The funeral of a priest is performed with much splendor. [180] 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. In some parts of Armenia, as for example in Erzerum, the snow lies so deep in winter-time that burial is well-nigh impossible. During spring-time, with the melting of the snow, coffins have been found perched up on tree tops. This was related by an Armenian boy I know of, who lived in the vicinity of Erzerum. Curious customs of the past have left their marks. In Tarsus, for example, there are Armenian graves ranged about a tree which is asserted to have been planted by St. Paul, each provided with a stone upon which has been carved a symbol of the deceased, for the merchant, a representation of weights and measures, for the blacksmith, an anvil and hammer, for the scribe, an inkstand and pen, and for the industrious housewife, a distaff and spindle. In the cemetery of Nakhitchevan is a large building in which the mourners have a great repast after the funeral, and in certain other graveyards, Dubois found innumerable pieces of broken pitchers and crockery, which were probably broken, as the custom is, to ward off the evil spirit of the dead. These four ceremonies complete the third and last group of festivals described. I have called them ceremonies because fundamentally that is what they are, but they are to be distinguished sharply from the many church ceremonies I have not so much as mentioned, by reason of their festival or social value which alone makes them proper subject-matter for this thesis. The relation between these ceremonies as revealed in the common procession, as well as in the religious ceremony necessary to each is due largely to the fact that they have to do with the most ordinary, and yet most extraordinary of life's events, birth, betrothal, marriage, and death.