(San Bernardo) Clovisnerys Bejarano kneels to pray before the body of her mother, Saturnina, who died almost 30 years ago, but whose features remained intact thanks to a still unexplained “spontaneous” mummification process that occurs in the Colombian village of San Bernardo.
“She still has her little matt, round face, her braided hair…” she describes to AFP in front of the glass coffin, exhibited in the Museum of Mummies in this city located about a hundred kilometers south of Bogota ( center).
In 1993, the body of Saturnina Torres de Bejarano, who died of a heart problem, was placed in a vault in the town cemetery. When she was exhumed eight years later, her relatives discovered that her remains were largely unharmed.
A discovery without much surprise for the inhabitants of San Bernardo.
“Mummification has become our daily life,” explains Rocio Vergara, the head of the museum where the bodies of 14 people who escaped decomposition are presented – some still have their eyes and nails – for unexplained reasons.
The first discovery of a mummified body in this cemetery dates from 1953 and, since then, the phenomenon has been repeated, with up to 50 “mummies” per year at the end of the 1980s.
Today, there are only a handful of cases each year, according to the museum manager, and most families choose to have the bodies cremated.
Without explanation
A decision that Clovysnerys Bejarano, who regularly takes her grandchildren to see the body of their great-grandmother, does not understand.
“God wanted to leave it to us and so we have it (…) When we see it in this state, how can we make it burn? », asks the 63-year-old housewife.
According to Mme Vergara, “although the door has been opened to university research (…) no one has managed to determine the exact reason” for the conservation of the bodies in the city cemetery.
In San Bernardo, we want to believe that this phenomenon of mummification is due to the good diet of the inhabitants of this agricultural town. A theory that does not find scientific support.
The mummified bodies have no particular commonality: they were of different ages at the time of their death, and no gender, build or location in the cemetery predominates.
Cellars
As for the climate, which was also studied, it paradoxically turned out to be “temperate and humid”, “which should facilitate the decomposition of the bodies”, adds Mme Vergara.
On the other hand, the answer is found with certainty in the vaults, since the phenomenon began to occur when the municipality inaugurated a new cemetery in which there are no graves on the ground.
After a visit to the museum, anthropologist and researcher at the National University of Colombia, Daniela Betancourt, points out that the mummies of San Bernardo have a similar appearance to those of Guanajuato, Mexico, and Palermo, Italy.
She offers her own explanation: “The cemetery is on a steep mountainside. The wind blows constantly, but at the same time it is hot. We can assume that the vaults function like ovens (…) they dehydrate the bodies little by little.”
However, she warns that it would be necessary to scientifically verify her hypothesis.
reference: www.lapresse.ca