Man is mortal, and it is impossible to avoid the natural end for any living being. Is it possible to make sure that further troubles with the departed are minimal? One of the reasonable solutions is cremation.
The incineration of the bodies of the dead is by no means a new method of burial. For a long time, for many peoples this method was traditional, and somewhere even the privilege of only certain castes or estates. The spread of cremation was interrupted only with the establishment of Christianity, in the case of Russia - Orthodoxy, which still does not welcome the burning of bodies, and in some regions actively opposes cremation at all.
In Europe, where customs have traditionally been milder, cremation has been widely used since the second half of the 19th century. In Russia, the first attempts to introduce cremation date back to 1917, but, faced with misunderstanding and denial, it did not become widespread. Only after the collapse of the USSR, in almost all large cities, increasing attention began to be paid to cremation, and today, depending on the region, in those cities where there are modern crematoria, from 45 to 60% of the deceased are subjected to it.
If you do not touch upon the traditional Orthodox moral foundations (although the Russian Orthodox Church officially approved the process), then cremation today is the most environmentally friendly and harmless way of burying bodies. We must not forget about the economic side of the issue. For a number of reasons, cremation is significantly less expensive than traditional burial or equal to it.
The question of how exactly the cremation process is carried out worries a lot of interested people. Since almost everyone is familiar with the method of traditional burial in the ground, the question of cremation and its technology remains open to the majority.
As for the actual ceremony itself, it may differ significantly from region to region, but the technological process is essentially the same in all crematoria.
The first rule, and it is invariably everywhere, is that the coffin must be made of combustible materials. Ideally, absolutely everything that is loaded into the crematorium oven should be burned with almost no residue. Although the statement that only ashes remain after cremation is not true. After the completion of the process, the remaining solid fragments are mechanically transferred to a temporary container, where they stay until they are handed over to their relatives. The latter, in turn, either bury the ashes in a columbarium, or scatter them over a special platform, or treat them in some other way.
Currently, the popularity of cremation is increasing, which also contributes to the reduction of traditional burial in the ground, which reduces the risk of contamination and poisoning by groundwater, where the decay products of the body enter.