Culture · Essay
Zaduszki: the night Poland can be picked out from the air
On 1 November millions of glass grave lanterns are lit across Poland and the cemeteries burn until morning. On the znicz, the largest annual journey in the country, the collections at the gate, and what the state could not stop.Written to last.
By Confinity Editorial · 2026-08-21 · 6-minute readQuiet tools, kept out of the way.
On the evening of 1 November, Poland's cemeteries are the brightest thing in the country. Every grave that anybody remembers carries a znicz, a squat glass lantern with a candle inside, and the larger burial grounds hold tens of thousands of them at once, so that a cemetery seen from a hill is a field of moving light and a cemetery seen from an aircraft is a bright patch in an otherwise dark town.
The lanterns are not decorative and are not symbolic in a way anybody has to explain. They are simply what you bring.
The observance runs across two dates and Poles distinguish them, even though the visiting mostly happens on the first.
Znicze on the evening of 1 November. The rule nobody writes down is that no grave should be left dark. Photograph by Marek Ślusarczyk, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
1 November is Wszystkich Świętych, All Saints, a public holiday, and the day the whole country travels. 2 November is Dzień Zaduszny or Zaduszki, All Souls, which is the day the liturgy is actually directed at the ordinary dead rather than the saints. Masses are said for named people, and in many parishes the names of everyone in the congregation's families are read.
The Church's arrangement is the same one that operates across Catholic Europe. What is specifically Polish is the scale of the movement and the light.
The days around 1 November produce the biggest internal travel peak in the Polish calendar. Motorways are managed for it; the police run a national road-safety operation over the weekend; long-distance coaches and trains put on extra services; and people who work in Warsaw or abroad go back to a small town they may visit only once a year, because that is where the family plot is.
The visiting is not confined to one's own dead. Families tend the graves of relatives they never met, of neighbours with nobody left, of soldiers, of strangers whose stones look neglected. The unwritten rule is that no grave should be dark on that night, and volunteers and scouts go round the older sections lighting the ones nobody has claimed.
At the gates of the historic cemeteries, actors stand with tins.
The practice began at Powązki in Warsaw in 1974, when the writer and broadcaster Jerzy Waldorff started a public collection, the kwesta, to pay for the restoration of decaying historic graves. Well-known actors, musicians and public figures collect in person, which is why a visitor to Powązki on 1 November is likely to be asked for money by somebody off the television.
It has since spread to Kraków's Rakowicki cemetery and to burial grounds across the country, and it has funded the restoration of thousands of monuments. It is an unusually practical piece of heritage financing: the one day a year when everybody is already at the cemetery is the day you ask.
Under the communist period the observance was awkward for the authorities: a mass religious event, on a fixed date, involving essentially the entire population.
The response was to secularise rather than suppress. The state promoted the day as a civic commemoration of the dead, and encouraged attention to war graves and monuments in particular. Officials laid wreaths. The religious content was left unmentioned in public.
It made no difference to what people did, and the state's own emphasis on soldiers' graves fitted comfortably into a custom that already held that no grave should be left dark. When the political circumstances changed in 1989, nothing about the practice had to be restored, because nothing had stopped.
Underneath the Catholic calendar sits something considerably older, and Poles are generally aware of it.
Dziady, the ancestors' rite, was a Slavic autumn observance at which the dead were invited to eat: food and drink set out, a place left, the dead called by name. It survived longest in the eastern borderlands and among Poland's Belarusian and Lithuanian neighbours, and it is the subject of Adam Mickiewicz's Dziady, one of the central works of Polish literature and one that has been politically explosive more than once, most famously when the closure of a Warsaw production in 1968 set off nationwide protests.
The eastern version of the same practice is still kept as Dziady in Belarus, and the spring counterpart across the Orthodox world is Radonitsa.
The observance solves a problem that most modern remembrance has given up on: it makes the obligation collective and visible.
Because everybody goes on the same night, the cemetery is full, the graves are all lit, and a family that failed to turn up would be noticed. Because strangers light strangers' lanterns, a person with no descendants still gets a flame. And because the whole country is on the road, the annual journey home is not something an individual has to organise against the grain of ordinary life. It is simply what the first of November is.
What it cannot supply is the content. A lit grave says somebody came. It does not say who is under the stone, what they did, or why the family used to make the trip.
Two days, and what each is for