DAMASCUS, Syria (North Press) – “You can get a house in this area very easily, but getting a grave here is not the same, even if you pay the same price as the house!”
This is how Ihssan Marei, a resident of Amara neighborhood in the Syrian capital Damascus, expresses the suffering of Damascenes in securing graves for their dead in the capital, and in his speech he describes the state of the Dahdah cemetery on Baghdad Street, one of the largest cemeteries in Damascus.
Residents of Damascus and its countryside suffer from the difficulty of obtaining a grave plot for their dead, given the limited area of land allocated to graves and the increase in the number of deaths as a result of the ongoing war and coronavirus pandemic.
Marei, the owner of a sewing shop on Baghdad Street in Damascus and a father of three, told North Press that many people bury their dead outside the capital because there is no space left in the cemeteries in Damascus.
Damascus suffers from a severe shortage in the number of cemeteries compared to the number of the population, as the number of cemeteries reached just 33 in Damascus, which is not proportional to the population and the death rate.
Marei said that obtaining a grave has become a dream, and residents are no longer able to secure graves for their dead in the capital. Therefore, many of them resorted to graves outside the capital, the most important of which is Najha Cemetery in the Damascus countryside.
In addition to other crises, burying the dead has become a crisis for the residents of the capital, as the prices of graves have reached fantastic figures, in addition to the costs of burial fees in general.
Layered graves
Youssef Ghawi, a trader who lives in Rukn al-Din in Damascus, told North Press that his family resorted to layered graves to bury his father last winter.
“In order to reduce the high costs of buying a grave in a cemetery close to his residence, I had to bury my father in the grave of a deceased person from the family of a friend of mine,” he adds.
The cost of a grave may reach 7 million pounds (SYP), between the payment for a deed of plot ownership to the burial office in the cemetery and the payment to the owner of the tomb, while the use of the layered grave cost Ghawi 700,000 SYP.
In 2018, the Executive Office in the Damascus Governorate issued Resolution 1020 with the aim of making the process of ceding graves difficult for people.
The office imposed a fee on the process, which is officially known as “deed of plot ownership,” ranging from 3 to 4 million SYP, and this value is paid by those who want to obtain burial ownership in a graveyard.
Ghawi pointed out that many families resort to this method, where the deceased is buried in the grave of another deceased after the approval of the family of the latter, on the condition that five years have passed since his burial.
This process creates major problems with the grave ownership, which can only be resolved by the judiciary, and some of them go beyond the problem of ownership to the extent of losing the trace of the deceased.
Fewer burdens
Fares Kateb (a pseudonym), who works in a cemetery in Jaramana in Rif Dimashq, compares the state of cemeteries with the burial procedures in the capital and its countryside.
“Despite the high costs in the countryside, which are not commensurate with the wages and financial conditions of the population in it compared to the relatively easy situation in the city, the burial costs here remain better and are a smaller burden for families,” he said.
The graveyards here are owned by religious endowments or with donations from philanthropists, and this used to make it easier for people to bury their dead, “so it is possible for them to pay a fee for digging the grave and the raw materials for its construction, and these are usually donated by philanthropists as well,” he added.
He stated that the cost of buying a grave in the countryside ranges from 150,000 to 200,000 SYP, which is a big sum for the population there, but it does not compare in any way with the imaginary figures in the capital.
He added that this cost has been on a permanent rise in recent times due to the high number of deaths due to the coronavirus epidemic, in addition to the increased demand for graves by the indigenous population and the Damascene arrivals.
He pointed out that because of the peak of the virus spread in the past few months, new cemeteries were opened, and this in turn led to an increase in the cost, as the cost sometimes reached 500,000 SYP.