But, even so, Greece is a comforting place to be when you miss the dead. None of the soulless concrete town crematoriums, lain with perpendicular paths, stiff rows of roses and “Do no walk on the grass” signs.
Here in Greece they know how to mourn. Our local town graveyard is on a headland overlooking the sunrise of Mani to the East and the sea to the west. It’s a steep cobbled climb through Koroni castle, where the story goes a whole garrison of Venetians was slaughtered because they forgot to close the gate.
Now it’s a gentle place, every evening as dusk falls from the tiny nunnery a handful of elderly nuns, leave their labours of tending their small vineyard and neat vegetable plot to make a daily pilgrimage to the graves in their keeping. As the sun sets they light candles, by the photos on the tombstones to keep the dead safe through the night and guide them home: paid for by relatives who cannot do the task themselves.
Officially it is in the forty days of mourning when the family and friends of the deceased must wear black, but many women here in rural Greece wear black for the remainder of their days once a parent dies. We watch as elderly ladies slowly make the weekly pilgrimage in the blazing heat to lay flowers by the simple stones.
I like Greek cemeteries. I like the pictures of the dead displayed giving strangers’ names a face and personality and the way the graves are placed to face the view, as if the dead are still with us.
But land is in short supply, as the Greek Orthodox Church still insists that burial is the only way to ensure the body and the soul will be reunited on The Day of Judgement. There is not enough consecrated land available on the rocky outcrop above the harbour. So it is common as one wanders the graveyard to see recently exhumed graves, the bones removed to the ossuary in the corner or stored to be buried beneath another family member’s coffin.
Tonight, I am looking for the grave of Barba Thassos, our 92 year old neighbour who died while we were away and whose cats still sit on his doorstep waiting for his creaky cry of ‘Pina, pina”, asking if they are hungry, as he scraped milked bread into their bowls.
I find it and there is something unbelievably touching to see his photo in his best suit with a few fresh flowers still laid. I light a small candle and reassure him that tonight, at least, we will feed his cats and wish that my dead had such a place too.
