The uncompromising acceptance of death which is so characteristic of this culture is assisted by the fact that the people are no strangers to it, and from their earliest years they see the older generations one by one succumbing to the onset of infirmity which, it is accepted without fuss, will lead to the stones of the burial ground. Children are allowed freely into rooms where people are sitting with the dead, they see the open coffins of the Orthodox funeral, and with the rest of the congregation they go up to kiss the dead person at the end of the funeral service in the ritual of ‘the last farewell’. And the community’s physical care for the body does not end with the funeral service, for after the required number of years in the ground the bones are dug up by the relatives to be washed with water and wine, put in the church over Saturday night and Sunday morning, and then set aside in the ossuary. The exhumation is an encounter with the nature of physical existence so sharp that invariably someone is moved to remark involuntarily, ‘Look at what we are!’ or, ‘That’s what man is—a handful of little bones’, and someone else to reply, ‘We are only temporary here’. So the dissolution of the flesh is in its own terms the final reality, and this is faced with a certain robust realism which defies any easy comfort referring to the life of the soul in paradise: ‘A fat lot I’ll see when I’m under the earth!’ and ‘No-one’s come back to tell us!’ It is an acceptance of death firmly based on a repeated confrontation with the limits of physical existence — a continual following through of the cycle of life from the birth of a child onto the earth from which it came, to the return of the body to the earth when that life is finished.

But although the people accept death, because they must, they do not thereby weaken in their love of life. It is this life in which people eat, drink, and feel the light of the sun, in which they dance, laugh, and love, which is celebrated with such passion, this life in which even the simplest things occasion the most profound delight—the planting of chickpeas in the vineyard so that the worker among the vines can ‘go eating’, a drink of cold water from a mountain spring, a special find of mushrooms in the autumn which are borne back pierced through one after the other on a long withy, the use of the round leaves of the arbutus as spoons to scoop off the froth from buckets of new milk, or the rosy translucent vein of pine wood which smells wonderfully of resin and burns with a brilliant flare. It is this world of precise and personal experiences that represents life, and this world which man, because he cannot bear to leave it, leaves behind to his children who inherit it in his stead and in their turn re-people it and hold the past in their memories.

- Juliet du Boulay, The Violence of Death, in Cosmos, Life, and Liturgy in a Greek Orthodox Village (2009)