Funeral Rituals in the Villages of the Romanian Banat (Based on the Results of the 2025 Expedition)

Abstract

This article examines the funeral and memorial rites of Serbian, Romanian, and Ukrainian villages in the Romanian Banat. In 2025, we conducted an expedition to the villages of the lowland Banat (the villages of Sânpetru Mare, Variaş, Dragomireşti in Timiş County) and the mountainous Banat (the villages of Belobreşka, Divić, Zorile, Caraş-Severin County), during which a number of funeral and memorial practices were recorded: playing cards in the presence of the deceased (Romanians and Serbs of Banat), games in the presence of the deceased (Banat Ukrainians), breaking dishes and turning over benches when carrying out the coffin (Banat Romanians), performing a biography song (Romanian: Hora mortului) at a funeral (Romanians of Mâtnicu Mare), bringing water to the house of the deceased (mountainous Banat: in the Romanian and Serbian villages of the Danube coast – after the burial, in the Romanian villages in the upper reaches of the Nera River — before the burial), the ritual of letting out water - slobozirea apei / изљивање воде on the fortieth day (Romanians and Serbs of Banat), a calendar-timed (in the villages we visited, usually on Maundy Thursday) ritual of releasing water (Romanians and Serbs of the Danube coast), and a funeral hora – jocu mortului (Romanians of the mountainous Banat). During the expedition, we also recorded stories of the walking dead. Romanian and Serbian funeral rites of the region are characterized by a large number of common features. The main difference between Serbian and Romanian rituals is the absence of instrumental music at Serbian funerals and the absence of a funeral hora among Serbs. The rituals of the Ukrainian village of Zorile show no Romanian influence, while in the village of Copăcele it is evident, although some vocabulary of Romanian origin (помана, опревеґя) could have been borrowed by the Ukrainians of Copăcele even before their migration to Banat from Maramureş County.

Funding

This article was supported by the Russian Science Foundation grant No. 22-18-00484-P “Slavic-Non-Slavic Borderlands: Funeral and Memorial Rites in Ethnolinguistic Interpretation” (https://rscf.ru/project/22-18-00484/).

Received 25 November 2025

Revised 13 December 2025

Accepted 3 April 2026

For citation: Strutynski, I. M., 2026. Funeral Rituals in the Villages of the Romanian Banat

(Based on the Results of the 2025 Expedition). Slavic World in the Third Millennium, 21 (1–2), pp. 203–226. https://doi.org/10.31168/2412-6446.2026.21.1-2.12