Latvians flocked to cemeteries on Sunday to honour the dead on All Souls Day as they also mourned the deaths of at least 54 people in the collapse of a supermarket in Riga.
By grim coincidence this year’s “kapu svetkus” or “cemetery festival” occurred just after the worst loss of life since the country regained its independence from the Soviet Union in 1991.
Seven people were still missing after the roof of a supermarket collapsed in the capital on Thursday, but rescuers say there is no chance of finding more survivors even as they continue to comb the wreckage.
The tragedy has stunned the nation of two million people, with the government declaring three days of national mourning as residents flocked to church to offer prayers for the dead.
On All Souls Day, a tradition throughout Eastern Europe, families place candles on the graves of their loved ones and clean family plots.
But this year is different.
“People are not thinking only about their own families,” said pensioner Ligita as she rode the tram to a Riga cemetery.
“They also think of others, people they have never even met,” she said, dressed head to toe in black and clutching shopping bags full of flowers and candles.
On Sunday, more people streamed into the Second Forest Cemetery in Riga with flowers and candles than in previous years, according to manager Liene of a coffee shop next door.
“For a small country like Latvia, whose population is small, it’s like the effect of a typhoon or earthquake in a larger country,” she told AFP.
“But it is not a disaster due to natural causes,” she said, recalling words by the president Saturday.
“This case should be considered as the mass murder of defenceless people and requires an appropriate response,” President Andris Berzins had said.
Ilze, a flower seller at the cemetery gates, applauded his words: “He is our president and as such he is supposed to defend us.” “The builders must be responsible — how else could such a tragedy happen?” she told AFP.
Latvian police are pursuing three theories of what caused the disaster: building design, construction method and new roof additions.
Liene suggested the weight of a new rooftop garden and playground caused the cave-in: “If you look at photos... everything collapsed inward, not one side or the other. So there must have been too heavy a load.”
“The builders and architects should be held accountable,” she added, while the names of victims scrolled across the coffee shop television screen.
The mall was built in 2011 and was named one of the country’s top three architecture projects that year. The Lithuanian-owned Maxima supermarket chain leased it from owner Homburg Investor.
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