Burial Rituals

This work mainly deals with burial rituals and a way of handling with dead bodies from past times to the presence. The first chapter tries to define basic terms speci-fied by various authors. The second chapter deals with a description of burial ritu-als during present and past times. This chapter mainly focuses on the Czech tradi-tion and is completed by G. Maiell{\crq}s research on contemporary exploitation of crematoriums. The third part of the work deals with the burial rituals of pre-Christian cultures in Europe, especially Celtic, Germanic and Slavonic traditions. The fourth chapter focuses especially on the rituals of noneuropean cultures, e.g. Chinese or Islamic. The last part of this paper includes special ways of burying of dead bodies, e.g. children{\crq}s burials, burials of young people or dealing with dead bodies by unusual situations, e.g. during epidemic periods