Indonesian "Manene" ceremony honors ancestors with exhumed bodies

A family on an Indonesian island poses with a relative dressed in a school uniform, while an elderly member of the local community stands patiently as loved ones put a sarong and a white shirt around him.

But the student is not off to class and their forebear is not going out -- they are both dead.

Residents around Indonesia's North Toraja regency on Sulawesi island have been celebrating a weeks-long ceremony called "the Manene".

Hundreds of corpses including those of babies are brought out in North Toraja's villages -- some from tombs locally known as patane -- as part of a ritual to honour their ancestors.

"All family groups gather, each come to check on parents, grandmothers, relatives who are in the patane," Kapala Pitu villager Yuliana Kombong Palino, 51, told AFP.

"We all gather, work together, clean (the bodies) and then change the clothes."

Coffins holding the preserved bodies of loved ones are pulled from a burial cave carved into the mountainside.

The remains are then put back in their resting place one or two days before their graves are closed again until the next ritual, Yuliana added.

A few of the bodies remain relatively intact because of the mummification process, while others have deteriorated to skeletal remains.