All Souls/All Saints

This past Saturday we went to a large cemetery here in Novi Sad to visit my husband's parent's graves. This was in the midst of the All Souls/All Saints days celebrated by the Catholic and Orthodox communities.

I've never seen so many people at a cemetery in my life. There were cars parked on both sides of the main road as well as the side roads all around the cemetery. People made their own parking lots in the nearby fields.

Police were there to help with traffic flow around all of this.

In front of the cemetery gates, there are always people selling fresh flowers and candles. The flowers are gorgeous and the blooms are huge. This must be the best time of the year for the vendors....EVERYONE was handing over dinars.

We've been to the cemetery before. My husband regularly visits his parent's graves. From what I gather this is common here. I think it is very nice that the dead are not forgotten. In America, my deceased family members were buried far from where I was living, so visiting graves wasn't possible.

Inside the gates, there were people everywhere. On this particular holiday, people come and bring some food and drink to leave at the gravesites. I saw apples, loaves of bread, small cakes, etc. Some graves had only one or two mourners, others had large groups of people - whole families, I suppose.

We did what many people were doing: cleaning the gravestone, discarding dead flowers and replacing them with new ones, lighting candles and paying our respects.

There were some Roma kids in the cemetery, begging for money at the gates and riding their bikes among the gravesites. People here tell me that on this day, after people leave, they take the food that is left at the graves. If so, I guess it doesn't go to waste.

When people told me this, they weren't angry. It was more in the way of an accepted fact.