Page:Modern Greek folklore and ancient Greek religion - a study in survivals.djvu/526

 There is a custom well known in Modern Greece which consists in the maintenance of what is called 'the unsleeping lamp' ([Greek: to akoimêto kantêli]). A fair general idea of it may be given by saying that after a funeral a light is kept continuously burning either in the room where death took place or at the grave for a period of either forty days or three years. This variation in time and place requires examination. In customs, as in other things, there is a right way and a wrong way; variety in observance is not original; there is a proper time and a proper place.

First then, which is the proper place for this particular custom, the chamber of death or the grave-side?

The localities, in which that form of the custom which I shall show to be correct in this particular has come most conspicuously under my own observation, are Aráchova, a village near Delphi; Leonídi on the east coast of Laconia; a cemetery in the Thriasian plain belonging, I think, to the village of Kalývia; and the island of Aegina. In the last-mentioned it is an ordinary lantern which is used; it is placed at the head of the grave, and for forty days after the funeral is so trimmed and tended that the flame is not once extinguished. At Aráchova and in the Thriasian plain each grave is provided with an erection capable of sheltering a naked light. Some of the erections are like doll's-houses with door and windows complete; others are mere boxes; others again are no more than a few tiles or flat stones set on edge to form a square and covered over with a roof of the same material. At Aráchova the lamps contained in these erections are tended both evening and morning, and the obligation to keep them burning uninterruptedly for three years, until the exhumation of the body, is strongly felt and scrupulously discharged. In the Thriasian plain the light is kept burning with equal care, but I am uncertain for what period. At Leonídi some shelters of the same kind as those described are in use; but there are also more elaborate tombs at the head of which is built a small recess below the level of the ground or at any rate under the slab of stone or marble which covers the grave, and in this recess, which is closed with a small door allowing the passage of air through its chinks, is placed 'the unsleeping lamp.' Here again the lights are kept burning until the exhumation takes place, and the lamps are fed and trimmed every evening. At Gytheion a device not dissimilar,