Anthropology · an 1892 book, read as an itinerary
The family lays a length of cloth on the doorstep, at the gate and across the stream. The coffin passes; the cloth is taken up and given as pomană. In 1892 Simion Florea Marian set the Romanian funeral out in 36 chapters: the body lies in the house for three days, the soul passes the customs of the air, the bones are washed at three, five or seven years.
Simion Florea Marian was a priest and a schoolmaster in Suceava. In October 1892 he finished, for the Academy, a book of 593 pages on what is done when someone dies. The title, Înmormântarea la români. Studiu etnograficu (The Romanian funeral: an ethnographic study), names the work. The contents open with the signs of death and stop at the last judgement. Between them come the washing, the staff-candle, the fir tree, the lament, the cloth on the threshold, the releasing of the water, the lifting of the bones.
Marian writes customs. He groups the material in the order the work is done. Read that way, the book is an itinerary. The dead person is outfitted for a journey. Every object in the house, on the lane and at the grave has a job on that road.
The printed contents list 36 chapters. An appendix gathers laments and a funeral from the Oravițel country. The figures on this page follow that sequence.
Before leaving the house the dead person is given tools. Each one holds a stage of the journey.
A wax light measured to the length of the body, then coiled. While the corpse still lies unburied, it burns the sins. In the other world, Marian writes, the dead person leans on it “when crossing the bridge of paradise”. In Transylvania it is called a watcher or a standing light; in Wallachia, a star.
When a person is “drawing towards death”, a yellow wax candle is put in the hand or held at the head. A close relative should not hold it: their grief is greater, and then the dying person struggles longer. A neighbour is called.
Boiled wheat, sweetened with honey, set in a bowl with a cross of walnut or raisins. It is taken to church and shared. It is food for the road, packed in grain.
A green bough from a fruit tree, loaded with fruit, small loaves, pastry doves. It travels with the cortège. Where it is not set on the grave, it is set on the funeral table.
A dressed fir, planted before the house, as a sign that a dead person lies inside. For an unmarried girl or lad, the flag and the fir work with the wedding clothes from the dressing chapter. The unmarried dead are outfitted for a wedding and for the road.
Chapter XXII is called “The bridges”. The road from house to grave is cut by thresholds, gates, crossroads and water. At each one the family lays a length of homemade cloth, about three cubits, a towel or a kerchief. The coffin passes. The cloth is taken up and given as pomană, often with a loaf and a candle.
The nearer kin of the deceased, wishing to ease as much as they can his crossing of these rivers as well, strew them in his path during the accompanying from the house as far as the grave.
The village bridge is made of cloth given away. The other world is sewn onto the geography of this one. Lay the cloth at the thresholds, in the order of the cortège. At each threshold the coffin passes and the cloth is given as pomană.
Lay the cloth at the next threshold. The cortège crosses on its own. The cloth is taken up.
Marian lays the first bridge on the threshold of the house or the porch: the last place the dead person crosses as someone who still belongs indoors.
The second bridge sits by the yard gate. Beyond it the dead person is no longer of the household.
Cloth is laid at crossroads because paths divide there. The soul needs a bridge wherever the road splits.
Beside the cloth, in Boian and Stupca a small coin is tied at each corner. In other villages a relative throws one coin into the stream and another back, without looking.
A bridge is laid at the churchyard entrance and on the church doorstep. The other road runs through the place where the funeral service is sung.
The last village bridge is the graveyard gate. After the dead person crosses, the cloth, the loaf and the candle are given away as pomană, and the soul keeps going beyond the grave.
Lay the cloth at the next threshold. The cortège crosses on its own. The cloth is taken up.
The body has a short clock. The soul has several, and they do not fall on the same days from one district to the next. Marian writes them all down. He does not force them into one calendar.
The clocks do not add up. Seven customs ask for seven Saturdays; twenty-four ask for another pace; ninety-nine fill six weeks. The family feeds the traveller until they believe the traveller has arrived. The duration is local.
Between the earth and the third heaven, the devils who stuck in the air keep customs posts. They stop souls, weigh their deeds, keep ledgers on black leaves in white letters. How many posts there are, Marian says, no one can know.
Most Romanians, however, hold that there would be twenty-four customs.
Each post bears the name of a sin: of thieves, of theft, of killing, of drink, of fornication, of tobacco, of lying. The soul is examined more sharply where it sinned more. The staff-candle, the cloth, the wheat and the liturgies are the road-money. Marian names the written source: the Life of St Basil the Younger, with the customs listed and painted “in a kind of icon”.
Three years after the death of a child, five after that of a youth and seven after that of an old person, Marian writes, it was the custom to lift the dead and sing the funeral service again.
The grave-diggers bring up the bones. The kin wash them with water until they are white, then with wine. They are laid in a linen bundle: the legs at the bottom, the trunk in the middle, the skull on top. The bundle spends a night in church, under the icon of the Mother of God, and the next day receives a funeral as for a person newly dead. Then the bones go back to the graveyard.
In 1892 Marian notes that the custom still lives “only in some communes of Moldavia and Wallachia”. He describes it as the end of the road: the body has gone dry, and only then can the dead person be set among their own.
Fifteen years later Robert Hertz would write, of the Ngaju Dayak of Borneo, that death is consummated only when decomposition has ended, and that the second funeral moves the dead from the isolation of the corpse into the society of the ancestors. Hertz did not cite Marian’s book. The Romanian material, gathered without his theory, sits on the same scheme: one clock for the flesh, one clock for the bones.
Death is consummated only when decomposition has ended: only then does the deceased cease to belong to this world so as to enter another life.
Funeral pomană feeds a traveller. The wedding envelope is credit among the living. Gail Kligman described, in 1988, the death-wedding of Ieud. Marian already has it, briefly, at the dressing: the unmarried dead receive a bridegroom’s shirt. It is a station on the road.
Marian was born in Ilișești and taught in Suceava. The preface thanks “all the gentlemen” who completed the work. The footnotes are a net of priests, schoolteachers, gymnasium students and women dictating charms: Vasile Turtureanu of Vicovu de Sus, Ionică son of Iordachi Isac of Mahala, Măriuca Nistor of Mălini, Maria Ursac of Vatra Dornei, Romulus Sima of Orlat, Teodor Simon of Năsăud.
The weight falls on Bukovina and northern Moldavia. Transylvania is present, especially Năsăud and Orlat. Wallachia and the Banat appear in particular chapters, the releasing of the water and the small meals. Macedonia is cited through Bolintineanu. The map is the map of a Suceava priest’s correspondents. The material remains dense. The question worth keeping: how many other things said about “Romanians” have the same geography of letters.
All quotations from Marian follow the 1892 edition. Diacritics are brought to the present form. Where the OCR is broken, I do not quote and I do not count.
The full text of the Göbl 1892 edition was taken from the Internet Archive, from the Harvard copy, and checked against the printed contents at the back of the book. The 36 chapter titles and their pages come from that contents list. The figures on this page (3 days, 24 customs, 3 / 5 / 7 years) sit beside the chapter and page they come from.
“Most Romanians” for 24 customs is Marian’s judgement. Exhumation, in 1892, still lived “only in some communes”. The number of customs and the length of the feedings vary by district; the page keeps them all in view, without an average.
The 1892 spelling is hard on optical recognition. I recovered the structure of the book. A coin thrown into a stream is in the text.
The Wikimedia Commons PDF, from Dacoromanica, is the same 1892 title. Hertz is cited for double burial, which he described from Dayak material. The placing beside Marian is editorial.