All Saints' Day

ALL SAINT’S DAY

First broadcast on Ex-Pat Radio, Krakow, October 2007

As my long-suffering English students fastened coats and snapped shut briefcases, I called out: ‘Enjoy your holiday, Piotr!’ Piotr turned, grinned and shook his head. ‘Better to say ‘Happy Holiday’, he corrected me, winking. Be happy but don’t enjoy, seemed to be the message; have some respect for the dead.

Like many ex-pats and immigrants, I took part in the All Saints’ Day observance last Thursday night, 1st November, and went to Krakow’s biggest and most famous cemetery, Rakowicki, here in Krakow. There can be few of us who have yet to experience All Saints’ night in Poland. All across the land, in cities, towns and villages, Poles make pilgrimages to place thousands and thousands of multi-coloured candles on gravestones, family tombs, mausoleums, graves of unknown soldiers, victims of communist oppression as well as poets, priests and painters, spectral lights of red, white, yellow and green conjuring up shadows which dance and flicker like wood nymphs in the night. The heavenly sight is an arresting one, certainly the first time: the branch of a willow gently brushing against some sleeping sarcophagus, ‘Here lies Jaciek’, long since gone. And in a ceremony repeated throughout the land, from the middle of it all, a church is overflowing, its open doors bathing the people and sleeping ones alike with kind and holy words, as mysterious and beautiful to me as an Arab call to prayer.

It is a dry, warm night and we walk slowly around the cemetery: cutting quickly off from the main paths, finding quiet delight in discovering ever-smaller avenues, which become quickly clogged with autumn leaves and roots of trees. I trip, regain my balance and check the unlit candle in my pocket. It’s still there, waiting for that empty grave. My girlfriend – who has no family members buried here - tells me it’s a tradition to place a candle on an empty grave and say a prayer for its owner. But, as you could warm your hands by the candle heat from most graves, finding an unlit one is no mean feat. Still, it’s good fun looking, all the same.

Most graves and tombs have several, or many, carefully and tastefully-arranged candles in shaped glass jars, placed there by reverent family members. Fresh pots of flowers, too, are provided, in rememberance of the dearly departed. And yes, lest you, o cynical soul, think my picture is a little too rosy, I’ve heard all about the Joneskis next door. You know, the ones you need to keep up with, especially in the village, where appearance is all. It gets like a competition, apparently. The biggest and most impressive candles, wreaths and flowers. At least one of my students hates it all and only takes the night-train to Hel (the northern peninsula, not the southern pergatory) for the money her family gives her, which will tide her over ‘til Christmas and the next family shindig. But scratch the modern surface and you’ll often find something deeper, pagan almost. I’m told that in some villages every inch of a grave may sometimes be covered with candles and flowers in the firm and solemn belief that such an over-abundance of familial love and good wishes will help speed the soul to heaven. I, for one, hope that story to be true. For we all know that Christianity, like all successful religions and cults before it, supplanted and suppressed pre-existing festivals, labelling them inferior, or ‘pagan’. And yet our intuition lives on: throughout the long dark days of first clerical and now consumerist subjugation, we cannot but feel the occult pull to remember, to recognise, once a year, at least, the need to connect, either with our ancestors or some part of ourselves, for most of us buried deep within for 364 days a year.

It is not surprising that human beings across the northern hemisphere should light fires and turn away from the maelstrom of everyday life and look towards the shadows now in the autumn. A year is like a day. The summer, like the heat from a busy working day, has died down and as the hot afternoon gives way to the cooler autumnal evening, it feels right to stop for a moment and reflect as we settle down for the long winter night. But why can similar scenes be found repeated across the world, not just in the autumn, but on the very same day, 1st November? Is there indeed some truth to the mystical belief that, on this day, the worlds of the living and of the dead draw close, overlap, even? And, if so, then no amount of date-changing or spiritual obsfucation will ever snuff out our awareness of the fact.

As in so many other ways, much of English culture has been either forgotten or torn apart in the case of progress and liberalism. Only a few days ago, I blithely, yet wrongly, told an inquiring Pole that, in England, we have only Halloween, a modern, American-influenced, tradition to our name. You, intelligent listener that you are, see immediately how foolish I was. The truth is that both All Saints’ Day, 1st November, and All Souls’ Day, 2nd November, were once celebrated in Britain just as much as in the rest of Europe and many other parts of the world besides. The first, All Saints’ Day, remembered all the saints in heaven while the second, All Souls’ Day, prayed for those in pergatory, neither in heaven nor in hell. However, to the revolutionary mind of the seventeenth century, such concepts smelt far too much of Popery and were discouraged as popular festivals as Protestantism and the Age of Enlightenment took gradual hold of the newly-United Kingdom.

And yet there I was placing a candle on an unknown grave, offering a silent prayer for an unknown soul in a foreign land, neither he nor I feeling part of a world that could stop for the silent fall of another autumn leaf.

They had laid on extra trams to ferry Krakowians to family graves and back to family homes. As always in any Polish crowd, there was character and style. Smart men with dickie-bows and pork-pie hats, who in England would look faintly ridiculous, strolled proudly past, escorting fur-coated women of a certain age, balancing freshly-sculpted bouffants through the crowds. Mothers held their smiling children’s hands as fathers struggled slightly beneath plastic bags full of candles for second cousins, twice removed. But at least he knows their names and, this year, just maybe, they’ll remember his.