Panikhida

The funeral happens once. The panikhida is what the Orthodox tradition does instead of leaving the matter there. It is a short sung service, a compressed version of the burial rite, with the same litanies for the departed, the same prayer for a place of light and refreshment, and the same closing "Memory eternal". Because it is short it can be asked for at any time, and because it is asked for by name it becomes the ordinary way a family goes on doing something for its dead.

The days are fixed by custom rather than by doctrine. The third day after death, the ninth and the fortieth are the standard sequence, then the anniversary, and after that whenever the family wishes. The forty days carry a widespread popular understanding of the soul's passage after death which the church has never defined dogmatically; the services are kept whether or not any particular account of what happens in that period is held.

Alongside the services for individuals, the calendar sets aside several Saturdays of Souls, when the commemoration is general. On those days the priest reads out the names submitted by the whole parish, sometimes hundreds of them, and the dead of that community are prayed for together rather than one family at a time. That is the balance the practice keeps: a rite personal enough to be requested for one named person, and a calendar that makes sure the ones nobody requests are not left out.

A panikhida is usually sung over a dish of kolyva, boiled wheat mixed with honey and often with nuts, raisins and pomegranate seeds, decorated and set on a table with a candle in it. It is blessed during the service and eaten afterwards, shared among those present. The explanation given for it in the service books is a scriptural one: a grain of wheat has to fall into the ground and die before it bears anything. The dish is an argument in food, and it is eaten rather than merely displayed, which is a fair description of how the tradition handles teaching in general.

The custom of the wheat is old and has local names and recipes across the Orthodox world: koliva in Greek usage, kutia in Slavic, where it is also a Christmas Eve dish, and versions in Romanian, Serbian and Georgian practice. The details vary and the meaning attached to it does not.

Radonitsa is the strongest expression of the same idea. On the Tuesday after Thomas Sunday, in the second week of Pascha, Slavic Orthodox families go to the cemeteries, and the memorial is sung at the graves with the paschal greeting, "Christ is risen", and with red eggs left on the stones. The name is usually connected with the Slavic word for joy. The practice absorbed older spring commemorations of the dead in the regions where it took hold, a continuity that scholars of Slavic religion note and that the church has never treated as a problem.