Pomuch Cemetery

Pomuch Cemetery

Many are familiar with the now well known Mexican Day of the Dead Celebration held on Nov. 2nd each year. A celebration of ones ancestors it has a distinctly fun meets macabre atmosphere with sugar and bread skulls for eating, make-up that resembles skulls, and a day spent in the cemetery telling stories of relatives and friends.
However, in Pomuch Cemetery in the small Mayan town of Campeche, Mexico the connection with the dead goes even farther. Each year on the day of the dead, family members visit the cemetery and ritually clean the bones of their loved ones and place them on display among flowers and new cloth for veneration.
Those who die in Campeche, be they a newborn or an eighty year old, are all buried for three years, and then are dug up on the Day of the Dead (this can be a difficult experience for the family members) to have their bones cleaned and transferred to a wooden crate placed on permanent display in the cemetery. From each year there on out, family members will come every November 1st (specifically for dead children known as Day of the Innocents) and November 2cnd and clean the bones of their fathers, brothers, sisters, mothers, aunts, uncles, cousins, and so on.
The custom may date back directly to Mayan practices in which skulls of ancestors were often kept and venerated. Curiously as technology has progressed and entered into our bodies themselves, items like steel hip joints have entered into the remains and must be cleaned differently from the bones themselves.
The ritual which is said to help deal with the pain of death and keep the family together, is also tied to a belief that a poorly taken care of relative can "become angry and wonder lost through the streets." There is some concern that as the youth of Campeche become more modernized they will abandoned the tradition of cleaning the dead. In the words of one local man speaking of his children "I can't make them do it, but if they don't, I don't know where I'm going to end up."

Read more about Pomuch Cemetery on Atlas Obscura...

Category: Memento Mori, Relics and Reliquaries, Ossuaries, Catacombs, Crypts, & Cemeteries, Cultures and Civilizations , Rites and Rituals
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Edited by: Dylan, Seth Teicher, Rachel