Old traditions are not dead

November 3: as dismal a day as you could imagine. Driving rain, low cloud, snow line creeping down the mountain towards us. Not a soul in sight. The last leaves are being scattered by the wind. Even the cattle have retreated to the stalls – not a cowbell can be heard.

We plod through the village churchyard where two days ago there was a buzz of activity and conversation. On All Souls Day, Austrians travel back to the village of their origin to visit the graves of relatives long, and more recently gone. Each family brings a Gesteck – an arrangement of heathers, dried flowers and plants to place on the graves.

It is not only a time to remember the dead, but also a time when acquaintances are renewed with friends and family not seen since last November 1^st, a time to catch up on family news…and to see how much older everyone looks. Is it true that old people like to see that others are wearing worse than they themselves are?

November 3: not a single grave in the cemetery which surrounds the church is without its Gesteck – some more elaborate, even gaudy compared with those which only comprise living heathers. On every grave there is at least one candle burning, now deep into it’s glowing red container.

The headstones tell of a tight and stable community: a handful of surnames appear time and time again. Faded, sepia pictures of the long departed in tiny oval frames on headstones show stolid, uncomplicated folk bearing family resemblances through the generations. Longevity is taken for granted in Embach though there are a few tiny graves of babies and children who died long ago and before their time, but are still remembered.

After church, to the music of the village band, families beat a retreat to their homes where the fat is chewed, the experiences of the past year compared, the future considered. This is a time for a tradition far older than the graves themselves, for longstanding families to reaffirm their roots here on this usually sunny plateau surrounded by meadows and mountains. Long may it last.

(On this day, it was so wet and dismal, that it was not possible to take any photographs to go with this blog)