Note 288.1 — Chapter XIII · FUNERAL RITES.

In Europe, where flesh is not consumed ceremonially at the funeral feast, other means even more expressive are taken to ensure the same object. In the Balkan peninsula the rites are very significant. In Albania, cakes of boiled wheat and other ingredients are carried in the funeral procession, and eaten by the mourners upon the grave as soon as it is filled up. All expressions of sorrow are repressed as sinful while it is being eaten; and as each person takes his share he says: “May he (or she) be forgiven!”288.1 In some parts of the peninsula the cakes bear the image of the dead. They are broken up and eaten upon the tomb immediately after interment, every mourner pronouncing the words: “God rest him!”288.2 At Calymnos, among the Greeks, the funeral, as elsewhere, takes place on the day of death. Kólyva cakes like those in Albania are then made, and are guarded in the house of the departed all night, with two lighted candles, by a watcher who must not go to sleep. The next day they are carried first to the church and then to the tomb, on which they are set to be distributed. The eating of Kólyva cakes is repeated with similar ceremonies on the third, ninth and fortieth days, and again at the end of three, six and nine months and of one, two and three years, after death.288.3 It is impossible to mistake the meaning of these practices: the image of the dead upon the cakes, the acts of carrying them in the funeral procession and eating them upon the grave, elsewhere the night-watching, and everywhere the cessation of mourning and the pious exclamations during eating, all admit of but one interpretation.