Randomly remembered seeing this random old black and white photo from like the 50s, pretty sure it was from Sweden. A picture from a morgue, of a tall blond man in some kind of an uniform approaching another man standing beside an opened coffin, clutching something to his chest while looking at the approaching man with a look of wary insult on his face. The caption explained that this was an incident of a police officer stopping a man from putting a bottle of beer in his father's coffin (his own father, not the cop's father) because for some reason doing that was against Sweden's burial laws.
I don't remember the details but I recall how the guy had the looks of a rough life written all over him, ragged clothes in contrast to the police officer's pristine uniform - though obscured by motion blur as he was rapidly approaching with hateful intent - and the much finer burial clothes of the deceased. A small, skinny man with black hair, holding onto the bottle that's about to be confiscated like it's something precious to him.
I felt like something wasn't adding up and went to the comments to see if there was additional context that was missing from all this, and there was: The son and the father were Romani, and at least at the time it was still very much a tradition in Swedish Romani culture to bury the dead with little gifts - not necessarily extravagant or expensive, but things that the lost loved one would have liked.
This wasn't about a mourning son being stopped from playfully paying his respects in a way that someone else thought indignified. This was about a man being prohibited from performing his own peoples' funeral rites.
Had to go find the photo, it's indeed Swedish. Taken by Åke Borglund and photo of the year 1958, apparently.
Source: https://digitaltmuseum.se/021016531349/arets-bild-1958-tagen-i-stillhetens-kapell-tid-uppstandelsens-kapell-i
Holy fuck you found it.
I misremembered, it wasn't a morgue, those are empty church pews.
After finding and posting the photo above, I did some more research and found out where it was originally published. Long story short, I now own a 1958 issue of Se, which was a Swedish magazine for photojournalism, inspired by Life and other similar publications.
The photo comes from an article on a Swedish Romani funeral in Karlstad (a city 300 km west of Stockholm). The text is pretty exoticising and othering, I won't bother translating the whole thing. But I will relay the most interesting information.
First of all, the deceased man is Josef Dimetri (1903-1958), who was a Romani chief. From what I can tell from the Swedish censuses, he left behind a wife and six children, ages 18-31.
Which means that the photo is a bit deceptive on its own - the chapel is still empty there, but the article states it was taken shortly before the rest of the guests arrived. Because there were plenty of guests - and there are more photos of them!
The article doesn't explain why the police was there, but it says they had to step in and break off some fighting and arguments that broke out between guests, which is more likely what they were there for (rather than just inspecting bottles). They can also be seen talking to spectators in the last photo, so staving off curious or hostile people might also have been a reason.
And most important, perhaps: While the policeman did try to stop him from leaving the bottle, the son shook him off and protested that "he needs it, he needs it", and "the tactful policeman" (as the article calls him) did not insist further. So it seems Josef Dimetri was in fact laid to rest with his bottle of beer.
