Heroes and Victims: Remembering War in Twentieth-Century Romania

1. Death and Ritual: Mourning and Commemorative Practices before 1914

What we call culture is nothing else than an ensemble of beliefs and rituals created to ἀght the subversive effects of individual or collective death. —Thomas Louis-Vincent (1985)1 1 Death and Ritual Mourning and Commemorative Practices before 1914 In the elaborate burial rituals observed for many centuries by the mostly Orthodox populations of southeastern Europe, mourning was a central element, and the prescriptions for who could perform the task were precise: The wailers [would be] women, or girls, because only they are entitled by custom to cry for the dead, usually the closest or more removed relatives of the departed: mothers, wives, sisters, cousins, sisters-in-law, goddaughters, and the godmothers of one’s child, as well as those who had remained in amicable relations with the dead. But the ἀrst in line are always the mothers and wives. If the dead doesn’t have any close relatives versed in the art of wailing to cry for him, then women from the village who have made a profession out of this, and who deserve the real title of mourners, wailers, or incense burners will be hired.2 Death and Ritual 19 After the body was interred, for six weeks “a girl would be hired to bring water to different houses, for the soul of the departed.”3At the six week mark, “when the second almsgiving [pomană] for the dead is to take place, the mother, sister, cousin, or another woman from the family takes an offering of warm bread, a black rooster or hen, then a few hot embers in a small container, together with some incense, a scarf in whose corners she ties a few coins, as well as a wax candle and then goes to the well” to offer them to the girl who had been hired to commemorate the soul of the departed by bringing water to neighbors.4 An elaborate almsgiving meal and ceremony would follow, and for seven years after the death of a family member, families, especially women, would continue to perform speciἀc rituals to ensure the peaceful passage of the dead into the afterlife. After that, the memory of dead ones would be kept alive by visits to the grave throughout the year and almsgiving in their name during religious ceremonies dedicated to the memory of the dead.5 I offer this extended description of burial rituals by way of suggesting two important components of mourning and commemorating the dead among Romanians and other populations in eastern Europe: the cult of the dead was a central component of these cultures and societies, especially among the Orthodox, and included both religious and semi-pagan elements so elaborate as to suggest a life-long learning process in order to master them; and funerary rituals were fundamentally gendered, with women playing speciἀc gender roles at every step of the way not only as followers, but also as central gatekeepers of the passage into afterlife. This chapter describes the context that framed the cultural practices of burial, mourning, and commemorating that developed after World War I. Though there were unprecedented developments in the realm of mourning and commemorating the dead all over Europe after 1918,I contend that they were fundamentally shaped by the types of traditional practices described here. This is not a startling claim in itself, as Jay Winter, for instance, made the notion of continuity rather than break a central component in his argument in Sites of Memory.6 The difference rests in the actual traditions discussed here, as well as their relationship with efforts by monarchs and other state representatives to coax such traditions into mobilizing practices on behalf of either the nation or the empire. The localized and centralized actions I focus on are far less interconnected than was the case in Great Britain or France, for instance. Burial, mourning, and death rituals were a site of intense, constant cultural production and reproduction in the mostly rural societies of eastern Europe before the twentieth century, contrasting and competing with newly emerging nationalist and imperial ones, which attempted to construct new bonds of loyalty and legitimacy between rulers and the ruled. The two realms of commemorative practices coexisted, largely unconnected at the local level, with the state pursuing certain symbols and practices, while 20 HEROEs An D VIc t Ims local communities followed their own traditional practices or offered local inflections on new commemorative symbols. The Religious...