PHILIPOS Philippides unwraps the white sheet, exposing the deceased man’s body. The body is clean but the pallid yellowish tinge to the skin makes it clear that the peacefully reposed elderly man on the mobile bed is not sleeping.
A statuette of the Virgin Mary rests in the corner on a plush crimson carpet. Above her hangs a crucifix.
“We have already given him a sponge bath,” says Philippides, director of the family-run Petros Funeral Services, which opened in 1980, the first funeral home in Cyprus. “Now we will dress him.”
Phillipides and an assistant dress the man in undergarments and then place a cloth shroud over his head and around his upper body. “The shroud is a tradition,” Phillipides says. “It’s what they wrapped Jesus in.”
They then proceed to dress the dead man in the suit provided by the family, placing the jacket on one sleeve at a time, and rolling the man onto the side to facilitate the process.
“He’s not so stiff because we massaged him earlier,” Philippides said, as he folds the man’s right arm to slip it into the overturned jacket sleeve.
Philippides, who has prepared thousands of bodies over the years, said that one accustoms to the work with time, although some cases are harder to deal with than others. “Car accidents and burns are the worst.”
Once the man is fully dressed, they cross his legs and hands, with the right foot and hand always on top, and then bind the wrists and ankles with a white ribbon.
Philipos Philippides’ mother, Lenia Philippides, explained to the Sunday Mail that this tradition comes from old times when people did not have the money to afford coffins; instead they would lay the dead body on a plank, which several men would then hoist up and transport at shoulder level.
“If they did not tie the hands or legs, a limb might fall and throw off the balance, causing the plank to overturn,” Philippides said.
“Or the dead man’s hand might hit someone in the face. Imagine that. Then the person might drop the plank, thinking that the dead person is still alive.”
Before the coffin is closed and lowered into the ground, the white ribbons are untied so that the deceased person can walk to Paradise.
Ayios Petros Funeral Services, named after the gatekeeper of paradise, handles from zero to three dead bodies per day on average, although there can be as many as seven or eight bodies on some days.
Although Lenia Philippides believes that it is primarily the passage of years that causes one’s existential outlook to change, she also feels that facing the dead on a daily basis does affect one’s attitude towards mortality.
“You accept death more easily than before,” she said. “You know you will die. Some things that may bother others don’t bother you as much.”
Philippides’ described how her son, when he was much younger, got in a minor fender bender with a car outside the funeral home.
“The woman was yelling and shouting, and Philippos who was working then at the funeral home couldn’t understand why she was so upset.
“‘What’s wrong?’ he said to her. ‘It’s just some metal. It can be fixed.’”
Embalming
PHILIPPIDES said that the man had only been dead one day so there was no need to preserve the body. But though some form of preservation is required on two-day old or older corpses, embalming – a preservation process involving the injection of formaldehyde and the removal of organ fluid – is not a common practice in Cyprus.
Unlike the other branches of the Christian faith, Eastern Orthodoxy does not accept embalment except when required by law or some other necessity.
Ayios Petros Funeral Services does embalm occasionally as international law demands that any corpses transported out of the country must be embalmed for health reasons.
Philippides said that during embalment incisions are made below the collar bone and then formaldehyde is injected into the blood vessels.
“You can actually tell if you have done the process successfully because you can see the formaldehyde traveling through the blood vessels in the arms and legs and on the forehead,” he said, touching the man’s brow. “The veins stick out.”
“The skin of the person then takes on our colour.”
The internal fluids are then removed from the corpse by puncturing the various organs and aspirating their contents.
“You don’t want to pierce the wrong organ. You can tell if you got the right organ by the colour of the fluid that comes out. With the liver, the blood is black.”
Arsenic
In the late 1800s and early 1900s arsenic was often used as an embalming fluid. The fluid was later replaced by more effective and less toxic chemicals.
There were concerns while arsenic was being used for embalment that the arsenic in the buried bodies was contaminating water supplies.
Legal issues also arose because any people suspected of poisoning others with arsenic could claim that any arsenic found in the bodies was the result of the embalment process, not homicide.
Cremation
Cremation is currently illegal in Cyprus under an old burial law. Even if cremations take place abroad and the ashes are brought to Cyprus, the Orthodox Church opposes the burying of ashes on consecrated ground.
But Lenia Philippides said that the main reason there are no crematoria in Cyprus is the cost. “It takes a lot of money to make a crematorium, and a lot to maintain it.”
Ayios Petros arranged for the cremation of AKEL founder Ploutis Servas in England. Servas’ death in Cyprus sparked a controversy, primarily in the Church, when he asked in his will to be cremated.
