What does the phenomenon of mass graves and silent, faceless, sterilized burials mean for humanity in the 21st century? What immediate and long-term repercussions can the inability to mourn have on both individual and social levels, with all the rituals imposed by the culture of the society to which the deceased belonged?

What is the function of mourning in pre-modern, traditional societies? And what does the exclusion of the dead and death from people's lives in urban modernity societies imply? What happens with the impossible mourning for the pandemic's dead, the people who die all alone under quarantine conditions and are buried without the funeral ritual, locked in sealed coffins in mass graves?

What could the crypts of these dead, embedded among the living, signify for our culture? Mourning and burial customs are a condition of social life, part of the social bond. The act of Antigone burying and mourning her unburied brother, defying Creon’s laws, highlights the meaning of being human. It fulfills a Duty toward humanity and culture.

From the dawn of human history, dating back to the Neanderthal era, burial practices have played a significant role in the formation of society. The Homeric epics and the tragedy of Antigone teach us much. The impossible and insurmountable mourning is poignantly illustrated by the myth of Niobe, who, upon seeing all fourteen of her children dead, petrified from grief, her lamentation turned to stone, ultimately becoming a rock from which her tears flow day and night.

Our own Niobe, who shares the name, treated at 18 ANO and later at the Social Polyclinic, condenses into her tragic story all the major issues of our time: the impossible mournings for the absent father and the prematurely lost son, the constant wandering in the world of reason and madness, unable to firmly enter either world, carrying the petrified lament on her shoulders until she ultimately lost her life during quarantine days, falling from a rock...

COVER PHOTO: Truck convoy transporting coffins from Bergamo, Italy.