For two days each year, one week after Orthodox Easter, families gather in cemeteries across Moldova to eat lunch over the graves of departed loved ones.

Often wearing their best clothes, the families bring food, drink and favorite treats to share together as they celebrate the life of their dead relative. Prayers are said, candles are lit, a glass of wine poured for the deceased and placed on their tombstone, symbolically keeping the dead part of living family life.

Italian photographer Carlo Gianferro documented this “lively” and spiritual Moldovan tradition in 2010, where “The dead do not speak but watch from above, participate and thank.”
 

 

 

 

 

 
More lunch a la cemetery, after the jump…

 
The Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris is known as much for the beauty of its monuments as for the celebrity of its occupants, boasting the remains of Jim Morrison, Oscar Wilde, Maria Callas, Edit Piaf, and countless others. However, its arguably most dramatic tomb belongs to an author most people have never heard of.

Georges Rodenbach was a 19th century Belgian writer, best known for a book pretty much relegated to serious literary pursuants. Bruges-la-Morte, a symbolist novel published in 1892, was about a man mourning his dead wife. It’s known for being debilitating tragic and intensely romantic; one of the central thematic elements is the decay of the city, itself.

So, it’s painfully poignant that Rodenbach’s tomb depicts a patina bronze likeness of him actually emerging from the grave, a rose in one hand. Fairly fitting for a man whose opus contained lines like this:

As he walked, the sad faded leaves were driven pitilessly around him by the wind, and under the mingling influences of autumn and evening, a craving for the quietude of the grave … overtook him with unwanted intensity.

Excuse me while I go turn in my leather jacket and electric guitar—my punk rock cred has been compromised, because I’m apparently a teen goth girl right now.