Categories: Residence and weekdays, Anita Locmele

Story-teller: “A grave was dug for one person and then a coffin was found. And, of course, everybody was shocked, that, what a coffin, if there were no mounds seen in the place they had dug. So they dug up that coffin, and, what… it is a habit here, in our Danska cemetery people are buried in three layers. In two layers people are buried with their heads in one direction, and in one layer – in the other direction. I don’t know, I am not a grave-digger, simply all those people, who have dug the graves, because there are no grave-diggers in our village, only in towns there are grave-diggers, here the neighbours come together and dig the grave. And there are also such people who are more successful in digging graves, and they are more often asked to do that. And, and so they dug up that coffin. It was interesting, it had to be opened. The coffin was preserved in the place where no mould was seen. It is possible! So they opened that coffin, that was made of .. of oak, and there was a girl, a girl of the age of fourteen – fifteen, dressed in that Latgalian attire, and everything else in the coffin had fallen to dust. Then they closed the coffin, dug something like a niche and pushed it into that niche, so it would lie besides.”

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Researcher: Dr. philol. Gatis Ozoliņš, Daugavpils Universitāte