Forget Halloween costumes — Warsaw’s true night of spirits glows with candlelight, not masks.
Forget Halloween costumes — Warsaw’s true night of spirits glows with candlelight, not masks.
As October gives way to November, Warsaw doesn’t fill with ghosts or plastic pumpkins. Instead, it blazes with light. Across the city, thousands of candles shimmer behind colored glass lanterns, transforming cemeteries into rivers of flickering fire. This is Poland’s All Saints’ Day (Dzień Wszystkich Świętych, November 1) and All Souls’ Day (Dzień Zaduszny, November 2) — a time to honor the dead, and to see faith and remembrance expressed with luminous beauty.
Families gather at dusk, carrying flowers and lanterns. The air smells of wax and chrysanthemums. Candles reflect in wet stone, and for one weekend a year, Warsaw’s cemeteries glow like living cities of memory.
The most famous is Powązki, a vast, tree-shaded necropolis where Poland’s great and good lie side by side. Beneath weathered oaks rest the relatives of the last king, Stanisław August Poniatowski, and Nobel laureate Władysław Reymont. Along the Avenue of Merit (Aleja Zasłużonych), ornate mausoleums stand as sculpted tributes to writers, artists, and visionaries who shaped the nation.
When lit by thousands of candles, Powązki feels like an open-air cathedral — solemn yet radiant, history made visible in every glowing lantern.
Warsaw’s Protestant cemeteries — Augsburg Evangelical (ul. Młynarska 54/56) and Reformed (ul. Żytnia 42) — are smaller but rich in stories. Here, headstones in English, German, French, and Russian whisper of the city’s once-multicultural fabric. The Wedel family, Warsaw’s famed chocolatiers, rest beneath elegant stonework, while the Reformed cemetery’s mix of crosses and secular graves reveals a spirit of inclusion rare for its time.
At the Jewish Cemetery (ul. Okopowa 49/51), the mood turns quieter. Jewish tradition favors stones over candles, yet some visitors — moved by the national ritual — break custom and light flames of their own. The gesture, though small, feels deeply human.
Nearby, the Tatar Muslim Cemetery (ul. Tatarska 8) adds another voice to Warsaw’s chorus of remembrance. Founded for Muslim soldiers in the Tsarist army, its epitaphs speak of distance and devotion — hearts aching for homes far away.
And at the Orthodox Cemetery (ul. Wolska 138/140), established after the failed November Uprising of 1830–31, Cyrillic inscriptions and three-bar crosses mark the city’s Russian past, interwoven with Polish grief.
Augsburg Protestant ul. Młynarska 54/56
Warsaw’s history, so often scarred by war, finds solemn expression in its military cemeteries. The Powązki Military Cemetery (ul. Powązkowska 43) honors generations of soldiers and insurgents, while the Warsaw Insurgents Cemetery (ul. Wolska 174/176) holds the ashes of those who fought and fell in 1944.
Further afield, the Cemetery Mausoleum of the Russian Army (ul. Żwirki i Wigury 10) contains the remains of more than 21,000 Soviet soldiers, its stark Socialist Realist forms standing as both monument and warning. The Italian Army Cemetery, by contrast, is haunting in its simplicity: row upon row of plain white crosses.
All Saints’ and All Souls’ days are less about mourning than connection — between faiths, between generations, between the living and the departed. For a few nights each year, Warsaw becomes a city illuminated by memory.
And as the candles burn low and the crowds drift home, the darkness that follows somehow feels warmer for the light that was left behind.
