Longevity
 

 

 

 

 

The cemetery in Vourliotes is very small.  I think I counted only about 50 marked graves in it last year.  The custom here is to bury the dead under a small marble crypt.  After 5 years the body is exhumed by the family, the bones are carefully washed and transferred to a small box then stored in an ossuary for as long as there are family members around to care for them.

 

I started looking at the dates on those crypts and noticed that there were 3 women in the cemetery whose average age  was 100.  If half the people in the cemetery were women, then 3 in 25 of the women in the cemetery, or 12% of the women buried in that cemetery in the past five years, lived to be 100.  My math skills aren't the best, but that is an astonishing number.