Culture · Essay
Vėlinės: the Lithuanian word for a soul is older than the church that kept it
On 2 November Lithuanian families take candles to the graves, in an observance whose name comes from vėlė, an old Baltic word for the shade of the dead. On Ilgės, the cemeteries at Vilnius, and the last pagan country in Europe.Written to last.
By Confinity Editorial · 2026-08-21 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
The Lithuanian word for the day of the dead is Vėlinės, and it is built on vėlė: the shade, the soul of a person who has died, distinct from the living soul, siela. It is an old Baltic word with cognates in Latvian and relatives elsewhere in Indo-European, and it is not a loan from anything Christian.
That is a small linguistic fact with a large implication. The observance now runs on the Catholic calendar, on 2 November, immediately after All Saints. The vocabulary it runs on is older than the calendar by a long way.
Lithuania is the relevant case because of when it became Christian.
The Grand Duchy accepted baptism in 1387, and Samogitia in the west held out until 1413, which makes Lithuania the last part of Europe to convert officially. Written accounts of Baltic religion therefore survive from a period when there were literate observers on the spot, and the pre-Christian material is better attested here than almost anywhere else in the region.
What those accounts describe includes an autumn rite for the ancestors: Ilgės, held at the end of the harvest, at which the dead were named, invited, and fed. Food was set on the table for them. In some descriptions the dead were addressed individually and asked to come and eat; in others the household went to the graves.
The Church did what churches generally do with a durable custom, which is to schedule its own observance on top of it. Vėlinės is the result: All Souls in liturgy, Ilgės in name and in most of its content.
The practice today is candles and travel.
Antakalnis in Vilnius, one of the two cemeteries the city fills on the night, and where the memorials to the deported and the killed of 1991 stand. Photograph by Loraine, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
On the evening of 1 November and through 2 November, families go to the cemetery with candles and put them on the family graves. The larger burial grounds in Vilnius, Rasų and Antakalnio, and the cemeteries of every town and village, fill with light. Families clean the plot beforehand, bring chrysanthemums, and stand for a while.
Neglected graves get candles too. Soldiers' graves and the plots of the deported and the exiled are lit deliberately, which in a country with Lithuania's twentieth century covers a great many people who are not buried where their families are, and a good many who are not buried anywhere identifiable.
Public broadcasting carries services and concerts, and the national mood on the day is closer to quiet than to festival.
The Lithuanian version of the day carries a weight the Polish one does not, and it comes from the deportations.
Between 1941 and 1952 large numbers of Lithuanians were deported to Siberia and to the Soviet far north, and many died there. Others were killed in the postwar partisan resistance and buried without record, or displayed in town squares and then disposed of by the authorities. A substantial part of the country's dead from that period are in graves nobody can point to.
Vėlinės absorbed this. Candles are lit at monuments, at the sites of former NKVD buildings, at symbolic graves, and in the family plots of people whose actual remains are somewhere in Krasnoyarsk. The Rasos and Antakalnis cemeteries hold memorials for exactly this purpose.
An observance built on an old word for the shade of a person turned out to be well suited to a century that produced a very large number of shades and very few bodies.
The Baltic and Slavic observances of the dead form a family, and the differences are informative.
Zaduszki in Poland is the same two days, with the same lanterns, at a larger scale. Dziady in Belarus keeps the older name and the older shape, with the dead fed at the table. Kapu svētki in Latvia moves the whole thing to summer and holds a service among the graves. Radonitsa in the Orthodox east puts it after Easter and makes it cheerful.
All of them are the same underlying transaction, conducted at different points in the year by peoples who share a good deal of history and disagree about most of it.
The observance holds a specific and useful position: that a person can be remembered properly without a body, a plot or a date of death.
That is not a consolation prize. For a country where the state destroyed the records as a matter of policy, an annual occasion at which a family lights a candle for somebody whose grave does not exist is the only remembrance available, and it works because everybody agrees to treat the symbolic plot as the real one.
What it needs is the name, and the knowledge that this person existed and was ours. Those are exactly the things a deportation, an emigration or a generation of silence removes.
The last country in Europe to convert
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