Candles lighting up the cemetery on Halloween in Vaszar.

We didn’t dress up and go trick-or-treating for Halloween in Namibia, but Jack-o-Lanterns and spooky costume parties are what come to mind when I think of the time around the transition from October to November. In Hungary –and it turns out many countries in this area– it’s celebrated a bit differently and spooky costume Halloween parties have only started to become popular in the 21st century.

On 1 November, Hungarians travel to the countryside for All Saints’ Day and All Souls’ Day on 2 November. They visit the cemeteries where their ancestors are buried and decorate the graves with flowers and candles. It looks really beautiful at night and I took some photos when we were in Vaszar on the weekend. It was a dark night and the pictures are mostly out of focus, but I think they’re still pretty.

It turns out Halloween is a combination of the words Hallow (meaning holy or saint) and e’en (a contraction of even, which is the Scots spelling of eve or evening), and the celebration has a long Christian and Celtic folk history.