UK to Slovakia

November 1st - All Saints Day in Slovakia.
There are many religious beliefs surrounding All Saints Day and it has many different names depending upon your religion and country of residence but I’m not getting into that…..

One of Slovakia’s many traditions is, at this time, to visit the local graveyards, light a candle of remembrance and of course say a prayer or three.
Our next door neighbour who is also my wifes employer asked us to go with her to visit the local graveyard with her here in Kezmarok. I must admit I was a little dubious as, wandering around a graveyard on a very cold and misty November night was not exactly high on my list of priorities. However, I sensed she had a need to do this but did not want to do so alone, so we agreed to go with her.

Now, I am not an overtly religious person, nor in fact am I prone to overtly showing emotion but when I walked into that graveyard and saw all the remembrance candles, the people huddled around graves, memorials and war memorials, I was moved, very moved. I could hardly see for the tears streaming down my face and as I write this, the memory alone is causing tears to well up in my eyes, well in truth, I’m crying like a baby..

Like most people, I have friends, family, pets and events that have ‘passed’ that I remember but to see all these people; some praying, some just staring into space, others re-counting past deads and events, a few huddled silently around a bottle of vodka to keep warm sharing a knowing look.
Candles of a multitude of colours and sizes resting on just about every horizontal surface available along with flowers and photographs of loved ones. The whole graveyard was emitting a warm, inviting, multi-coloured glow.
I raised my eyes to the misty night sky and offered thanks that people here still care enough to ‘remember’, a prayer that they would continue to remember and a silent apology for my own past deads and all the could-a, should-a, would-a’s…

And then the real sadness hit me that had me crying like a baby all over again. In my own country, these graves would have likely been vandalised, most probably beyond recognition. The flowers stolen and given to girlfriends or thrown about for juvenile ‘fun’. There would probably not even be anyone in the graveyard but those that might have been would have turned a blind eye and walked away, the reason for their coming there long forgotten.

I had my camera with me, a journalists was taking photographs and although I would have liked the world to share the moment pictorially, it just did not seem appropriate.