The Saturdays of the Souls

Saturdays given to the dead. The Saturday before Meatfare Sunday and the second, third and fourth Saturdays of Great Lent are the chief of them, with Radonitsa in the second week after Pascha in the Slavic practice and the Saturday before Pentecost everywhere. Saturday is the day because it is the day Christ lay in the tomb. The Church serves a general memorial, boiled wheat is brought, and lists of names are read for as long as the lists take. The pre-Pentecost one prays for everyone who has died from Adam onwards, including those nobody is left to remember and those who died in ways the Church cannot name, which is the widest prayer in the Orthodox year.