In a bit of macabre news, the body of the late president of Cyprus, Tassos Papadopoulos, has been stolen from its grave. According to the BBC, “The theft was reported by a former bodyguard who visited the tomb and found piles of earth by the graveside and an empty coffin.” No motive has yet been ascribed to the abduction, though judging by the spray paint left on Papadopoulos’s headstone, it wasn’t the work of sympathizers. This reminded me of the bizarre case of Benito Mussolini, whose body, unlike in the Cypriot case, was stolen from its grave by a Fascist sympathizer, Domenico Leccisi, in April 1946. (And in a rather nice touch, authorities discovered the empty grave on Easter Sunday.) Let us hope Mr. Papadopoulos does not have the same journey as Il Duce, who was at one point stuffed in a steamer trunk and kept in a closet and was not returned to his family crypt until August 1957. (Before that, Mussolini’s family did receive slivers of his brain, which, upon his memorable execution, had been sent to St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D.C., to check for evidence of syphilis. The test came back negative. Turns out he was a megalomaniac for some other reason.)
