When Romania Visits Its Dead – Luminația and Moșii de toamnă

In short: Romania has two days of the dead in autumn. Luminația, on the evening of 1 November, comes from the Western church calendar and is kept above all in Transylvania, the Banat and Maramureș – with candles on every grave, and long since across denominations. The Orthodox Moșii de toamnă fall on a Saturday in early November, in 2026 on 7 November: coliva, bread, wine and candles are blessed in church and then given away as pomană.

Two evenings for the dead

Travel through Romania in autumn and you can meet the dead twice. The first time is on 1 November. In Transylvania, the Banat and Maramureș that evening is called Luminația, the festival of lights. The day comes from the Western calendar: the Catholic Church keeps All Saints on 1 November and All Souls on 2 November. In everyday speech, though, it is 1 November that people call Ziua Morților, the Day of the Dead, and on its evening families go to the cemetery.

The second time is a few days later. The Orthodox Church, to which most Romanians belong, has its own remembrance: the Moșii de toamnă, the “ancestors of autumn”. They fall on a Saturday before the start of the Christmas fast, in 2026 on 7 November. In Transylvania, the local paper Alba24 writes, the two days are sometimes confused. Look closely and you notice they smell different: one of wax and chrysanthemums, the other of wheat, honey and wine.

Four Saturdays a year

Moși means ancestors – moșii și strămoșii, the old ones and the older ones still. The Orthodox order knows four great Saturdays for them: the Moșii de iarnă before Great Lent, the Moșii de primăvară in spring, the Moșii de vară before Pentecost and the Moșii de toamnă in autumn. Add the days of remembrance after every single death – the third, the ninth and the fortieth day – and you have a year in which the dead never go unnamed for long.

Wheat, bread and wine

On the morning of the Moși, families carry their baskets into church. In them lies the coliva, boiled wheat with honey and walnuts, the sign of the Resurrection: the grain that is buried and rises again. With it come the braided loaves, the colaci, a bottle of red wine, candles and a slip of paper with names, the pomelnic. The priest reads out the names, one after another, and holds the parastas, the memorial service, over wheat, bread and wine. Afterwards many go to the cemetery, light candles and sprinkle the grave with the blessed wine.

Then things are given away. The pomană is not an offering to the grave but a gift to the living: bread and colaci, apples, pears, grapes, walnuts, sweets, and in some families cooked food as well – sarmale, roast meat, rice. It is given “for the soul” of the dead. As for why, two readings live side by side: the souls receive spiritual nourishment through the gifts of the living. Or God, for their sake, forgives the departed a little more of their sins. Priests insist on one thing, according to Alba24: what counts is the prayer and the gift, not the amount.

A sea of light

Luminația looks quite different. In the days before, the graves are cleaned and decorated with flowers, above all chrysanthemums. At nightfall people light candles and grave lanterns, and the cemeteries become what Romanian reports describe in the same words every year: a sea of light.

It is no longer only Catholics who come. Orthodox, Greek Catholics, Reformed, free-church Protestants, even people without faith set out their candles. The newspaper Evenimentul Zilei therefore called Luminația the festival that does not ask about religion. In Maramureș the children are given sweets in the cemetery, and the priests read the memorial prayers among the graves. The exact day varies, by the way: depending on the place, Luminația falls in the last days of October or at the beginning of November.

With it goes a folk belief that sounds older than any church: on the night of 1 November the gates between the world of the living and that of the dead open, and the souls come back. In some villages children carry fresh water to the graves before sunrise – because they are pure, and because the dead are thirsty.

What you do not do on this day

As on every day of the dead, a wreath of rules hangs on the Moși and on Luminația. They are local tradition, not church law, and they change from village to village. You do not wash or sew, so as not to disturb the dead. You give no money and no objects out of the house, because whatever leaves on this day, it is said, might go away with the soul of the departed. You are not stingy with food. You do not lament aloud, because the souls do not want to see the living suffer. And whoever was at odds with the dead had better not visit the grave that evening.

In some places candles are also set out in the yard or at crossroads – an old custom meant to show lost souls the way into the light. It is the same worry that in the Carpathians also explains the covered mirrors: that a soul might not find its way and stay.

What of this is in the books

In The Village of the Hanged there is an observation from the village church that puts this whole subject into one image. Beeswax candles are sold at the entrance, at two separate stands: one for the living, one for the dead. “Both stands are always equally full.” The dead belong – they are remembered, the book says, as if they had merely moved to a neighbouring village from which visiting is difficult.

And there is the bundle. At a memorial meal the narrator has one pressed into his hand for the first time: a small cake, an apple, a candle, knotted into a napkin, for the soul of a man he never knew. Whoever accepts it says “May it be received.” Against death nothing can be done, the book says; but one can hand out cake.

That is autumn in the Carpathians. Not the horror, but the order with which people meet it – until the evening when someone stands at the door who should no longer be able to come. That is what the Carpathian Chronicles are about.

How we know this

The Orthodox calendar of the four Moși Saturdays and the customs of the Moșii de toamnă – coliva, colaci, wine, candles, pomelnic, parastas and pomană – are living practice and are described in the Romanian press every year, among others by Alba24 (“Moșii de toamnă: Când este Sâmbăta Morților în 2026”, 27 September 2026) and Antena 3 (25 October 2025). Luminația, its regions and its cross-denominational character follow Alba24 (1 November 2024) and Evenimentul Zilei (“Halloween de Transilvania”, 31 October 2024); the folk beliefs and prohibitions given above are found there too. As the sources themselves stress, the rules are local tradition, not church teaching.

The scene with the two candle stands and the memorial bundle is in The Village of the Hanged. The rest cannot be looked up. You have to have stood in a Transylvanian cemetery on a November evening when the last candle is lit.