Community coffin

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The municipality coffin was (also transport or Konduktsarg) one of the parish information furnished coffin , who could not be buried with the dead and used repeatedly.

In the Middle Ages it was customary to bury the dead immediately after death. The corpse was wrapped in cloths , sewn into linen sacks or buried in containers such as large jugs or hollowed out tree trunks . Coffins were expensive and mostly reserved for the upper class. For the rest of the population there were one or more community coffins provided by the community (sometimes also a children's coffin), with which the deceased was only brought to his grave , but not buried in it. Since the 16th century, the form of the was folding coffin with a hinged bottom usual, so the coffin with the body into the grave let down, opened the bottom and then the coffin was lifted out again without a body. The oldest surviving community coffin , that of Mandach , with dendrodatum 1548 (today in the Aargau Museum ), however, still has a solid base. Most of the folding coffins that have been handed down under the name of Pestsarg are also community coffins. Only new practices in the 18th and 19th centuries - such as the compulsory laying out of the dead for a few days - made an individual coffin almost indispensable, which led to the fact that from then on there were hardly any burials without a coffin.

A late form of the community coffin is the Josephine savings coffin, which was introduced at short notice in 1785 due to an imperial decree in the Danube monarchy . Folding coffins were systematically used one last time in camps and sanatoriums during the Nazi era .

literature

  • Central Institute for Sepulchral Culture Kassel: Large lexicon of funeral and cemetery culture . Dictionary of Sepulchral Culture. Folklore-cultural-historical part: From abdication to second burial. Edited by Reiner Sörries , Braunschweig 2002.
  • Museum of Sepulchral Art: boxes, carriage, caravan. On the way to rest . Accompanying publication to the exhibition of the same name, Kassel 1999.
  • Stefan Hess : The so-called plague coffin of Mandach - an informative testimony to early modern sepulchral culture, in: Argovia 125 (2013), pp. 124-133.