Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/390

 of such acts by the Turks in the Aegean Islands and probably also on the mainland; the somewhat half-hearted condemnation of the superstition by the Greek Church, which, as we shall see later, maintained the belief in the non-decomposition of excommunicated persons and notorious sinners, hesitated between denying and explaining the further notion that such persons were liable to re-animation, but certainly endeavoured to repress or to mitigate the atrocities to which that notion led; and at the present day the forces of law and order as represented on the one hand by the police and on the other by modern education, the chief fruit of which is a desire to appear 'civilised' in the eyes of Europe; all these influences combined have certainly succeeded in reducing the proportions of the superstition and curtailing the excesses consequent upon it. Thus in some places the old practice of burning corpses which fail to decompose within the normal period—and it must be remembered that exhumation after three years' burial is an established rite of the Church in Greece—has been definitely superseded by milder expedients. In Scyros the body is carried round to forty churches in turn and is then re-interred, while in parts of Crete, in Cythnos, and, I believe, in some other Aegean Islands the custom is to transfer the body to a grave in some uninhabited islet, whence its return is barred by the intervening salt water.

None the less the superstition itself still holds a firm place among the traditional beliefs of modern Greece. Witness the following account of it from a history of the district of Sphakiá in Crete written by the head of a monastery there and published in 1888:

'It is popularly believed that most of the dead, those who have lived bad lives or who have been excommunicated by some priest (or, worse still, by seven priests together, [Greek: to heptapapadon] ) become vrykolakes ; that is to say, after the separation of the soul from the body there enters into the latter an evil, p. 125.], pp. 72-3.], the anointing of the sick with oil.](plur. [Greek: -âdes]), on which see below, p. 382.]