this post was submitted on 28 Dec 2024
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Summary

Sweden’s burial associations are seeking land to prepare for potential mass wartime burials, prompting new crisis readiness guidelines following the country’s decision to join NATO amid rising tensions with Russia.

In Gothenburg, officials aim to acquire 10 acres for emergency burials and 15 acres for regular cemetery use.

Sweden’s neutrality ended after Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, prompting civil defense measures and NATO membership.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Honestly, I wouldn't think that land for graveyards would be a huge problem in Sweden.

The Netherlands or something densely-populated, that might be a lot more difficult. Especially since I imagine that you have to have land above the water table by a certain amount.

I wonder how the Dutch do it?

kagis

Ah.

https://www.businessinsider.com/graves-in-the-netherlands-are-rented-2016-1

"[G]raves in the Netherlands are typically rented for 10 or 20 years, with remains being cleared out once the lease expires," as RBC Capital analysts recently noted in a report.

Interestingly, this has nothing to do with burial rituals. Rather, it's because there isn't enough cemetery space in the country.

Poor soil conditions and high ground water tables that slow down the "skeletonisation process" of the bodies preclude the Dutch from building up enough cemeteries, Paul J. M. Van Steen and Piet H. Pellenbarg of the University of Groningen noted in a 2004 research report on burials in the Netherlands.

EDIT: I remember an NPR Planet Money episode talking about long-run graveyard economics.

https://www.npr.org/transcripts/464628054

TANYA MARSH: In most countries in Europe, you buy the right to use a grave for a particular period of time - 20 or 30 years, 50 years.

GOLDSTEIN: And after that, they dig up your bones, and they put them in the bone house. There are these fancy words for this I actually didn't know before I did this story. They are the charnel house or the ossuary.

SMITH: And is this just because Europe has been around so long, like, if they didn't do this there would just be bones all the way down?

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, I think they have a better idea, like, of what it means to say, oh sure, we'll bury you and keep up the cemetery forever.

SMITH: Yeah, we're so hopeful in America.

MARSH: We're the ones who deviate. We came over here, and we said, look at all this land - we can give everybody a grave forever. And so they did.

GOLDSTEIN: Oh, is that a mistake?

MARSH: Yeah, it was a huge mistake.

SMITH: Watch?

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, so, you know, essentially, in the law - this is in the law in most states - cemeteries are making this legal promise that is an anomaly - that's really unusual. You know, they are promising to do something forever - to mow the lawn forever, to keep up the fence forever. And she says it's easy enough to do this while you're still burying people. You know, someone pays for a plot, and you take some of that money and spend it on, you know, lawn care, etc.

SMITH: It's like a pyramid scheme a little bit.

GOLDSTEIN: Well, you could say that.

SMITH: You're paying for old plots with new people coming in.

GOLDSTEIN: Sure. If you were a less cynical person, you might say, you know, it's like - think about it like work and retirement, right?

SMITH: Yeah, OK.

GOLDSTEIN: So, like, the part where the cemetery is still filling up, that's like your working life. When the cemetery is full, that's like retirement, although in this case, you've got to retire forever. You're never going to die. You've got to keep the cemetery going forever. But cemeteries do what we do for retirement. While they're working - in this case, while they're filling up with new dead people - they save money. So this is often regulated by the state. For example, in the state of New Jersey, where Andrew's wife's aunt is buried, the state requires that cemeteries put aside 15 percent of the cost of a new grave, put that into this perpetual care fund. So they say, you've got to set that money aside. You can't touch the principle. And then forever, you know, once your cemetery is full you will have this stream of interest to, say, pay people to cut the lawn. I should say this doesn't apply to religious cemeteries. But a lot of religious cemeteries do the same thing, even though they're not regulated by the state.

SMITH: So when our listener, Andrew Mitchell, sees those guys mowing that old cemetery - a cemetery where they're clearly not getting any new customers - they're in theory, perhaps, being paid by some investment from long ago.

GOLDSTEIN: Yeah, that's exactly right.

SMITH: But that probably doesn't always work out, as we know, when you try and invest for the long run - meaning forever. Sometimes you don't have the money to do it.

GOLDSTEIN: Definitely. And one of the reasons Tanya Marsh, that law professor, says it's a mistake to make this permanent promise is cemeteries do go bankrupt. She says it happens a lot. You know, we don't hear about it because they're little things, but they don't invest right, they don't have enough money saved, and they just don't have enough money to pay to keep the cemetery up.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

This kind of misses a major point. In countries like the Netherlands or Germany the majority of people get cremated. No skeletalization, no bones, no leftovers. The urns are made from a material that dissolves fully within the rental period for the grave, so there is no collectible remains left by the time someone else is put in the same grave.

[–] LordWiggle 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

When you think of the size of Zweden, you'd think it wouldn't be an issue. The times I've been there, the ground was usually rock with a thin layer of soil over it, or just a thick layer of moss. So it may be hard to find the right spot with enough soil of the right type. But that's just based on my impressions of the times I've been there. I haven't seen that much of the massive country, I have been there 12 times on holiday or work related.

[–] M137 2 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] LordWiggle 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Lol, typo, it's Sweden in Dutch so missed the spelling mistake.

[–] M137 1 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Ooh, didn't know that, kinda cool!
Does that mean Sweden is at the very end of countries by alphabetical order in Dutch?

I won't deny that I felt it might have been some joke about Sweden, not sure what. I did think about Russia painting white Z's on some military vehicles but never heard any conspiracy or idea that Sweden is in their pockets or anything like that. And just to be clear, it was nothing more than a quick random thought based on nothing that I put no weight on whatsoever.

[–] LordWiggle 2 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Nope, second to last! Zwitserland is the last one!

Edit: and I just learned Switzerland officially doesn't have a capital city :)

And I found out about more awesome stuff about Switzerland here

Edit edit: oh and the Z on the Russian vehicles is because it's a letter which doesn't exist in the Cyrillic alphabet, as well as all the other letters or signs painted on military vehicles during the invasion of Ukraine. It represented the area where the vehicle came from, to prevent blue on blue engagement. The largest group of the invasion was marked with a Z so it became a national symbol in support of the war.

Or from our perspective: the new swastika.