turns a genuinely grief-stricken face away from me, and forcefully joins the cry of “Immortal! Immortal!”
I know stories about Aspasia and Hypatia. But I have never heard of this immortal dead woman.
I can’t find a passageway out of this crowd, which shifts and sways but doesn’t move until people at the front catch sight of the funeral procession, when the chanting of “Immortal” trebles in volume, driven and protesting, and the mass surges forward to follow the coffin. I am swept past glass-fronted shops with sample tomb carvings in the windows, many in the popular shape of open marble books with space for a photograph. The photographs used in the storefront tombstones are of famous figures—I see a picture of a much loved young mayor of Athens, who died suddenly of a heart attack not too long ago and is still talked about with regret. There is a picture of Maria Callas, so it is clear that these carvings are a kind of advertisement, since Callas, defying the Greek state, in which civil funerals are illegal, and the virulent Orthodox prohibition against cremation, supposed to interfere with the resurrection of the body, had arranged to have her body cremated and its ashes scattered over the sea. The crowd sweeps me past a cluster of these shops, and I catch a glimpse of a memorial featuring a photograph of Marilyn Monroe. In other windows, there are elaborately decorated cakes with sugar messages reading
Kalo Taxidi
, the wish for a good journey, and
Athanatos.
This is
kollyva
, the food of the dead, made of grains, seeds, and dried fruit, funeral food throughout the Balkans. The Turks, too, have a similar commemorative food, of wheat and pomegranate seeds, which they eat to mark the martyrdom of Muhammad’s grandsons, and to celebrate Noah’s survival of the flood—the mixture, in their version, is based on the supplies remaining on the ark after the survivors’ forty days on board.
I am swept along inside the Protonekrotafio, Athens’s version of Père Lachaise, but I manage to disentangle myself from the crowd. The geography of the cemetery is complicated; I am utterly lost now as I often am here, but I have learned that bewilderment is often as effective a method of finding an entrance or an exit as certainty. I pass a life-size statue of a little girl wearing a 1930s smock and a Buster Brown haircut, baptismal cross prominently carved, and a gravestone that proudly identifies the deceased as an employeeof the Greek national telephone company. A man in a straw hat and shirtsleeves is weeding graves. Tending graves is obviously a difficult business here, since water is expensive and keeping greenery alive takes committed effort—I can see that many people opt for urns full of deathless plastic roses and wreaths.
Two women near a wall are trying to revive a dying kitten by giving it sips of water; the Greeks consider spaying animals cruel, and according to European animal welfare organizations, attempt to control the stray animal population through putting out poisoned food. A row over, a priest in a long gown, ponytail, and the black fez on which chef’s hats were supposedly modeled is singing a remembrance ceremony for a small group of five, before a stone tomb covered with flowers, stems wrapped in foil to keep them wet long enough to live through the ceremony. Two rows further up, toward what I hope is the exit, two women are gardening the graves of their dead, one wearing a halter top and gym shorts, the other flapping her skirt up to her thighs to make a breeze. I pick my way through the meshes of the graves, struck by the modern versions of the kind of classical grave monument that pictured the dead relative on one side clasping the hands of the living on the other. The kitschy realism of the modern carvings is absurdly fascinating—mustachioed men wearing business suits, women with permanent waves wearing pearls and stiletto heels are presented in classical poses.
On a rise overlooking what
I know stories about Aspasia and Hypatia. But I have never heard of this immortal dead woman.
I can’t find a passageway out of this crowd, which shifts and sways but doesn’t move until people at the front catch sight of the funeral procession, when the chanting of “Immortal” trebles in volume, driven and protesting, and the mass surges forward to follow the coffin. I am swept past glass-fronted shops with sample tomb carvings in the windows, many in the popular shape of open marble books with space for a photograph. The photographs used in the storefront tombstones are of famous figures—I see a picture of a much loved young mayor of Athens, who died suddenly of a heart attack not too long ago and is still talked about with regret. There is a picture of Maria Callas, so it is clear that these carvings are a kind of advertisement, since Callas, defying the Greek state, in which civil funerals are illegal, and the virulent Orthodox prohibition against cremation, supposed to interfere with the resurrection of the body, had arranged to have her body cremated and its ashes scattered over the sea. The crowd sweeps me past a cluster of these shops, and I catch a glimpse of a memorial featuring a photograph of Marilyn Monroe. In other windows, there are elaborately decorated cakes with sugar messages reading
Kalo Taxidi
, the wish for a good journey, and
Athanatos.
This is
kollyva
, the food of the dead, made of grains, seeds, and dried fruit, funeral food throughout the Balkans. The Turks, too, have a similar commemorative food, of wheat and pomegranate seeds, which they eat to mark the martyrdom of Muhammad’s grandsons, and to celebrate Noah’s survival of the flood—the mixture, in their version, is based on the supplies remaining on the ark after the survivors’ forty days on board.
I am swept along inside the Protonekrotafio, Athens’s version of Père Lachaise, but I manage to disentangle myself from the crowd. The geography of the cemetery is complicated; I am utterly lost now as I often am here, but I have learned that bewilderment is often as effective a method of finding an entrance or an exit as certainty. I pass a life-size statue of a little girl wearing a 1930s smock and a Buster Brown haircut, baptismal cross prominently carved, and a gravestone that proudly identifies the deceased as an employeeof the Greek national telephone company. A man in a straw hat and shirtsleeves is weeding graves. Tending graves is obviously a difficult business here, since water is expensive and keeping greenery alive takes committed effort—I can see that many people opt for urns full of deathless plastic roses and wreaths.
Two women near a wall are trying to revive a dying kitten by giving it sips of water; the Greeks consider spaying animals cruel, and according to European animal welfare organizations, attempt to control the stray animal population through putting out poisoned food. A row over, a priest in a long gown, ponytail, and the black fez on which chef’s hats were supposedly modeled is singing a remembrance ceremony for a small group of five, before a stone tomb covered with flowers, stems wrapped in foil to keep them wet long enough to live through the ceremony. Two rows further up, toward what I hope is the exit, two women are gardening the graves of their dead, one wearing a halter top and gym shorts, the other flapping her skirt up to her thighs to make a breeze. I pick my way through the meshes of the graves, struck by the modern versions of the kind of classical grave monument that pictured the dead relative on one side clasping the hands of the living on the other. The kitschy realism of the modern carvings is absurdly fascinating—mustachioed men wearing business suits, women with permanent waves wearing pearls and stiletto heels are presented in classical poses.
On a rise overlooking what
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