The 1st and 2nd of November are two days in Poland when the dead are remembered and commemorated. Everything shuts down on these public holidays and it seems like the whole population without exception return to the towns and villages where they grew up, meet up with their families and head off to where their relatives are buried. Flowers are placed, candles lit, and masses said. Neighbours and acquaintances are spotted and greetings exchanged.
In the cities roads are cut off and police guides employed to deal with the huge amount of traffic coming and going. During the day the cemeteries are not particularly appealing but when night falls the thousands of coloured candles make for a magical setting and dazzle from afar like a fairy scene from A Midsummer Night's Dream - this is the best time to visit.
Polish gravestones are much of a likeness, thick marble slabs of considerable size which are laid flat with a headstone at one end and are placed very close together in rows. They are exceedingly expensive and there is much pressure to spend a lot on such a tombstone. Even in the extremely poor parts of Lodz the cemeteries are crammed with costly chunks of marble, some families take out huge bank loans to buy a burial place costing a year's wages. It makes no sense at all but that's how it is here.
I once accompanied friends who went to choose a gravestone for a relative who had died... death is big business and tombstones are very lucrative for the companies making them. At the showroom we walked up and down lines of great marble slabs all costing thousands of pounds. My friends are retired country folk with no capital and when I made my astonishment at the prices known they said that they had no choice... "People will point at us in the cemetery and in the street and we would be humiliated if we do not buy such a gravestone" they confided. A simple cross is not an option.
