“If the Sun Shines on Him Once More, He Will Live Two Lives”: Exhuming the Dead in Eastern Serbia

Abstract

Until the final decades of the 20th century, the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia practiced a rather unusual funerary custom about which very little was known: exhuming people who died very young 40 days after the funeral, so that the inconsolable family could see them once more. Apart from bringing peace and consolation to the family, it seems that the belief behind this custom was that if the corpse is taken out of the grave once more, so that the sun shines on it, the deceased would have two lives. The rare ethnographic references from the beginning of the previous century indicate a wider spread of the phenomenon in Eastern Serbia, among the Vlachs, but at the end of the 20th century, when the last exhumations were done, only a few villages in the Homolje region celebrated the custom. This paper draws on the few Serbian ethnographic sources from the first half of the last century and on the limited later mentions, and presents the narratives recorded by the authors in 2022 with Vlach interlocutors who had heard about the ritual, conducted it, or took part in it between 1970 and the 1990s. Special attention is paid to the area in which this phenomenon took place, situations in which the exhumation was done, and the beliefs underlying it.