One evening in the neighborhood of Metz I came across a white door that was bare but for a wilting pile of white flowers laid in the nook at its feet. Beside it a white candle at its side burned pale and silent. I never knew why they were there, the door never opened, and the next day they were gone.
There is a ritual to death that requires the services and skills of those who live on or near Anaspiostisis Street, off of which I too now live. There’s nothing cynical to it—people die and when they do it is necessary to close their lives with a ceremony that marks a passage as one marks a ship’s log, though the destination is left blank. Flowers become the stamps, wood felled now wrapped around them the signatures of those who have embarked, as if to say “a border has been crossed, here is proof.”
Anaspiostisis street is flanked by tall black pines whose thin needles gather in the pots of flowers below them. Once you’ve passed the usual peripteros and mini-markets at its far end, separated from the Temple of Olympian Zeus by a wall, a fence, and another wall of traffic, you’ll begin to see the funeral shops.
In typical Greek fashion, there is no one stop-shop for all-inclusive service. No one does everything, or even two things. The first shop, just around the corner from my building, is usually empty but for a pudgy Greek man at his desk. There are no products, there are no shelves to stack them upon. But every now and then a shining new wood casket appears out of the backroom behind the desk. Beside the office, the smell of hot cut wood leaks out visible as sawdust.
Just up the road, the Studio Vonzidis (Fotoceramicas) pile their windows with samples of engraved angels in marble or brass mourning and supine over the portraits of the dead rendered in silver or stone or framed in hard flowers empty, candle-cradles dangling from their stiff fingers. Jesus in three sizes looks down at himself. Epitaphs speak out at passerby and the faces of the unknown dead smile on as if they were selling some product just out of frame. Who were they, I wonder, and did they know what would become of them? What did they think at that moment the photo was snapped? Did they know they would be buried in a storefront? Perhaps at night, their smiles switch off with the lights.
These Studio Vonzidis cluster together around the two shops that carve the headstones in crosses or slabs as well as the occasional busts that gather outside their small quarry yards like children waiting for the morning bus.
Opposite them stand the statues of whole figures carved by a man shirtless and hairy covered in white dust surrounded by half-men, half bodies, half in rock or suspended from chains. An armless, coarse-skinned woman turns her featureless face toward the corner where the old men of the flower shop prune and arrange their goods, the occasional bright burst of a daisy overcome by the long-petaled white orchids. Their feet snap on the broken and discarded stems that cover the floor. Just down a little side street, other men prepare the white wreaths carried in the stead of those could nor attend, carefully pinning the white petals to the round rolls of white linen.
Behind blank doors opposite others print the white banners running their hands through the reams of white cloth around them the dismembered letters they use to stamp the banners with names. In the company of the letters are tiny figures of saints blessing from their small mirrored plates splotched with ink.
It is custom in most of Greece to bury the dead for a certain period of time to give the flesh away and then to exhume the bones and take them for storage in a simple small box to share a slot in the family tomb. In the Peloponnese, it only takes two years for bodies to decay. In Northern Greece, it can take up to six years. The first cemetery includes a mausoleum for the bones of the dead whose families cannot afford a separate crypt. Most the boxes, piled a story high separated by narrow rows, have spots to tack flowers or light small candles.
One day I arrived at the cemetery just prior to a funeral. I passed through the gates like upright hollow coffins into the yard paved white and wide divided in the center by a row of black pines, flanked on both sides by the ostentatious tombs of the cemetery’s wealthy and famous, high neo-classical domes and Dorian columns.
On that day the mourners still had business to do inside the church but the pallbearers and wreath-bearers—young men nearly slinking down through their clothes into puddles on the ground, old men with their bulbous stomachs testing the absolute limits of the buttons on their starched white shirts—were all smoking, all waiting outside and sitting clicking rosary beads or leaning on their scooters.
Eventually the mourners emerged from the small church and the men in their white shirts gathered up the white garlands and their faces were hidden behind the flowers with only their black legs and feet showing below. Other took the coffin upon their shoulders and they shuffled to the grave followed by the walking wreaths and the mourners strolling so casual, motorcycle helmets tucked in their arms and dangling from their fingers, the old women laughing at some joke understood silently by all in procession.
They buried him and said his name. They walked away. And the door was left open and white. Back on the street, a taxi idled by, its passenger an orchid bright red.
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