Item Detail
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30539
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3
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0
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English
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Wrestling with Death : Greek Immigrant Funeral Customs in Utah
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Utah Historical Quarterly
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Winter 1984
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52
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1
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Salt Lake City, UT
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Utah State Historical Society
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29-49
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In the early years of the century young immigrants regularly sat in Greek Town coffeehouses to arrange funerals for patriotes killed in falls of coal and ore, explosions, and spills of molten metal. "The gold-ornamented Minotaur [industry] of immigrant life is nourished on fresh Greek youth," wrote a Greek woman journalist who toured the bursting industrial camps of Utah in those years. Sometimes a black-robed, tall-hatted priest, bearded and long haired, sat with the men. They did the best they could for each countryman but were able to provide little more than the rites for the dead and, at most, place a wedding crown on his head; for marriage, like baptism, had ties with death.
The immigrants were men without women and expected to remain in America only long enough to accumulate savings. Bereft of mothers and sisters, they barely nurtured the culture that had come down to them from antiquity through the Christian-Byzantine epoch and into the kief tic era of insurrections against the 400-year rule of the Turks. Yet, so important were the rituals of death that the young men immediately built churches and sent for priests to insure the dead 'not go to their graves unsung.' Their horror of dying in a foreign land was thus mitigated somewhat. [Author]