„Nunta mortului” ilustrată într-un verș din zona Vișeului

Abstract

„Wedding of the dead” is a local funeral custom that we find in Vișeu de Mijloc, a suburb of Vișeu de Sus town, where the rural specificity is still preserved, which makes such customs to be maintained even today. This custom of very old origin, is celebrated on the occasion of the death of an unmarried young man. They are given a symbolic wedding in order to be integrated into the world beyond, because, according to the local conception, a man has to go through the three moments of life: birth, marriage and death. The funeral, in this situation is done with the intercalation of wedding elements, that emphasize the metaphorical relationship between death and wedding. This local custom is also mentioned in a local funeral poem - local poetic-musical production of the church singers, sung during the traditional funeral ritual in Transylvania - “Poem for Gheorghe Ulici” composed by deacon Simon Ioan from Vișeu de Mijloc. The whole construction of the text, which presents itself as a broad metaphor of death, is structured in the form of a “negative parallelism” in which the resemblance between death and marriage is emphasized by contrasts and symbolic inversion. The melody of the poem is specific to that place, a song that represents the dominant autochthonous melodic type, found in the singing of most local funeral poems. Its melody is built on a modal structure characterized by major-minor parallelism and which takes place within an octave.