Note 18 — Chapter IV · Private Festival Occasions

The funeral of a priest is performed with much splendor.18 The procession makes a circuit of all the churches, and stopping at different places, portions of the gospel are read. If the priest be of high rank, as an archbishop, or a bishop, he is carried in an open coffin and in a sitting posture, dressed up in official vestments, in which position he is interred in the courtyard of the church. Farmers send sheep to be killed and given to the poor as a sacrifice. The Greeks in Constantinople also carry their dead in an open coffin, but this is because a Greek official who was a refugee prisoner in Constantinople at the time of the war of the Turks with the Greeks, endeavored to get himself carried out of the country by feigning death and boxing himself up in a coffin. But the Turks discovered the ruse and it was enacted by the sultan that thereafter all Greeks must be carried to their graves in open coffins. The custom in respect to the Armenian bishops, however, has no connection with this.