If the family is finally there, what happens after? - Total Incident Ecology of Deaths and Disappearances on the Balkan Route

What happens after someone dies or disappears on the Balkan route?

This article is part of Dead and Missing, a four-part series previewing Collective Aid’s forthcoming report, Total Incident Ecology of Deaths and Disappearances on the Balkan Route.

Covering Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Greece, North Macedonia, Bulgaria, Albania, Kosovo and Montenegro, the report examines deaths and disappearances documented between 2020 and July 2026. It follows what comes after: recovery, identification, family notification, burial and the long-term traceability of a grave, including the cases where a person remains unidentified and their family never receives an answer.

Each article explores one part of that chain, offering a first look at the report ahead of the full report’s release in November. 

The decisions are not over

The person might have been identified. The family has been contacted and has managed to reach the country. Before following what happens next, it is worth holding onto how much had to happen for them to get here. Many people are buried without being identified, and many relatives cannot travel even when they know where someone is.

For those who do arrive, there are more decisions. Will the person be buried here or taken home? Which cemetery is available? What documents are needed? Can the burial reflect their faith or known wishes? Will there be a name on the individual grave? Who pays?

These can sound like family choices. They are also choices shaped by visas, transport, municipal arrangements, available burial grounds and money. A family cannot choose a journey it cannot afford or a cemetery that is not available to them.

What bringing someone home requires

Returning a body across borders is called repatriation. It can require a death certificate, medical documents, transport permissions, consular authorisation, a suitable coffin and arrangements between funeral providers in different countries. Translations and travel can add further costs.

Repatriation costs run into several thousand euros, with accounts ranging from around €4,000 to €10,000 or more. These are examples from different cases, not a single regional tariff. They show what families may be required to raise before a preference becomes an available option.

In reporting on burials in Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, an Afghan family’s effort to return a relative home was frustrated by expense and bureaucracy. A burial within the region became the alternative. Identification had established who the person was; it had not made it possible to take him where the family wanted.

An available cemetery can be another journey away

On Samos, interviewees described the absence of a settled local process for Muslim burial. Identified bodies might be taken by relatives or buried locally, but the available cemetery did not provide Muslim rites. Families able to pay could arrange transfer to the Muslim cemetery in Komotini, at a reported cost of around €1,000.

That is a separate expense from international repatriation. It is the cost of moving a body within Greece to reach a burial option appropriate to the person’s known religion. If the family cannot pay, that option is not equally available.

The issue is not that everyone arriving on the route should be presumed Muslim. A person’s faith cannot be established from nationality alone. It is whether known beliefs and wishes are sought and respected, and what happens when the practical arrangements needed to do so are unavailable locally.

The Mytilini Declaration sets out principles for the dignified treatment of missing and deceased people and their families. But a principle does not itself organise transport, secure documents or make it possible for a relative to attend. Those responsibilities need people, resources and an accountable procedure.

Who makes participation possible?

On Chios, a small community organisation receiving missing-person calls, helping families communicate with hospitals and morgues, recording graves and assisting with funerals. It drives people from the camp to a cemetery an hour away and arranges video calls so relatives abroad can watch a burial.

These are not decorative additions to a funeral. Without transport, friends may not be able to attend. Without a call, relatives abroad may have no way to witness the burial. Without someone recording the grave, a family may later struggle to locate it.

One repatriation described in the interviews cost around €10,000, with funding shared between an organisation, the family and the wider community. The amount is a case-specific example, but the division of payment reveals the arrangement: people outside the public system had to assemble the resources required.

Municipal authorities refuse responsibility for cemetery administration, while relatives and small organisations are left arranging much of the access and practical support around it.

When no family and no money arrive

For many people, none of those choices becomes possible. They remain unidentified, their relatives are not reached, or the family cannot travel or pay. A municipality may arrange burial before anyone can participate.

The person can then be buried under NN - name unknown - or a number. A burial has happened, but the family may not know there is a grave. Later, they may need to locate the cemetery, find the relevant record and establish which individual plot belongs to their relative.

A marker helps only if it remains connected to that information. Europe’s Nameless Dead, an investigation cited in the report, documents how burial locations across Europe have had to be reconstructed through municipal inquiries, cemetery visits and local knowledge rather than one accessible record.

In Bosnia and Herzegovina, organisations have funded permanent markers to replace temporary ones. That preserves something important: a place, an inscription and potentially a reference linking the grave to a case. Yet a durable NN marker still does not establish identity. Nor does one funded intervention settle who will maintain the grave in the years that follow.

A grave has costs after the funeral

The financial and administrative work does not necessarily end at burial. Relatives may later need to pay for records, translation, travel, exhumation or repatriation. Where cemetery use depends on renewal, someone also needs to know when action is required and how to take it.

The Council of Europe’s Parliamentary Assembly calls for graves to be individual, permanently identifiable and recorded, with efforts to respect religious beliefs. These standards concern more than the marker’s appearance. They preserve the possibility that someone can be found after burial, including when a family comes forward years later.

A person’s dignity is not something a family purchases. What the report shows is that the material arrangements through which it should be respected, appropriate rites, transport, an individual marker, access to a funeral and a traceable grave, can depend on money and outside assistance.

Dead and Missing: Total Incident Ecology of Deaths and Disappearances on the Balkan Route, released in November, documents who is asked to carry those costs and what happens when they cannot.

The next part looks beyond the funeral: at the marker that deteriorates, the record that becomes difficult to find and the family still separated from both.

Words by Anna Gruber, Advocacy Manager