A Year in Pictures – Grave Candles

[swan_tower]

This work by http://www.swantower.com is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

I don’t know the story behind it, but judging by what we saw in Poland, it’s a common tradition there to put candles in red vases and lay them on graves around Hallowe’en/All Souls Day. My husband got to see an amazing display of them in one of Kraków’s cemeteries at night; these are, of course, in Peksow Brzyzek, the cemetery we visited in Zakopane.

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Comments

[green_knight]

All souls' day is the day of remembering the dead in the catholic church (a mass is said and all that); putting red candles on graves is very common in the catholic parts of Germany, too, though it's usually just one per grave.

[swan_tower]

I wonder what the origin of the tradition is?