Private cemeteries constitute a new development in the Romanian postsocialist death system that poses a challenge to the traditional burial culture. This paper charts the emergence of privately owned, profit-oriented cemeteries that have appeared across the country after the demise of state socialism. It argues that the development of these new, entrepreneurial burial grounds is to be understood at the intersection of several factors: (1) transformations in the country’s political economy after the overthrow of the socialist regime have facilitated the diffusion of an entrepreneurial ethos in the realm of death and body disposal. Against this background, (2) a burial crisis produced by overcrowded cemeteries was mounting, which (3) the local state authorities largely failed to address. Using empirical data collected from multiple sources, the paper examines statistically the private cemeteries opened in Romania’s postsocialist deathscape as well as the burial crisis affecting the public cemeteries, which stimulated the former’s development. Lastly, the paper takes stock of the Romanian Orthodox Church’s reaction to this trend and charts its shifting position from the initial vehement condemnation of private cemeteries to market accommodation after the adoption of the 2014 law regulating the burial grounds.

Periods of national mourning have been on the rise in the last decades in European societies as part of a wider process of democratization, whereby ordinary citizens have been increasingly granted the honors of state condolences. However, despite their growing incidence, periods of national mourning have not received the due attention in social science scholarship. This study examines the patterns and politics of national mourning observed in European countries between 1989 and 2018, based on an exhaustive dataset compiled for this analytical purpose (N = 415). Periods of national mourning are understood here as instituting states of social exception during which state authorities enact ritual actions consisting in a sequence of choreographically staged performative acts meant to create a national community of grief in the face of what is framed as a socially meaningful loss. Against these considerations, the paper argues that there are two main political cultures of public mourning in Europe. Data analysis reveals that the continent is split diagonally between a sober, Northwestern and Protestant political culture of public mourning and a lavish, Southeastern one informed by the traditions of Catholicism, Orthodoxy, and Islam.

Despite their growing incidence over the last decades, national days of mourning received curiously sparse attention throughout social sciences and death studies. This study investigates the 327 national mournings observed across European countries between 1989 and 2017 in terms of their national variance, temporal dynamics, typology of events that led to their declaration, and victimology. Drawing on a Durkheimian-inspired conceptualization of national mournings as political rites of solidarity and reconciliation, this article finds empirical support for the thesis that the frequency with which European countries declare national mourning is a negative function of a society’s level of social integration.

National days of mourning are state-sponsored rituals of collective grief enacted in the public sphere by political authorities to symbolically mark and emotionally cope with a socially significant loss. These officially declared and ceremonially performed state rituals of communion in grief provide privileged epistemic opportunities for unravelling the politics of grievability underpinning a society’s willingness to mourn its dead. This paper focuses on comparing and contrasting two case studies – the Colectiv nightclub fire and the flu epidemics – in order to grasp the politics of national mourning in the Romanian post-communist context. After identifying the criteria of grievability underlying the declaration of national mourning in cases of mass death as consisting in a ‘chronotopic togetherness’ in death that is characterised by an ‘instantaneity of emotional shock,’ the paper argues for enlarging these criteria of grievability so as to include the victims of socially invisible traumas inflicted by structural violence, such as those killed in epidemics and car road accidents.