The cult of the dead is a prominet aspect of the culture of the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia, which in some regions is still important to this day. For many Vlachs, their dead were so important that villages would lack cemetaries, as the dead would be buried within the gardens of family members. They would regularly bring food and other offerings to the graves of their family members to help them in their afterlives and honor them as well as a series of old spirits; today in some villages this tradition continues, they offer even televisions to their ancestors, which has made some of these villages a site of tourism - thought others see less tourism, perhaps and allegedly in part due to fear of tales of Vlach magic and its power.
The dead were important to a long series of rituals as well. Ritual dances, ceremonies, and celebrations would often be held in grave sights, many times involving offerings being brought, a fire being made, dances, music, and seer/healer women - a form of "shamanic" practice kept to this day - would fall into trances and with the help of the dead and spirits, heal individuals or tell their future.
Funerals were an important event, as were other rituals afterwards - notably the Vlachs of Eastern Serbia would hold weddings for family members which passed too young so that they would not go unmarried in the afterlife. There was a habit as well of at times digging up the dead, either to check that they were indeed dead (especially if they kept visiting people in dreams after weeks passed from their death), if they had not turned into melicious supernatural spirits, or to ask for their help - a somewhat taboo practice which until recently had survived in regions of Romania as well.
