Is There More To Urns?

Urns are an integral part of everyday life. You may not actually notice these objects around you, but the fact remains that you either use, see or admire and even appreciate urns daily. You use urns in the form of Glass urns/vases (for flowers displays), Planter urns (those big decorative ones in your garden), Wooden and other material urns (wooden boxes/cylinders, jewellery kists and storage containers – coffee, tea, spices etc) to Collectors urns (Ming and other valuable collections), and Commercial urns (coffee/tea and water urns) to more traditional Funeral and Cremation urns.

In this site I will go through some of the different styles, shapes and materials used in manufacturing and sculpting urns. Occasionally I answer (or go and find an answer) questions in a post for readers that enquire about urns and in other pages I have written articles describing historical backgrounds of styles and patterns.

I trust that you will find the content interesting and invite you to contact me if you have further questions.

What Is An Urn?

The exciting part however is not in the question but lies within the answer or answers….

The clinical definition could be simply
URN
–noun
1.a large or decorative vase, esp. one with an ornamental footer pedestal.
2.a vase for holding the ashes of the cremated dead.
3.a large metal container with a spigot, used for making or serving tea or coffee and other hot beverages in quantity.
(excerpt from dictionary.com)

However lets bypass the boring clinical definition and get speedily to the more exciting and occasional, but required, serious explanations of the above three points.

Vase

Other Examples of Urns

1.            An urn is a vase, ordinarily covered and without handles, that usually has a narrowed neck above a footed pedestal. In the late 1760’s the English came up with an invention for living in high-style dining rooms. “Knife urns” placed on pedestals flanking a dining-room sideboard. Unfortunately these became rather unpopular and they went out of fashion in the following decade, in favour of the more stylish and practical knife boxes that were rather placed on the sideboard

n. In Classical terms, an urn is a large decorative covered container of originally made from wood, metal, pottery, basic materials popular in previous centuries. In furniture design, an urn was a large wooden vase-like container which was usually set on a pedestal on either side of a side table. This was the characteristic of Adam designs and also of Hepplewhite’s works. Urns were also used as decorative turnings at the cross points of stretchers in 16th and 17th century furniture designs. The urn and the vase were often set on the central pedestal in a “broken” or “swan’s” neck pediment

Cremation urns

2.            Funerary urns (also called cinerary urns) have been used by many civilisations since the dawn of modern mankind. After a person died, the remaining survivors cremated the body and collected the ashes in an urn (in ancient Greece this is called a lekythos, a type of pottery) used for holding oil in funerary ritual). Cremation urns became ever increasingly popular and commonly used in Anglo Saxon England.

Coffee & Water Urns

3.            A coffee urn is a large metal container that allows for making large batches of coffee/tea and hot water to serve at factories, canteens, during banquets or party settings. These can be especially helpful when you need to serve a great deal of coffee, and don’t have time to make and remake pots of coffee. Further, the coffee urn keeps the coffee warm, but tends not to burn it, so coffee can be made several hours before an event.

You’ll find the coffee urn in a variety of sizes. Simple ones that brew about 10-20 cups of coffee are easily and inexpensively purchased for home use, perhaps for large family or friend gatherings. The largest coffee urn, often owned by people like caterers or by restaurants may make up to 100 cups.

If you don’t own a coffee urn but do have several large capacity carafes, you can serve but not brew coffee to a large number of guests. Airtight carafes hold and keep warm coffee, but the principal difference is that they don’t make coffee. Still you can make coffee hours ahead of time, and properly sealed, the coffee will still be fresh and hot when served in carafes.

A new trend offered in banquets is to rent coffee carafes from coffee chain companies. These come fully filled with different types of coffee, a supply of paper cups and all the necessary accoutrements to coffee like creamer, half and half and a variety of sweeteners. If you don’t plan to use a coffee urn frequently, rentals of filled carafes may be a great way to go.

Many of these subjects and urns you can fins online in many reputable sites and shopping sites such as Ebay! So feel free to browse around and read really interesting answers, articles and educate your own curiosity by considering other aspects you never thought of when using the term Urn.