Urn Graves Essay

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Urn Graves - A New Tradition in Hungarian Urban Cemeteries By Andrea Tallos The most common and accepted form of burial in Hungary is to bury someone’s mortal remains in the ground. Other forms - such as cremation and preservation of ashes in an urn or (more extreme) spreading someone’s ashes in the air or into a lake - are still viewed with suspicion in most Hungarian families. Since the 1970s cremation and internment of ashes has became accepted in bigger towns, however, in villages there are only a few urn-walls (about 20-25 urns are usually put together, forming a wall of urns). These walls are called shame-walls (szégyenfal) by village people in some areas of the country. In villages burial is considered a serious issue. It is quite common for older people to collect some money for the expenses of their own funeral, even if they have lots of relatives and are sure that their families will organize a worthy burial. Village families (and sometimes town families also) who have their dead relatives cremated face the condemnation of neighbors, and are often accused of being tight-fisted. It is true that the urn-cremation costs are much less than the traditional funeral’s. From the middle 1970s a third type of burial became accepted, the so-called urn-burial (burial of urns in graves in the ground). I examined these kinds of graves in Budapest’s 19th District Public Cemetery. The size of the graves is small (their length is approximately 80 centimeters), their height above the ground-level is not more than 20 centimeters. They are very close to each other (the usual distance separating these graves is 50 centimeters). For someone who is not familiar with the burial customs in Hungary these graves could be misunderstood as being children’s graves. The view these graves present is more than bizarre. However, there are many advantages of
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