If how people live and celebrate speaks to a culture, what do the traditions around death show us?
As travelers, we love to discuss how a specific place may have the best ceviche, the most gorgeous fountains, or the clearest waters we’ve ever seen. Perhaps we’ve even been invited to a wedding with local traditions and customs: music, traditional dress, and language are all comfortable entry points for learning about another country’s culture. But if how people live and celebrate speaks to a culture, what do the traditions around death show us?
While it may be uncomfortable to think about our deaths or the deaths of our loved ones, many cultures perceive death rites as an act of love. The tradition becomes about paying respect to the people we know and slowing down to note their existence in a fast-paced world. It also honors their spirit and helps them on their way to whatever, if anything, might come after death.
How we grieve and the rituals around our body’s final days on earth vary across the globe and throughout history. Balinese Hindus have an intricate community ceremony that eventually involves cremation called Ngaben. Many Muslims are buried without a coffin and placed on their right side, facing Mecca. There’s a tradition of Black Americans mourning community members with a homegoing involving a funeral procession. Vikings were cremated with stone mounds marking the grave, called tumuli. We often passively observe how people say goodbye to loved ones, even if we don’t openly talk about them.
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Once you have been touched by death, it’s a door that doesn’t seem to close. Talking to someone theoretically about death is very different from first-hand encounters. There’s a saying, “Game recognize game.” I’d say, “Grief recognizes grief.” Someone who has endured the rawness of one day having someone here and the next day they’re gone is a special kind of anguish.
My doorway to grief opened at the age of 25 with the death of my sister. While I didn’t travel to mourn, I found that traveling eased my relationship with grief. Travel turns down the volume of being immersed in the day-to-day minutia of work, goals, relationships, responsibilities, and everything we invest our time, energy, and emotions into. This is why we feel so light when we travel, even when we pack heavily. We get to escape, in a way and for a time, and savor the best of a new place, skimming across the surface.
I was traveling in Albania and saw an older woman dressed in all black. An Albanian man from the village explained that her dress indicated mourning. I asked him, “If that’s what women do when their spouse dies, what do men do?” He said, “Get another wife.” I think he smiled when he said it, but I don’t think it was a joke. In any event, from his perspective, I think it’s an interesting insight into Albanian culture.
Last year, I spent some time in Bansko, Bulgaria, a small ski town a few hours south of Sofia. There’s no public transportation, so you must walk everywhere unless you have a car or take a taxi. I’m not a huge fan of forced walking tours at a mountainous ninety-degree angle, but that’s when I noticed them.
Bulgarian architecture includes natural materials of wood, clay, and stone. The streets are also mostly made of cobblestones, luggage’s worst nightmare. Looking at the wooden buildings with wooden balconies, thick walls, and steep roofs, I would sometimes see black ribbons framing laminated sheets of paper or just these laminated sheets of paper on the gate leading to the house or on the house itself near the front door.
I’ve been to a few countries in Eastern Europe, specifically the Balkans, but this was my first time seeing the 8 ½” x 11” pieces of paper with photos on them. In the AskBalkans subreddit on Reddit, people from other Balkan countries revealed that the custom of creating these odes and remembrances is common in the region.
In the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet, the word is Некролог or Nekrolog, means obituary. I was intrigued by what it meant to be socially lauded to post these remembrances and let everyone publicly know someone they’d loved had passed. Death is often so removed from our routines. You have to visit a cemetery or ask a person directly about it. Not here, though. I thought about how powerful it is to wear grief on your sleeve and have it normalized.
I saw an event called Death Cafe advertised in Bansko and decided to go and see what it was all about. A licensed therapist invited attendees to sit at a table and introduce themselves and what made them interested in the topic of death. I met Desislava “Desi” Valkova there. She’s a Bulgarian woman who had a successful corporate career in Sofia, where she met her husband. They’d decided to move to a slower-paced Bankso where she was recovering from burnout. And she was grieving the death of her mother, Ivanka, who had passed away from cancer in 2018.
She told me in an email exchange that while they had these rituals for the deceased, “No one ever really talks about death, and it being an important topic for me, I managed to find these conversations at the Death Cafe.”
She further shared with me some of the funeral rites. Around 85% of Bulgarians are Eastern Orthodox Christians. She said that Bulgarians are typically buried, but her mother, Ivanka, was the first in their family to be cremated.
“When she passed away at home just after 10 p.m., we were prepared. We immediately called the funeral home to start preparations,” she recalled. “We also called close family, and I and some of the aunts cleaned and dressed mum, I put some makeup on her; she looked like her normal self and not the gaunt cancer patient she was just hours before.”
The funeral home then brought a casket and placed it in the living room, and they had a night vigil where people could come and pay their respects and sit with the deceased. Desi continued, “One of the first things the funeral home prepares is the necrolog. It is placed immediately at the front door of the building and the house, announcing the death. The next day, at 12 p.m., we had another vigil at the little chapel in the cemetery, giving people more chance and time to say goodbye. After that, the crematorium arrived to pick up the body and take it to Sofia, where we cremated her two days later.”
Her family split her mother’s ashes into separate urns so they could each have some of her, and Desi has been spreading her share of the ashes to different places she travels to, saying, “I take a little bit every time I travel somewhere new in the world and sprinkle it, so Mum can be a part of it. She loved the idea of travel but did not do enough herself.”
During the vigil, the superstition is that friends and family watch over the body to keep evil spirits away. The front door stays open, so people can peacefully come and go. Mirrors are covered so the ghost can’t see themselves, and a candle is lit in the hands of the deceased. Lighting candles for the dead in the Orthodox church can represent wishing the deceased the light of Christ. Vigils can also take place at the cemetery’s chapel.
Desi and her family came together on the 40th day after her mom’s death, having a church ceremony and a big lunch. She stated that Bulgarians believe the soul leaves the world on this day. During this period, close female relatives wear black clothes, though Desi said she didn’t, and her mom hated the color black.
The necrolog has personal information about the deceased—name, birth and death dates, some quotes, poems, and/or fond words about the person. It may also include funeral arrangements. Some families update the necrolog three months, six months, one year, eighteen months, and then annually on the death anniversary if they choose. Some families don’t include the deceased’s photo on the first necrolog to make sure the spirit doesn’t reenter the home.
Obituaries have a long history dating back to the Romans. The human desire to commemorate people who lived has lasted in some shape or form all these centuries later. Death can be such a sensitive topic for some. In various Western cultures, it’s approached with a sanitized, legal last will and testament, “What do you want me to do with you and your stuff?” kind of way.
Perhaps how we talk about death is equally as interesting as how much we don’t. Being inevitable, maybe if we approached death with curiosity instead of fear, it could help us shape our time on earth. Inviting more care for our loved ones, we’ll leave behind as they care for us in the same way. In the best travels, we take all of ourselves and meet the life already living there. May you be encouraged to meet the death as well.