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.
The site is back up on line! For more than a month it’s been down while I transferred it from the Namibian server to a new Hungarian web host and now it’s back. Apologies to anyone who wanted to access the site during this time and thank you for your patience. Now that things are working more or less smoothly I should be able to post some fresh content! 🙂