ABSTRACT
In old-regime Moldavia (seventeenth early–nineteenth centuries) the cult of the dead (burial rites, funerary banquets, commemorations, gifts, donations, etc.) occupied a prominent place both in church ceremonial and in social practice. A range of documents is available – from testaments to account books and wealth inventories – offering data on the ways in which Eastern Orthodox Christian burials and commemorations across the seven years after death were conducted. This type of information helps us reconstruct not only patterns of property ownership and social status, but also offers insights into spirituality and its place in the social fabric of premodern Romania. In addition, burial and commemorative rites had – and still have – a performative component which added to the “spectacle of death” as part of individual experience and community life. The present study explores the entanglements of these multi-layered forms of social experience.
