With this study, I intend to focus on the challenges of both secularisation and spiritualisation impacting the traditional ways in which, it is believed, most people approach death in contemporary Romania. As it has become all the more evident after Colectiv nightclub tragedy, Romanians’ religiosity can no longer be un-problematically linked to institutional religion. If the growing number of non-dogmatic experiences of the sacred and, consequently, the multiplication of personal death ways have long been an acknowledged reality in the Western world, Romania is still uncomfortably stuck in the interstice between two major death patterns (traditional and modern) both being perceived as menacing and unconvincing. This may have led to conflicting versions of “good death” that have created small, unstable comfort zones, and fast, unpredictable swings from meaningful to meaningless versions of dying.

A full-length study is available here.

A full-length study is available here.