Patrycja Ćwikła from the Kraków Board of Cemeteries (ZCK) said the growing popularity of cremation was mainly due to practical and financial reasons, Polish state news agency PAP reported on Monday.
Almost 50 percent of Kraków’s deceased are cremated
Ćwikła said: “There has been a trend towards urn burials for more than a decade now. In 1995, such burials accounted for just 0.5 percent of all funerals in city-owned cemeteries. Now they represent almost 50 percent of all funerals.”
She added that some people, especially practicing Catholics, were initially wary of this form of burial.
‘The Church is not against cremation’
“The Church is not against cremations,” Fr. Łukasz Michalczewski, the spokesman for the Kraków Archdiocese, told the PAP news agency.
According to funeral officials and representatives of the Catholic Church, families choose urn burials out of respect for the last wish of the deceased, but also due to lack of space, PAP reported.
“The cemeteries are overcrowded,” Michalczewski said. "We have to buy additional land to expand the area."
The cost of dying
Financial considerations are also playing an increasing role as the prices of cemetery plots rise, officials said.
The price of a plot for a brick-lined grave, to be used for a period of 99 years, may now reach PLN 20,000 (EUR 4,200), according to cemetery officials.
Meanwhile, a traditional coffin funeral costs around PLN 8,000 (EUR 1,700) on average, the PAP news agency reported.
(pm/gs)
Source: PAP, krakow.tvp.pl, krakow.naszemiasto.pl