Byzantine Culture

History · Article

Death and Burial in Byzantium

Byzantine funerals, mourning, the forty-day cycle, memorial wheat, tombs and cemeteries, the fate of the soul between death and judgement, and the Athonite practice of exhuming the bones.

Byzantine attitudes to death were shaped by two convictions that pulled in different directions: that the body is not a shell to be discarded but part of the person and destined for resurrection, and that the soul’s condition after death is genuinely uncertain and can be affected by the prayers of the living.

The first produced careful, elaborate burial practice and an insistence on the integrity of the body. The second produced a machinery of commemoration — services at fixed intervals, endowed memorials, monastic prayer bought with land — that shaped Byzantine economic as well as religious life.

The Funeral

The sequence is described in liturgical books and in a range of narrative sources, and much of it is still recognisable in Orthodox practice.

At death the eyes and mouth were closed, the body washed, anointed with oil and wine, dressed in clean clothes — for a monk, in his habit; for a layman, sometimes in wedding clothes — and laid out with the hands crossed on the breast, holding an icon or a cross.

The wake was held at home, with the body surrounded by candles and with psalms read continuously through the night. Professional mourners were employed, and the church disapproved of them consistently and ineffectively: the threnos, the ritual lament, with tearing of hair and beating of the breast, was a pre-Christian practice that clergy condemned from the fourth century to the fifteenth without suppressing it. It survives in the Greek village lament tradition to this day.

The funeral service (nekrosimos akolouthia) was sung in church. Its texts include the great idiomela attributed to John of Damascus — meditations on the vanity of life and the shock of the body’s dissolution that are among the bleakest and most beautiful things in the Byzantine repertory.

The service culminated in the last kiss: the mourners came forward to kiss the body or the icon on it. Then burial, generally on the day of death or the next, since embalming was not practised and the climate did not permit delay.

The Memorial Cycle

Prayer for the dead was not optional. Services were held on the third, ninth and fortieth days after death, then at three, six and nine months, at a year, and annually thereafter.

The numbers carried explanations — the third day for the resurrection, the ninth for the nine orders of angels, the fortieth for Christ’s ascension — but the underlying logic is that the soul’s passage is a process, not an instant.

At these services kollyva was offered: boiled wheat mixed with honey, nuts, pomegranate seeds, raisins and cinnamon, decorated and blessed. The symbolism is the grain of wheat that must fall into the ground and die. It is still made in exactly this way.

Certain Saturdays in the year — the psychosabbata, “soul Saturdays” — were dedicated to the general commemoration of the dead, and are built into the liturgical calendar before Lent and Pentecost.

What Happened to the Soul

Byzantine theology on the intermediate state is less systematic than the Latin doctrine of purgatory, and the difference became a formal point of dispute at the Council of Florence.

The Orthodox position, as argued by Mark of Ephesus: the soul after death enters a provisional condition of blessedness or suffering, awaiting the general resurrection and final judgement; the prayers of the church benefit the departed; there is no purifying fire and no satisfaction of temporal penalty.

Popular belief was more graphic. The telonia, the “toll-houses” — a series of aerial customs posts at which demons examine the soul for each category of sin as it ascends — appear in Byzantine visionary literature and in some ascetic writings from the fourth century onward. Whether this is doctrine or vivid metaphor has been argued within Orthodoxy for centuries and is argued still.

Tombs and Cemeteries

Burial was extramural in the Roman fashion at first, and the prohibition on burial inside cities eroded steadily as Christians sought to be buried near saints. By the middle Byzantine period, burial in and around churches was normal for anyone who could arrange it.

The principal types:

Simple earth graves, the majority, often lined with tiles or stone slabs, with the body extended, oriented east-west with the head to the west so as to face east at the resurrection. Grave goods were minimal — a coin, a cross, a ring, a few personal items.

Built tombs and sarcophagi for the wealthy.

Arcosolia — arched niches in the wall of a church or narthex, containing a sarcophagus with a portrait of the deceased painted above. The finest surviving examples are in the parekklesion of the Chora church, where Theodore Metochites and his circle are buried beneath the Anastasis fresco.

Monastic ossuaries. On Mount Athos and in many monasteries, the dead were buried in the earth and exhumed after three years. The bones were washed with wine, the skull inscribed with the monk’s name and date, and the remains placed in a communal ossuary. The state of the bones was read as a sign: clean white bones indicated a soul at peace, while a body that had not decomposed was treated with alarm rather than as a mark of sanctity.

Endowed Commemoration

The wealthy bought prayer. A donation of land or money to a monastery came with the obligation to commemorate the donor by name in perpetuity, at specified services, with candles, kollyva and a meal for the monks on the anniversary.

The founding charters of monasteries specify these arrangements in detail — the Pantokrator typikon sets out the commemoration of the imperial family with precision, including the number of candles and the provisions for the anniversary meal.

The economic scale was considerable. A substantial proportion of the land held by Byzantine monasteries was given for this purpose, and the arrangement is one of the mechanisms by which the church accumulated the estates discussed in the Byzantine aristocracy.

Children and the Poor

Child burials, which make up a large share of excavated cemeteries, were often made with unusual care: small tile-lined graves, personal objects, sometimes within the church itself. The funeral service for a child is a separate rite, without the penitential elements of the adult service — the child being presumed innocent — and with a different emphasis on consolation.

The poor were buried by the church at its expense. Constantinople maintained a burial guild for the purpose, funded from the endowment of the Great Church, whose members conducted funerals for those who could not pay. It is one of the more attractive features of Byzantine civic Christianity that nobody was left unburied.

The Funeral Hymns

The texts sung at a Byzantine funeral are among the bleakest and most beautiful in the tradition, and they are worth knowing because they express an attitude to death that the theology alone does not convey.

The idiomela attributed to John of Damascus are the core of the service. They do not console by minimising. They dwell on dissolution:

I weep and I lament when I think upon death, and behold our beauty, fashioned after the image of God, lying in the tomb disfigured, dishonoured, bereft of form.

Another asks where now are the worldly attachments, the gold, the silver, the crowds of servants, and answers that all is dust, all is ashes, all is shadow.

The service also includes a set of texts in which the dead person is imagined speaking to the mourners — asking to be remembered, noting that yesterday they spoke together and today the separation is absolute.

The register is deliberate. Orthodox funeral practice does not soften the physical reality of death, and the hymns insist on it precisely so that the resurrection claimed at the end of the service is not sentimental. The theology is that death is an enemy and an outrage, defeated but real.

The Ossuary Practice

The Athonite arrangement is the most distinctive Byzantine funerary custom and deserves a full account.

A monk who dies is buried in the earth, unembalmed, without a coffin, wrapped in his habit. After three years the grave is opened.

If the body has decomposed to clean bones, they are washed with wine and water, the skull is inscribed with the monk’s name and the dates, and the remains are placed in the communal ossuary — skulls on shelves, long bones stacked separately. The community prays over them.

If the body has not decomposed, or is dark and swollen, it is reburied and the community undertakes additional prayer, sometimes for years, until the bones come clean.

The logic inverts western assumptions. In Latin Christendom an incorrupt body is a sign of sanctity; on Athos it is a sign that something is unresolved — that the person died under a curse, an unconfessed sin or an unlifted excommunication, and that the earth will not receive them. The Greek tradition of the vrykolakas, the revenant, belongs to the same complex of ideas.

Yellow or honey-coloured bones, by contrast, are read as a mark of sanctity.

The practice is not morbid in intention. An Athonite ossuary is a statement that the community’s dead remain part of it, that the body is temporary, and that the monk who prays there is looking at himself.

Late Antique Burial and the Move Inside

The shift in where the dead were buried is one of the clearest markers of the transition from the classical to the Christian city, and it happened against resistance.

Roman law and custom forbade burial inside the walls. Cemeteries lined the roads out of every city — the tombs along the Appian Way are the familiar example — and the dead were emphatically outside the community of the living.

Christianity broke this in stages. Martyrs were buried where they died or in suburban cemeteries; churches were built over their tombs; and everyone else wanted to be buried as close to the martyr as possible — ad sanctos, near the saints, on the belief that proximity to holy remains would help at the judgement.

As the martyr shrines drew churches and the churches drew settlement, the cemeteries came inside. By the middle Byzantine period, burial in a church, in its narthex, or in the ground immediately around it was normal for anyone who could arrange it, and legislation prohibiting intramural burial had become a dead letter.

The consequences are archaeological: Byzantine churches are surrounded and often floored with graves, and excavating one means excavating a cemetery. They are also social — proximity to the altar was purchasable, and the hierarchy of burial positions inside a church maps the hierarchy of the congregation outside it.

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