Cemeteries and Burial Customs

Cemeteries are places where corpses are buried.

Details
Cemeteries can be municipal, collective (bourgeois or town gentry), or family-only. Municipal is bargain-basement burial and very much not preferred. Collectives typically contract with a single stoneworker. Municipal cemetery prelates are unbeneficed. Female prelates often become cemetery prelates and marry sextons. A family crypt would sometimes have a long, flat stone that could be used either as an altar or as a place to keep the body until it could be cremated or buried.

Sometimes cemeteries are haunted; there may not be proper ghosts, but “things move themselves....there are graves where the dirt is always disturbed no matter how many times you rake it smooth.”

It is customary to keep vigil over bodies prior to cremation. Sometimes this occurs in shifts. Cremation is considered barbaric in the capital, but is the best deterrent against ghouls. In Amalo, about half of the citizens choose cremation, largely those wealthy enough to afford it. A dead emperor’s nohecharei are at least sometimes cremated.

Most sects have very strict customs regarding how the dead should be handled and interred, and people will take great offense if these rites are not followed correctly. In Amalo, most people are buried initially in cemeteries, and then their bones are moved to crypts after the bodies have decayed.

In areas where ghouls are common and cremation isn't practiced, a headstone with the person's name, and a well-tended gravesite, will typically prevent the dead body from rising as a ghoul.

Murderers and victims must be buried as far apart as possible so they will not haunt the cemetery.