Mother-in-law in the box?

We show how the heated controversies of the time led to the introduction and social acceptance of cremation in Hungary.

The cremation of the dead in Hungary, the final product of the roughly seventy-year struggle between the churches and the facultative progressives, dating back to the end of the 19th century, had a decisive effect on changed attitudes towards death.

"Let's go! After all, digging the dead into the ground is not a burial suitable for a cultured people!"

- Mari Jászai wrote at the turn of the century, but in the heated debates about cremation there were also many people who represented the opposing camp. In 1905, Viktor Cholnoky formulated with charming irony the essence of the revolutionary innovation plan, according to which

"We will have a crematorium, and Hungarian-made canisters will also be available, thanks to which one can mistake one's mother-in-law's ashes for baking soda. And those pessimists who dared to say that not everyone in Hungary will perish the way they want will be killed."

The freedom to destroy, however, had to wait a long time, the first crematorium was opened in Debrecen only in 1951, although the building itself had acquired its final form much earlier, in 1932.

Arguments and counterarguments

"What is beautiful to one may be repulsive to another."

The five cornerstones of contemporary polemics on cremation are the historical, aesthetic, legal, public health and economic aspects. The particular interest of the historical aspects lay in their approach, because neither party could refute the known facts and sources.

The arguments started from prehistoric times, and supporters of cremation explained the burial in the ground at that time by the lack of the ability to light a fire. There were no other options available for cleaning the corpses apart from the use of the "four elements", unless we include the "help" of wild animals as the fifth. However, the man of the Bronze Age took possession of fire, and grave finds prove that cremation burial became common. It was admitted that among the Greeks, the par excellence belonged to the nobles, and the people were allowed there, as if to watch the spectacle, thus enhancing the reputation of the deceased, but over time, economic considerations intervened; the forests dwindled, and finally even the rich were forced to give up the expensive entertainment of the funeral pyre. Cremation was common among the early Germans, and an example is the Vikings, who used a combination of burial by water and fire.

The most important argument, which the representatives of cremation liked to refer to, was also based on a historical fact, "although Charles the Great's decree prevented the cremation of the dead for a decade, the burning of the living, which was more than a million in majorem dei gloriam, continued for several more centuries." to the decree of the church, which today declares cremation contrary to Christian customs".

Of course, this argument would have been striking and flawless if the aforementioned bonfire had consumed the dead.

The opposing camp attributed the desire to bury in the ground to the natural instinct of the primitive man, who only followed the instructions of nature when he buried his relative. As long as there was peace and they could live undisturbed in their places of residence, as long as one did not drive out the other, they were not compelled to burn their dead. However, as soon as it was necessary to flee from the enemy, the dear and famous dead could only be protected from disgrace by cremating their bodies, and the transportation was also significantly simplified by the changed state of the body. In antiquity, the bonfire was the privilege of the stigmatized, and of those who obeyed their vain whims and desire to be different. In addition, compulsion was also a factor, which justified the mass burnings following the plague epidemic in Athens, as well as the granting of the final command of soldiers who died on the battlefield in order to repatriate them.

So according to them

"the forefather and inventor of cremation was not Hercules, but necessity, the fear of dishonoring the dead, grace and the desire for peoples who migrate and frequently change their places of residence to take the ashes of their loved ones and elders with them".

We must examine the aesthetic, ethical and mercy arguments together, since they belong together.

The aesthetic aspects of the body, the presentation of slow decomposition processes, are not the subject of our study, nor is the detailed description of sudden cremation. But what about the aesthetics of tombstones, the poetics of cemeteries? Can a grove of urns be as aesthetic as an ancient or modern or neglected cemetery?

"I ask now," writes a Freemason, "if the graves are decorated, can't the urns be decorated?" Flowers are planted on the graves and next to the urns, if they are placed in so-called urn halls, can't more beautiful flowers be placed every day, or if they are buried underground in urn groves, can't a sad willow or a rose plant be planted above them?"

These questions arose more than a century earlier and stretched the boundaries of personality, the deepest intimacy, the manifestations of grace and grief.

"Because what is grace actually? In the modern sense, frills and chicory […] Because cremation precludes the manifestation of grace in externals as little as the current burial […] those for whom even the most sacred emotions are merely a mere pose, those who, when at the funeral of their so-called unforgettable ones, the marrow the shaking circumdederunt sounds louder and louder, and meanwhile a forgotten sob breaks out from the ranks of the strangers, they wonder how much is left for them after the happy one, those who look from behind their black-bordered handkerchiefs to see the effect of their immeasurable pain: they oppose cremation out of vanity, mercy in terms of no."

In the end, one more embarrassing point remained on this platform of the turn of the century, the question of the ethics of burial, common pits, and eviction. Because

"in the land of the dead, there is less and less space and the old graves are opening one after the other, so that their inhabitants, over whom the coffin lids were once closed with the false phrase "Peace to the dust" in front of perhaps an incomplete murderer, make room for the newest arrivals, who in life perhaps they were fierce enemies, so that the company would end up with them in the shelter of the dead, in the gaping big common pit.

Those protesting against cremation could not reflect on these aspects with effective arguments. They discussed at length the horror of burning, the sight of the body as it becomes consumed by flames, lacking today's technology and the obligatory cremation coffin.

"This is a mockery of human dignity, a slap in the face!" - writes János Csernoch, the future cardinal, and continues:

"... beautiful can only be what is good and true at the same time, because the concept of beauty is inseparable from these two. [...] The funeral itself does not give anyone pleasure in itself; however, as long as it calms the spirits of the living, fosters faith in the resurrection and the hope of seeing them again, it has advantages that cremation cannot show.”

It was a quagmire, the emphasis slowly shifted from the dead to the living, and now it became a question of who should receive mercy.

"You shall return to the ground, for from it you have sinned: for dust you are, and to dust you shall return"

Neither party disputed the obvious, but no agreement was reached on the speed and manner of the return - should it happen openly and suddenly, almost in an instant, or should it slowly disappear over years, carefully hidden in the depths of the earth from prying, curious eyes? The opinion of József Katona, one of the opponents of cremation, was perhaps closest to the truth when he wrote impartially:

"How do their arguments from the point of view of grace, ethics and aesthetics hold up? These are so subjective that arguing over them can be said to be pointless. The Chinese mourning color is white, ours is black. What is beautiful to one person may be repulsive to another, in this respect one cannot convince the other."

When examining the legal arguments, we must first of all clarify whether we are approaching the issue from the perspective of private law or criminal law. In terms of private law, it is only necessary to decide whether the individual has the right to dispose of his body during his lifetime in such a way that he does not receive a traditional funeral after his death.

According to the supporters of the case, cremation should be equivalent to a traditional funeral from a private law point of view, since in a modern state of law, where freedom of religion, thought and conscience is equally ensured for everyone, the individual's free disposal of his body cannot be restricted even in the event of his death. Opponents of cremation, however, voiced their rather summary opinion: an individual does not have the right to dispose of his own cremation, because this right would offend religious feelings. This is how cremation supporters felt about the conflict between private law and canon law:

"In a state of law, no one should be forced to act against his perception, conviction and emotional world. This is already done by those who argue with religious feelings against the expression of individual freedom. From the point of view of private law, it would also be reprehensible if the camp of those spreading the idea of ​​cremation would similarly deny the individual's right, stemming from personal freedom, to wish for a burial in the ground that better suits his convictions and emotional world after his death.

With this statement, they emphasized the facultative nature of their goal.

The debate over the emphasis on criminal law aspects proved to be endless, similar to the previous ones, reminiscent to some extent of the ongoing debates between those who argue for the death penalty and abolitionists, and the contradictions that hint at the essential part in the underlying content.

To what extent can cremation hinder the interests of justice? The later cardinal referred to a specific case, the Tiszaeszlár trial, which was also famous at the time, "which was decided as a result of the examination of a child's corpse that had been lying in the ground for months" . Coroners were required to examine bodies, especially in suspicious cases, but the possibility of error still existed, especially in smaller towns and villages where

"coroners perform this important duty who know as much about it as a hajdú knows how to cast a bell".

The supporters approached the issue in the opposite way, first examining how much traditional burial makes possible the successful detection of crimes. Taking into account the chemical processes taking place in the body and their decomposition products, poisons, they came to the conclusion that "the poison that caused the death of the experimental subject could just as well be a product of the decaying corpse as it could have entered the body directly with the guilty intention of poisoning".

And in such cases, a good forensic chemist could not comment otherwise than "the possibility that the detected poison could have been […] is not excluded".

The representatives of the cremation considered preventive examinations, conscientious autopsy and autopsy to be much more important in suspicious cases. They supplemented their argument with some statistical data, which proved that criminal exhumations occurred only in the rarest of cases - in a twenty-five-year period, there were two exhumations for every 670,000 deaths in Vienna, while in Prussia there was only one exhumation for every 600,000 deaths.

Public health aspects date back to the end of the 18th century, when the treatment of the dead changed as a result of the humanistic approach – the body was no longer just a dustbin, but a worthy partner of the soul, which received special respect after death. That is why he provoked fierce protests from his subjects II. József's funeral decree of 1789, which was very short-lived and was revoked in the year of his death.

The stomping of the new kind of grace shocked the audience; there was no question of sewing the naked dead into sacks, then rolling them into the grave from a coffin that could be borrowed from the parish, covering them with lime and finally burying them, even in the name of public health.

The hygiene ration evaporated on the altar of grace, and although the representatives of cremation tried in vain more than a century later to draw attention to the dangers inherent in cemeteries, public opinion hardly changed. Not long after the turn of the century, "in Kismarton, Szombathely and Fiúmé [...] the typhus epidemic occurred and spread due to the aqueduct water contaminated by the groundwater seeping from the cemeteries" , wrote the reformers, but there were also examples of infection occurring during exhumation; In 1752 in Chelwood-London, when digging up the body of a person who had died of smallpox, fourteen of the contributors became infected, and the epidemic soon spread throughout the village. The scientific experiments of the time proved that, even if some bacteria do not multiply in the grave, their infectiousness can be detected even weeks or months later - the dangerous period was defined as one for cholera, three months for typhus, and just one year for anthrax.

Their concern was heightened by a possible flood or other natural disaster, the forced exploration effect of which could have even caused the loss of parts of the country.

But just as the debate between the representatives and opponents of cremation raged, there was no agreement among the renowned representatives of science on the issue of the hygiene of cemeteries either. Based on in-depth studies, the doctors participating in the 1891 London Public Health and Demographic Congress and then the Berlin Medical Congress believed that, from a public health point of view, there can be no objection to burying corpses in the ground, if the place of the cemetery is well chosen and the burial is expedient way is done.

Hygiene professor Max von Pettenkofer, who entered the history of medicine as the founder of German hygiene research, made a similar statement. The mention of many authorities may have given reassurance, but as an addition, it is certain that they added that the smoke from crematoria would be significantly more harmful to health than the invisible processes taking place in cemeteries, since

"decomposition is so slow that the soil […] has ample time to render the compounds from the corpses harmless".

But there were also extravagant approaches, offering an alternative for both camps, promoting the surface burial of Turks without coffins as a scientific unicorn. Decomposition takes place much faster in the case of superficially buried corpses than in the case of their deeply buried counterparts, which is why the author suggested a kind of bioburial when he wrote that

"the corpse [...] is handed over to the earth without a coffin. Don't be a graveyard. On the contrary, the final act of every funeral should be to plant a bush or flower on the grave. [...] so the decomposition of the corpse is very fast and is completed in one or two years."

Before discussing the economic arguments, we must review the two stages of cemetery migration, going back to the end of the 18th century. At that time, for reasons of public health, a number of small district cemeteries were established away from the churches, and their final centralization began in the middle of the 19th century - the small cemeteries were swallowed up by the city.

The migration map of cemeteries in Pest-Buda showed a very varied picture. Following the decree of Mária Terézia, the cemetery of St. Anne's Church in Buda was closed, and after several detours it was finally located between today's Kútvölgyi út and Erzsébet Szilágyi, under the name of Vízivárosi cemetery. The inhabitants of the Castle, Víziváros and Országút were buried on the fifteen moons until the cemetery was closed in 1930.

The Tabán cemetery began its wanderings in 1775, and also found its final location after several stops, but it was also landscaped in 1930. The Németvölgyi cemetery was opened in 1885, but it soon proved to be too small, so in 1894 the new central cemetery of Buda, the Farkasrét cemetery, was handed over.

The cemeteries of Pest were also located more and more outside, until finally they were swallowed up by the large public cemetery. Among the suburban cemeteries, Ferencvárosi and Józsefvárosi were also moved two or three times, until the Kerepesi cemetery, which was considered the end of the world at the time, did not cease to exist. But the number of the city's residents and the dead grew at a rate that exceeded even the wildest dreams of city planners, so the city administration was forced to open a new cemetery with an area twice as large as the Rákoskeresztúr cemetery as early as 1886.

The city outgrew the cemeteries, and the cemeteries outgrew the city, and this fact could not be ignored by those arguing in favor of cremation, nor by the representative of the opposing camp.

Buried Dead as a Consuming Mass , supporters of cremation discussed at length how many hectares of land the dead take up at the expense of living, starving humanity . But they did not only talk about the value of the area itself, but also about the maintenance and administration of the cemeteries and the maintenance of the necessary economic and other buildings. As an illustration, some foreign examples were presented, finally reaching the Budapest of the turn of the century, where cemeteries robbed the city of 962,951 square meters of land, their value was almost twelve million crowns, and the annual administration consumed 156,600 crowns. The ash tray, on the other hand, would have required only one-twelfth of the area of ​​a grave site, and urn groves could have been wedged almost unnoticed even in the centers of cities.

The opponents' points of view were much more nuanced and somewhat avoided the problems affecting the capital when they wrote,

"What is the value of the cemetery of a small village, which is not normally in the prima classis area? Who would rent what they would pay for it? However, as a cemetery, it is used for burying the dead, and these must be put somewhere, besides, the annual hay crop also brings something."

Regarding the capital, they believed that even if the cemeteries were not cemeteries, they should still serve as parks providing fresh air, especially public health. However, this argument, however appealing, had little to do with economic considerations.

Of course, the polemic about cremation could have been stretched further, but the new aspects would hardly have helped to reach a consensus; before the turn of the century, representatives of both camps stubbornly stuck to their own positions.

Source: Szilvia Polgári: Cremation in Hungary. Brief history of the Debrecen crematorium (excerpt). Aetas Volume 31, 2016 Issue 2

Featured image: Illustration/Andreas Lischka/Pixabay