Saturday, March 20, 2010

You Can't Keep A Good Man Down

A few days ago, Tassos Papadopoulos, the former president of Cyprus, was lowered into his grave after succumbing to lung cancer. The actual succumbing occurred fourteen months ago, followed shortly by his burial. A year almost to the day after he was originally laid to rest, he turned up missing. The marble slab covering his grave had been moved and the ground disturbed. Authorities were perplexed. Ordinarily, people lose a lot of their value upon their death, just like a new car leaving the sales lot, and it only keeps going down as time goes on. Even Mr. Papadopoulos' adherents could not be expected to miss him so gravely as to dig him up.

This has not always been the case. In prior centuries, body-snatching was quite the thing. Medical schools and scientists had a need for cadavers for dissection purposes, and the so-called Resurrection Men did a good business exhuming bodies to sell. Although this was illegal, it was not considered that heinous a crime to steal bodies once their previous occupants were done with them. Even then, though, the bodies lost value quickly, and efforts were made to retrieve only the freshest, leading some of the more ambitious entrepreneurs to introduce efficiencies by dabbling in murder, which was frowned on, especially when the victims were nice and white.

So in Cyprus, when the year-old corpse was dug up, no one knew what to make of it. Other than the marble slab, there had been no particular effort to protect the grave. It's a far cry from the ancient Egyptian standard, wherein the bodies of kings were elaborately sheltered from harm, both from the living and in the afterlife. Pyramids covered labyrinthine tombs; the bodies themselves were embalmed and carefully enveloped in linen. Early on, Greek culture demanded similar measures for the more exalted personages, who were entombed after being lovingly wrapped in grape leaves, but the practice was largely abandoned in modern times when people found the yogurt dip off-putting. Mr. Papadopoulos was clearly left vulnerable.

But what was the nature of this crime? It was just another puzzlement, much like the local burglary ring that targeted nunneries, or the Post-It graffiti gang. Perhaps the body was being held for ransom, but it is unclear whether the family had been approached. A local government office was rumored to have received a small package with a severed, decomposed ear and a note made up of letters cut from magazines, but the message was Greek to them and no one in the mailroom could figure out why someone would send them an old mushroom, so it had been discarded.

Acting on a tip, authorities recently found the body in a new, freshly dug grave on the edge of town, and after positive identification, it was reburied in the original grave, attended by family and supporters who shouted "Immortal! Immortal!" during the ceremony. This struck many as being an odd observation to make about a person who is being buried for the third time, but people have different perspectives on this sort of thing.

Three men were ultimately fingered for the dastardly deed, including one who allegedly directed the operation from his jail cell. He was serving time for the rape and murder of two women, and had previously escaped for over a month before being recaptured. After the new accusation was leveled, he is reported to have threatened a hunger strike, but thought better of it after jail officials seemed insufficiently upset about it. He is now mulling his options, which include Sitting Stone-Faced With Arms Folded During Skit Night, and Cutting Down On Sweets.

19 comments:

  1. and just when poor mr. papadopolous thought he finally get a little rest. thanks for reminding me there's always something more bizarre than you can imagine going on out there!

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  2. I love the title almost as much as the article itself. Quite appropriate. Excellent use of satire, and rather an informative exposition on a little-known mystery and the always-popular practice of body-snatching. I never know what to expect when I show up to this blog, and I love it.

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  3. I can see I have to keep up with you more often to keep abreast of that news I knew nothing of. Oddities of life...er death, fascinate me.

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  4. You need to enable public access to the email listed on your Blogger profile page (check the box!) - I can't reply to your comments otherwise!

    Links (when relevant to the subject at hand) are always welcome in my comment section. Do leave us your bra post!

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  5. Gah! I was just reading the other day about the singer James Brown's body allegedly being missing. Apparently one of his daughters has been storing it in her house for the past 4 years until a crypt could be built. Another daughter (confirmed by DNA after Brown's death) came out of the woodwork and wanted access to it.

    Suddenly, it has "disappeared".

    I don't know what I find more disturbing---the fact that this woman has lived with her father's corpse in the house---is it in her GE Freezer or what? Or that another daughter wanted "access" to it. blech

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  6. "You Can't Keep A Good Man Down" !!!!!

    HA!

    Just the title alone!

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  7. Something fishy is definitely going on in Cyprus--today's new on BBC HERE indicates that the remains of two archbishops have been pinched from their Cyprus graves.

    Something's rotten in the state of Cyprus.

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  8. 'odd for a man being buried the fourth time around'

    hahaha!!!!

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  9. Now you people have me wondering where Elvis and Michael are.

    This is a great blog, Murr, and thanks for helping me find it by your visit to mine. I have signed on as a follower, but I may miss a post here and there.

    And a tip o' the cap to Attila, despite the fact that she never told me about you.

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  10. Resurrection men? Wow. I never knew there was such a thing. Interesting article. Thanks for stopping by my blog.

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  11. Oh Attila I am SO upset about finding out about James Brown. In that I hadn't written about it...that is so completely up my alley. The only equitable thing to do would be to divvy him up, I think. Always keeping some in reserve (Tupperware, people!) pending further DNA analysis. Thanks, everyone, for dropping by.

    And KGMom? I looked that link up. My goodness. If this keeps up there will be NOTHING rotten in the state of Cyprus.

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  12. Murr,
    I enjoyed your quirky sense of humor. Great blog! I also had a chance to peruse some of your posts and your slant on things is quite unique. We may have a few things in common considering being close in age and life experience.

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  13. Love your sense of humour! Thanks for pointing me in your direction. Nothing like a good grave-robbing, I say. We should encourage it, the more the merrier and then the full-up cemeteries crisis would be averted, there'd be plenty of new spaces for aspiring afterlifers.

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  14. LOL! The yogurt dip killed me!!

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  15. Great book called The Knife Man about early surgery/cadaver theft, etc, by Wendy Moore.

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  16. Great book called The Knife Man about early surgery/cadaver theft, etc, by Wendy Moore.

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  17. Murr,
    I enjoyed your quirky sense of humor. Great blog! I also had a chance to peruse some of your posts and your slant on things is quite unique. We may have a few things in common considering being close in age and life experience.

    ReplyDelete
  18. "You Can't Keep A Good Man Down" !!!!!

    HA!

    Just the title alone!

    ReplyDelete