Between the last breath and the burial, in the Carpathians, lies more than one night — and in that night the dead are never left alone. People keep watch, they wail, they place a coin in a cold hand. Where the Romanian wake comes from, and what it's really for.
In the Carpathians, no one dies entirely alone – not, at least, on the first night. Priveghi is the word for the wake: one to three nights in which family, neighbours and friends gather around the coffin and keep watch until the funeral begins. The rule behind it is simple, and in many villages it still holds today: the dead are never left alone. Someone always sits with them, deep into the night, long after the candles have burned low.
What sounds like plain care carries an older core. In the time between death and burial, the deceased is thought to be especially vulnerable – to evil spirits, to whatever might come for an unwatched body. The wake is protection, not formality. People talk, sing, eat and drink together – the wake is both gathering and defence, and in this belief the two are not opposites.
The wake has a sound that strangers usually notice first: bocet, the Romanian funeral lament. It is sung by bocitoare – women, often from the village, hired specifically for this purpose. They wail in free rhythm, rock back and forth, sometimes tear at their hair or clothes, and improvise verses praising the virtues of the dead.
The custom reaches back to pre-Christian times. Its purpose is twofold: it carries the family's grief when their own tears have run dry – and, in the older belief, its wailing itself keeps evil at bay. Hiring a good bocitoare was, in many regions, a matter of honour: her lament measured how deeply a person was mourned.
Before the burial, there is baking. Colac is the braided, sweet funeral bread handed out during the wake and afterwards to everyone who came – strangers included, and the poor, who are invited specifically for this. From similar dough comes the pomul: a decorated branch or small tree, hung with ribbons, fruit and sometimes pastries, representing the tree of life and the passage from this world to the next.
The memorial meal itself, the pomana on the third, ninth and fortieth day, is described in full in the article on the soul's forty days. Colac and pomul belong to the night before that: the hours when the body still lies in the house and the living tend to it one last time.
Before the coffin is closed, the dead are given something for the road. A thin, soft wax candle is bent into the shape of a cross and placed in the folded hands, with an old, no-longer-valid silver coin at its centre. The candle is meant to light the way and keep evil off. The coin is the toll – the fare with which the soul pays its crossing into the other world, much as a ferryman elsewhere demands his due.
Even the body's position follows an order: head to the east, feet toward the door – ready for the last journey. Nothing in this preparation is arbitrary. Every gesture is part of a quiet accounting: done correctly, the soul finds its way. Left undone, no one in the Carpathians can say for certain what stays behind instead.
This is exactly where the wake meets the region's other customs. Why the mirrors are covered in a house of mourning, why a light burns through the first forty days, why you never answer every voice that calls your name in the dark – all of it follows the same logic. The passage between life and death is not a line but a space, and in that space no one, living or dead, is ever quite safe alone.
The Carpathian Chronicles are set exactly in this space. Whoever breaks the family's rules in Stafii, whoever is meant to keep watch through the night and falls asleep, whoever leaves the dead alone for an hour because the candle is still burning anyway – learns why the old rule was never a formality. In Corben Vale's Carpathian Chronicles, an unwatched night is rarely just a missed one.
The wake, the bocet lament and the hired mourners (bocitoare) are well documented in Romanian ethnography and folk-music research – living practice, still kept in rural areas today. The candle, the coin and the body's orientation trace back, among other sources, to the classic fieldwork of Agnes Murgoci, whose essay "Customs Connected with Death and Burial among the Roumanians" (Folk-Lore, Vol. XXX, 1919) counts among the earliest systematic collections of Romanian death customs and is still cited today.
As with the soul's forty-day journey, the ethnographic outlines here are documented, but their exact meaning lives on mostly by word of mouth, shifting slightly from village to village. Some of it can be read. What it feels like to sit awake through a night with a burning candle beside someone who has just died cannot.
Corben Vale's Carpathian Chronicles tell exactly these kinds of stories – based on true events. „The Village of the Hanged“ and „Stafii“ release on 15 October 2026 in seven languages.