Posted
Update
Article written by
/2021/12/14/61b8b9accb57c_france-3.png)
One week before All Saints Day, Wednesday October 26, 12/13 focused on graves that sometimes fall into oblivion. For the municipalities, the difficulty is to find the owners of these abandoned concessions, before being able to reallocate the land.
Lionel Scottohead of the civil status and cemetery service of the city of Saint-Laurent-du-Var (Alpes-Maritimes) shows a tomb with a broken door, never repaired, whose surface is very black. “We can see that this concession seems not to have been maintained for some time”he observes. This phenomenon is more and more recurrent in the cemetery of the commune. 45 concessions in perpetuity are thus in a state of abandonment. The owners of the properties have a year and a half to come forward. Otherwise, the municipality will exhume the bodies and deposit them in the municipal ossuary in perpetuity.
The goal is to redevelop the concessions in order to allocate them to other families for 15 or 20 years. For the inhabitants, the maintenance of the concessions is a family affair and a story of memory. “I will be very sorry to have my grandparents, my father, my aunt, my uncle removed”says a woman. In the cemetery, places are starting to run out. 750 new locations should open in autumn 2023.