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When I lived in Warsaw, I was brought to Powązki Cemetery on the night of Wszystkich Swiętich, All Saints’, where many Polish actors and artists are buried. Władysław Reymont the legendary airmen, the opera singer Jan Kiepura and the poet Wojciech Młynarski all lie here along with film director Krzysztof Kieślowski, maker of Three Colours Blue, White and Red, The Double Life of Veronique- films which may have been the whole reason I moved to Poland in the 1990’s. I had a very dear friend who I lived in a flat in Monkstown when I was in college, and it was the music of Zbigniew Preisner she played endlessly that drew me to that part of the world. Preisner’s music was composed for collaboration with Kieslowski’s films. I used the Tango that Zbigniew Preisner wrote for ‘White’ as my muse for writing Malinski.
Anyway I found Warsaw very depressing. I lived in an Inżiniera office in Grochów district of Warsaw, decimated in World War Two. Well the whole city was pulverised. Watch Roman Polanski’s The Pianist to see this visually. We know where else could end up like that, today. It is perilously close, the other side of suppression is, it seems, oppression. In Warsaw I felt I was actually living in the City of the Dead. They seeped up through the pavements. In Grochów, on the wall near my place, there was some simple white spray can graffiti: ‘No i Co?’ which means, ‘And, so what?” And outside my window a group of men would gather in the mornings under the bare, spindly tree, and share a bottle of vodka in the freezing cold. One night I came home from a party in Żoliborz by tram, and there was a thick fog, so thick I could hardly see my way home. A bearded man’s face emerged out of the fog and roared at me, so I ran like a cat through the fog.
Other tombs in Powązki Cemetery are of the World War II courier Jan Nowak Jeziorański and the Righteous Among the Nations Irena Sendlerowa, who saved 2,500 Jewish children from extermination. We ate the tradtional Pańska Skorka in the cemetery, first made in 19th Century in Praga district out of ‘the purest gum arabic, spring or river water, cook over high heat until it dissolves, strain through a flannel, and when it has cooled, add a pound of finely ground sugar and put it on the coals, cook slowly, as it starts to steam from the boiler, the mass will thicken, mix quickly, add a little foam from 8 egg whites, beat so that it is not too heavy, then remove from the heat and immediately put into paper molds [covered] in vegetable oil or the best olive oil. Pour again almond oil or olive oil on top and store in jars".
Being in a Polish cemetery is intoxicating on All Saint’s Night. Everyone is out in droves, as they are all over Poland, lighting huge candles and lanterns on the graves, and laying wreaths and flowers, many of them chrysanthemums.
Pańska Skorka sweets are sold in Warsaw’s cemeteries on the night of All Saints’ Day. In Krakow, they sell Trupi Miodek (Corpse Honey) in the cemeteries. Pańska skórka was called panieńska skórka (maiden's leather/skin) at the beginning of the 20th century (Słownik warszawski-Dictionary of Warsaw). The confectionery was then described as a "sweet mallow cake, sold in bars in pharmacies, as a cough remedy or as a delicacy"(1908 edition), while in the 1915 edition the candy seems to be "a pharmacy product, rather a delicacy than a medicine, given to coughing children.
This All Saint’s Day and Night in Poland might be like the Day of the Dead in Mexico, but it can’t transgress the Roman Catholic Church, can it?
Or can it? There was concern in Poland the late Middle Ages for the salvation of souls of the Dead. They were not supposed to linger- a relationship with the Deceased was to be ministered by God and God alone, right? Whether they were in chains or they were saints. Traditional Slavs held firm that the dead were present in the lives of their descendants. The living had a duty to care for the dead beyond the funeral, and the year after the death of a person was studded with ritualistic contact with the dead in which they were summoned to the edges of villages, to cross roads, all those strange, liminal places, where the dead would guide them to their various futures. The Dead might also be present under the table and so people would let crumbs of bread slip to the floor, covert offerings that irritated the hell out of the clergy .
They were particulary present at solstices and equinoxes, when the people believed that they were at their optimum, working with their descendants to ensure good agricultural yield. At Christmas Eve, divinations were prepared by offering food and straw to the deceased. Such practices are common today, particularly in China, where the honouring of ancestors is of vital importance to a healthy household.
Ancestor tablets are kept on an alter, symbolizing the spirits of ancestors, enshrined for veneration by descendants. They ensure the continuation of a family bloodline and they are believed to protect the descendants from danger and harm. Food is offered in many traditions to hungry ghosts, but this is more of a compassionate practice for those that did not pass over well, and who still linger.
In the spring, in Poland in the Medieval times, the effigy of death was carried around the countryside, made of hemp or straw and was dressed in human clothes, carried away to the border of the community, where it was drowned streams or swamps. At this point the spring awakening of the dead began.
Such practices were brought ‘under control’ by the Church, who could not tolerate the dead ‘living’ among the living. Proper burial was vital, whether you were a pauper or a prince. “Those shall be condemned after whom candles will not be carried” claimed a Polish preacher in a sermon.
Abbot Odo in the end of the 10th century made new liturgy for All Souls. Lighting candles on the graves of the deceased became part of this solemn act in Germany and Eastern Europe. And so, the practices of communing with the dead were controlled, and yet it is not still an act of communion with the dead to literally worship them on the night of All Saints and All Souls?
It was a practice in Ireland too where families went to the cemetery where their loved ones were buried, said prayers for each departed family member, tidy up the graves and leave a candle burning on each grave. At home they would light a candle for their departed loved ones, and put a candle in the window of a room where a relative had died. When prayers were done, the candles would be left to burn out and the door was always left unlatched. We have a great respect for the dead and, we tend to rush our dead to graves, in case something catches hold of them. Irish people find the other Europeans’ habit of leaving the funeral for weeks and in some cases months, a horror.
At Samhain, our All Soul’s Day, the ancients said that the dead were repositeries of wisdom, and that on this night they return to speak to their descendents.
From these visits from ancestors, we remember who we are. As a child, my father never stopped talking to me about his uncle, Kevin Barry, who was hanged on the 1st November 1920 during the War of Independence. My father said the British were very foolish to hang Kevin on a religious day like that, they could make a martyr out of him. Which they did. I always felt Kevin skulking around the house, laughing. He never seemed to be far away. His death-day was the day before my birth-day.
I wrote this piece for Sunday Miscellany in 2020, during Kevin Barry’s centenery. I’m delighted that it will now be published in the New Island Anthology of writing.
Kevin Barry in the Umbrella Stand
Kevin wasn’t maudlin. An oval portrait of him hung in my father’s study – a copy of a painting by somebody in the H Company of the IRA. The face and shoulders of Kevin Barry had a slightly airbrushed look, set against a monochrome and patriotic green background. Kevin had a quiff of hair like Tintin and was wearing a trench coat with the collar upturned. He beamed eagerly around my father’s study, like a friendly family ghost. Beside this portrait was another one of my grandfather, Jim O’Donovan, in a rectangular frame, painted by Leo Whelan.
A true die- hard, my grandfather’s convictions had him locked up long after the War of Independence. His face, in the portrait and in real life, was sterner and more chiseled. When I was brought to see him in his nursing home, he never looked at me. I looked at him, in his wheelchair, at his hand with missing fingers – blown off when he was demonstrating a hand grenade he’d just invented. I found the stubs of his missing fingers fascinating. For some reason, we called him ‘Beep-beep’, although I have no idea why. I heard more recently that he occasionally demanded bottles of whiskey from my alcoholic father and other visitors. He needed an anesthetic for the past and for the tragedy of his wife Monty, who then lay prostrate on her bed down the corridor in the same nursing home, riddled into paralysis by several strokes. A woman of acerbic wit and sharp intelligence was living her final years in a terrible limbo.
My grandmother Monty was the first dead person I ever saw. I stole a glimpse of her in the open casket at her funeral in the nursing home chapel. I never forgot her still, waxy face and the smell of candles and incense hovering around her. My father quickly took me out to the cold corridor with my cousins and we were told to wait there until the funeral service was over. I heard the drone of praying, and the priest muttering gloomily from the altar. She, Kevin Barry’s second-youngest sister, was gone. My grandfather was gone too by 1979. They were all slipping away, leaving my father angry and intolerant of our inability to grasp who these people were. He wanted me to carry the chattels of our family history, but I did not want to do it. He would sit in his green armchair and tell me stories of how Kevin Barry cycled over the Wicklow hills to drink in the hotels in Glendalough and Aughrim, how my grandfather locked himself in a room at night in the family home in Shankill, County Dublin, speaking German to his secret friends in Nazi Germany. How my great aunt Kitby, Kevin Barry’s older sister, sailed to America with Countess Markiewicz, on De Valera’s orders, to fundraise for the Republic. But my father always came back to Kevin. Kevin spinning around on his bike in his Belvedere cap, drinking, dancing, pulling Belgian girls, out on the streets in am- bushes, down alleyways carrying arms. And in the end, hanging on the gallows, just like in the song. The stories seeped into me. I resisted, but there was nothing I could do, because they were part of me.
Although I grew up with these gripping tales of espionage and family militarism, it was Kevin Barry who made the greatest impact on me. The rest of it was just too frightening and strange, such as the thought of my grandfather Jim drinking tea with Hitler (which he didn’t, of course), or speaking to him on his radio from the family home (which he didn’t do either). I took refuge in our family hero, the boy who beamed at me from the oval portrait in my father’s study. I wrote essays about Kevin Barry for history class, described the ambush on the Monk’s Bakery in detail, faithfully recording the account written in Sean Cronin’s 1965 pamphlet on Kevin Barry. I could see his face as he was driven with the British soldiers to Bridewell prison. Irate, but amused. He was hanged the day before my birthday and, although we lived decades apart, his death was a shadow that followed me everywhere.
© Siofra O’Donovan 2020
As a footnote: Ellis, Kevin Barry’s executioner’s first task when he arrived on 31st October with his assistant Willis was to inspect the new ropes brought in from Pentonville to Mountjoy jail in Dublin. ‘Then Ellis used the spyhole in the condemned cell to calculate the drop, which depends on the height, weight and age of the prisoner.’ He chose the rope he thought most suitable, ‘shackled it to the chain in the roof of the Hang house, let it hang all night with a sandbag’. It was slightly heavier than Kevin Barry.
My father’s poem says it all, really:
Are you the nephew of?
Who tried to inveigle the elegant tart
In the train from Rathvilly
Who murdered a gallon of Smithwick’s
Lying on a bed with a Belgian bird
In the Glendalough Inn by the lake beyond Laragh.
Are you the nephew of?
Robbed a Lewis gun laughing
From the King’s Inns showing
Dinny Holmes his new toy
Are you the nephew of?
Was caught under a soldier’s lorry
Was tortured, tried and fed apples and grapes
Till he hang-dangled dead from an alien rope.
© Donal O’Donovan 1989
I agree that Christianity sought to dominate and supersede ancient pagan practices toward the dead, and that deeper traditions of communing with ancestors endured. The Church regulated and embraced those traditions that remained, while condemning others.
It reminds me of the stories I've heard about Boniface and other Christians, who attempted to injure sacred trees as one of their first acts against the pagans. Many of our indigenous spiritualities place a high value on trees, particularly as a means of communicating with ancestors.
If you can somehow sever or subvert that ongoing relationship and reverence between a people and their ancestors you take control over their understanding of their history and what is means to be spiritual.
The longer I live the more I feel that our concept of death is not what the Catholic Church would have us believe. That is not to say there is no afterlife - I believe there is. But the dead are with us here and now in a way that seems more in tune with pagan beliefs than Christian teaching.
So I like this article very much.