Why Seven Years? When the Graves Are Opened in the Carpathians

Anyone hearing about it for the first time assumes it is a rumour. It is not. Secondary burial – in Romanian dezgropare, the digging up – is a fixed part of remembering the dead in several regions of Romania, and it follows an order older than any cemetery regulation.

What happens in the seventh year

The grave is opened in the presence of the family and a priest. The bones are lifted out and cleaned – according to the older accounts, with water and wine. They are then wrapped in fresh linen, laid in a smaller coffin and buried again. A service accompanies the process, and afterwards the last funeral meal is given, the final pomană for this particular person.

It is not a secret act and there is nothing disreputable about it. It is a ceremony – the third and last of the great ones, after the burial and the fortieth day. People who have been present usually describe the same thing: the matter-of-factness of everyone involved. Nobody shudders. People work, pray, and afterwards they eat.

The practical side is obvious: a family grave can be used again. A woman can be laid with her husband even if his grave was still too fresh at the time of her death. That case is by far the most common reason of all.

The calendar of the dead

Why seven years, of all things? The answer is not in the folklore. It is in the liturgy.

The Orthodox Church does not commemorate the dead once, but in a fixed sequence. The first parastas, the memorial service, is held on the third day, then on the ninth, then on the fortieth. After that come services at three, six, nine and twelve months – and then every year, up to the seventh.

Each of these numbers has a reason. The third day recalls the Resurrection on the third day and the Holy Trinity. The ninth stands for the nine choirs of angels, into whose company the soul is to be received. The fortieth points to the Ascension, which took place forty days after the Resurrection – it marks the ascent of the soul.

And the seventh year is the end. After that there is no further parastas for this one person; they pass into the general remembrance of the Church, which belongs to all the dead.

That is the answer to the question. Seven years are the time an individual is granted. For that long they are prayed for by name, for that long their grave remains their grave. When the period has run out, the earth has finished its work too – and only then may one look.

The forty days

Before the seven years come the forty days, and they are the more dangerous time.

According to widespread belief the soul does not leave the body at once. It stays nearby, it walks the places where it lived, and only on the fortieth day does it find its place. During this period the grave is considered unfinished – and in some regions it was watched. If a child fell ill in those weeks, if livestock died, if several relatives dreamt the same dream, suspicion fell on the newly buried.

From this belief comes the rule people at the foot of the mountains still speak of today: if a voice calls your name at night, do not answer. Whoever answers confirms to the thing that is calling that they are still there.

What people feared they would find

When a grave is opened after years, there is a desired result: clean, dry bones. They mean that the earth has done its work and the soul has gone its way. It is a confirmation, not a horror.

The horror is the other case. A body that has not decayed after years – swollen instead of sunken, with colour in the face, with hair and nails that seem to have gone on growing – was taken as proof that something was wrong. From this finding arose the idea of the strigoi, the dead who do not rest.

That there are sober reasons for it – heavy clay soil, cold, a tightly sealed coffin, the natural formation of grave wax – was not known. People only knew what they saw, and they acted on it.

So there were preventive measures, long before anyone looked. Some of the dead were buried face down, so that if they tried to dig they would work deeper into the earth instead of upwards. Others were given a thorn in the mouth or a sickle laid across the throat. Those considered most at risk were people who had died unbaptised, without confession, by violence – and in some regions the seventh child of a seventh child.

Here too the seven appears again. In this cultural world it is not an arbitrary number.

Where the rule applies – and where it does not

This is the point at which most accounts become imprecise: it does not apply everywhere in Romania.

The custom is most firmly rooted in Moldavia and the neighbouring districts. In Wallachia the digging up of the dead was long unusual and permitted only in special cases. In the countryside the deadline is also more elastic than the number suggests – in some places graves were opened after three or four years, if one was needed.

Legally, reburial in Romania is possible once seven years have passed, in the presence of the cemetery administration. State rule and church deadline therefore coincide – which is rarely a coincidence.

The ossuaries of the monasteries

In the monasteries the same order was followed even more strictly. At Neamț Monastery, one of the oldest in Romania, the bones of dead monks were lifted from the earth after seven years and taken to a room in the basement – an ossuary. On the skulls they wrote the monk’s name and the office he had held in the monastery. The practice is documented from the eighteenth century onwards.

Anyone standing there today sees shelves full of inscribed skulls. For the monks this is not macabre but the opposite: visible proof that nobody is forgotten.

What has survived

One could file all this under the nineteenth century. That would be convenient and wrong.

Secondary burial after seven years is still practised today, quite matter-of-factly, with a priest and a family meal. And as recently as 2004 there was a case in Marotinu de Sus in southern Romania that made the international press: villagers opened a grave because they believed the dead man was a strigoi, removed the heart, burned it and drank the ashes dissolved in water. Court proceedings followed. Those involved did not understand what they were being accused of.

Between these two things – the calm order of the Church, and what happens when someone becomes afraid – lies exactly the space in which the Carpathian Chronicles take place.

Where this knowledge comes from

The most detailed old description comes from the ethnologist Agnes Murgoci, who published her notes on Romanian death and burial customs in the British journal Folk-Lore in 1919; her well-known work on vampire belief in Romania followed in 1926. Much of what is written about strigoi today goes back to these two texts.

The rest cannot be read anywhere. You have to have been there.