Within the medieval Orthodox Balkan culture, visual memory of death has manifold functions. Representations of violent death were preserved within images in Menologia, such as the one in Treskavac Monastery, and through particular hagiography cycles, like the one of Saint Parasceve in the Monastery of Donja Kamenica. The image which commemorates the death of an anachoret is very important in ascertaining the identity of the saint’s cult, which can be seen in the representation of The Funeral of Saint Gavril of Lesnovo in Lesnovo Monastery.

It has been ten years since I have stepped in the field of thanatological researches. Primarily incited by certain events in my personal life and then by classical thanatological studies, I have started to leaf through pages about death which were written by history of civilization. Immense and endless “book of death” obliged me to make my own system, to summarize my own experience, to tame and reconcile my own feelings of limited duration and perceptible eternity. However, in order to avoid creating a book of autobiographical and confessional notes, or at least to avoid reducing this manuscript solely to that, I tried to let my intellectual and emotional experience through the sieve of the culture to which I belong. This is, after all, a task of a researcher, particularly obvious in topics which concern essential questions of human existence. Death and dying are certainly such topics. Furthermore, these topics inevitably and explicitly turn researcher into interpreter whose goal is to establish balance between personal and general/common, individual and collective, historical and meta-historical levels of interpretation. Obviously, the title of this book was inspired by title of Philippe Aries influential study:”Essays on History of Death at the West” (“Essais sur l`histoire de la mort en Occident”). Approaches applied in this book encouraged me to design my study as a collection of more or less independent texts which were created during last decade and in which my attempt was to summarize what was the most important about death and dying in Serbian culture. Therefore, this book could be conditionally divided into two thematic parts: research results about ritual behaviors and attitudes towards death of common people, and analyses of different historical and cultural circumstances which influenced these comprehension and praxes. The other group of essays brings analyses of manifestations of death phenomenon in public spaces. These investigations revealed strong influences of cultural, political and religious ideas and ideologies on shaping public, collective image of death. However, they also point at the reverse Aleksandra Pavićević From Mystery to Spectacle 8 process – how thesaurus of symbols contained in “eternal mystery” determines content and messages of political praxes. The basic texture of this manuscript rests on the fundamental hypotheses of classical thanato-anthropological researches, i.e. on ambivalent, synchronic and diachronic models which can be found there. One model represents modern societies as ones in which facts of suppressing speech on death in private sphere on one side and invasion of death and dying images in public space on the other are confronted. The other model is based on the idea that understanding of death follows fairly one-way evolutionary path between tradition and modernity. However, a careful reader will notice that interpretative level of results constantly escapes compact structuring: silence about death in modern and neo-modern (term suggested by Walter) society is not an absolute category, while relation between tradition and modernity appears as multivalent, multi-way and full of deep mutual overlapping. Interviews that were conducted during the research, acquaintances, conversations and familiarity with colleges which I met at conferences on thanatology, as well as ever-growing pile of death studies literature, inspired me to write essays in relatively “free style”, which seemed to me to be the best way for making my own cognitions readable and accessible to a wider readership. Nevertheless, readers have in their hands a book about death and dying. Leafing through it, they can travel from rural to urban spaces, from traditional to contemporary ritual forms and ideological frames, from private to public discourses, from everyday life to political spheres, from mystery to spectacle and vice versa. This book will not help us solve the mystery of death, but it may improve our understanding of some forms it takes in contemporary society.

Death represents a universal and omnipresent topic in a philosophy and art of all cultures and civilisations. Also due to this universality the visual presentations of Death offer a unique opportunity to examine late medieval man’s understanding of his own earthly as well as posthumous existence. Late medieval visual arts illustrate the period “culture of death” and allow us to better understand mentality and imagination of people living during the 14th and 15th century – during the period of growing and intensively experienced fear of death. Late medieval Bohemia in the Central European context represents a unique region as the period painting here not only offers the complete repertoire of macabre iconography (The Legend of the three Living and the three Dead, Triumph of Death, Danse macabre) but also its original and iconographically unique adaptation within the new religious and devotional (Utraquist) context. Each of the book chapter deals with a specific macabre motif and describes all preserved examples of personified Death in the late medieval Bohemian art. 129 colour plates in total together with selected medieval literary sources accompany the text of individual chapters being the inevitable part of the book.

The present study is based on excerpts from the book A magyar szimbolizmus ["Hungarian Symbolism"] (Budapest: Corvina, 2016), and has been expanded by new research findings.

Textual and visual evidence is plentiful for the study of issues related to death and dying in medieval Serbia. Being a part of the Christian Orthodox Byzantine oikoumene, all rites and rituals pertaining to death, dying, burial and remembrance in medieval Serbia must firstly and necessarily, although not exclusively nor too insistently, be regarded within that context. The particularities and specificities brought on, on the one hand, by the multiculural and multiconfessional affiliation of the population which made up the society of medieval Serbia, and, on the other, by the enduring remnants of Slavic pagan funerary practices and beliefs particularly among the majority rural Orthodox population should always be kept in mind. This text offers an overview and insight into the sophisticated rhetoric of death and dying in both the written sources and visual material related to funeral art in medieval Serbia that should be the subject of further research.

National trauma, a passion for graves, and the collecting of national memorabilia in early nineteenth-century Poland Michał Mencfel This essay discusses collections of historical memorabilia assembled in Poland at the end of the eighteenth and the beginning of the nineteenth century, which contained the physical remains (bones and hair) of historical figures. An analysis is offered of the traditions and circumstances that made it acceptable and possible for Polish antiquaries and collectors to open the tombs of eminent historical figures and to remove the contents of graves to private collections. Emphasis is placed on the role of national trauma, brought about by the crisis of the partition of Poland, culminating in 1795 in the demise of Poland as an independent state, which provided an impetus for the development of a distinctive historical consciousness. It is argued that while objects of this kind would cause moral and other dilemmas in other countries in Europe, such concerns were absent in Poland owing to its unique situation. Attention is also paid to changing attitudes throughout the nineteenth century, which influenced both the shape of historical collections and the manner of examining the corpses of historical figures. An explanation is offered for why, in the second half of the nineteenth century, despite the continuing exploration of tombs, the practice of collecting and displaying human remains and grave goods never gained wide public approval.