Democratic Sentinel, Volume 12, Number 13, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 April 1888 — Death Customs of the Greeks. [ARTICLE]

Death Customs of the Greeks.

When a death is expected the attendant mourners in the Greek islands have many little customs peculiar to themselves. The moribund is handed a bowl of water, into which he puts a pinch of salt for each person with whom he is at enmity, saying as he does so: “May my wrath perish as this salt;” for it is considered dreadful for a man to die leaving an enemy behind him. His spirit, it is believed, will not rest, jut will wander about as a poor ghost, sucking the blood of his friends, like the shades in ancient hades, to gain strength for his earthly wandering. If the complaint is consumption they suppose that three Erinnyes stand ready to pounce at children at the corners of the room; hence the young are kept out of the way when the dying is in extremis, and a hole is opened over his head to allow the Erinnyes to escape. Fevers are best cured by priestly incantations; the name of the disease is written on a slip of paper, and with prayer and much incensing this is bound to a tree, hoping thereby to transfer the malady. Incense is much used by the priest in his visitations to the sick; the whole room is thick with it, and perhaps contagion is thus often avoided. When the death has occurred the women rush onto the flat roof or some other conspicuous place, where they rend the air with their cries, tear their hair, and give way to unbridled grief. The town crier is sent round to announce the fact to the neighbors and to summon friends to the death-wail, which takes place about an hour or two after the spirit has left the body. After the body has been washed in wine it is laid out on a bier in the center of the oneroomed house, arrayed in the deceased’s best clothes, decked out with flowers, and with lamps burning at the side, reminding us of the ancient custom of placing the corpse thus in the midst of the hall, dressed in as handsome a robe as the family could afford, in order, according to .Lucian, that the dead may not be cold on the passage to the hades and may not be seen naked by Cerberus. Then begins the death-wail ceremony —a scene of heart-rending grief such as took place in Priam’s palace over the dead body of Hector. T hese deathwails are, in fact, one of the most striking bonds of connection between the Hellenism of the past and the Hellenism of the present; and in the Greek islands, despite the strictness of the more civilized members of the orthodox church, they cling to them with surprising tenacity.