As families gather for the Pchum Ben holiday to celebrate their loved ones who have passed away, rows of aging, dusty urns sit on a shelf in Wat Langka Pagoda, waiting for someone to bring them to their rightful home.
These urns were hidden in a brick nook behind the main hall of the pagoda as families fled during the Khmer Rouge invasion and evacuation of Phnom Penh in 1975.
Venerable Vy Raksmey with some of the unclaimed urns At Wat Langka Pagoda. KT/Fabien Mouret
These families were unsure of what lay ahead for them, and believed the pagoda, which was the second largest in the city, was the safest place for their loved ones. The alcove was not discovered until decades later, when monks living in the pagoda were looking for somewhere to hide valuable urns made of gold and bronze.
But the discovery of these urns this year was big news here, with the hope that families who had lost urns during the confusion of the evacuation would be reunited with them.
After decades of being hidden away, the faded hues of the urns’ designs make them almost impossible to identify, and any name tags or signatures faded away years ago. It is also bad luck in Khmer culture to open another family’s urn, making it even more difficult to identify them.
In addition to the numerous difficulties in identifying them from the outside, many of the people who hid them in the pagoda passed away before notifying family members of where to find the urns of loved ones, leaving some of these urns family-less.
More than seven months after their discovery, very few of the urns have been picked up by families, and the shelves, built by a team of USAID workers and US Navy construction teams, may be their final resting place.
DC-Cam Effort
After the discovery, the Document Center for Cambodia (DC-Cam) has been searching for the families of the people cremated in each urn.
There are 464 urns, most of which are made of bronze, stone, clay and ceramic. The urns were moved from the brick alcove to a temporary shrine elsewhere in the pagoda.
After being rediscovered, USAID and the US Navy builders working on community construction projects throughout the country offered to construct eight cupboards for the urns, DC-Cam’s Executive Director Chhang Youk told Khmer Times.
“USAID and the US Navy united and have donated money to take care or publish the documents for the urns in order to facilitate the relatives of the urns to find their lost ones,” Mr. Youk said. “So far, only a few people have asked and brought relative’s urns to reunite their families.” Mr. Youk said that only a few of the urns had signs or tags with a name and death date. “Only a few of urns were from the Vietnamese minority,” he added.
“In the past, only dozens of people, including Cambodians living abroad, have visited and asked to search for their relative’s urns,” Venerable Vy Raksmey said.
Although many of the urns have not been picked up by families, the pagoda will construct a special stupa and shrine for the urns inside the pagoda, Mr. Youk said. The ashes held in the urns were from people whose ages ranged from 10 to 80 years-old, according to analysis.