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How Elderly People Were Killed in Old Russia and 3 Other Terrifying Traditions

Photo: Vasily Perov’s painting Peasants Returning from a Funeral in Winter, 1880.

Centuries ago, everyday life was filled with rituals, superstitions, and beliefs that seemed perfectly normal to the people who practiced them. Today, some of those customs sound like something straight out of a horror movie.

Leaving the Elderly to Die in the Bathhouse

According to accounts of this pagan tradition, which reportedly survived into the late Middle Ages, elderly people who were already close to death were sometimes taken to a banya, the traditional Russian bathhouse, during winter.

They were washed as if they were already dead, dressed in wet clothing, and left lying on a bench after part of the roof had been opened. The freezing air did the rest. Even a young, healthy person would struggle to survive those conditions for long, let alone someone elderly and seriously ill.

Bathhouses were also sometimes used for temporary winter burials. When the ground outside froze solid, the dirt floor inside the banya could remain soft enough to dig into. The coffin would then be removed in spring and transferred to a cemetery.

“Re-Baking” Babies

If a baby was born prematurely, sick, or with a congenital condition, some communities practiced a ritual known as “re-baking.”

The infant would be placed on a wooden bread peel — the long paddle traditionally used for putting loaves into an oven — and pushed into a warm oven three times.

Sometimes the baby was even wrapped in dough, leaving openings around the nose and mouth.

The idea was that the child had somehow been born “unfinished” and needed to go through the birth process again. The oven symbolically completed what the womb had failed to do.

Did it work? Unsurprisingly, there are accounts of babies dying after the ritual. It is not always possible to determine whether the ritual itself caused the death or whether the child had already been born with a condition it could not survive.

Wrapping Babies in Salt

In some regions, another ritual was performed for similar reasons.

People believed that salt could protect a newborn from evil forces, so the baby’s body was covered in finely ground salt, wrapped tightly in cloth, and left that way for several hours.

A newborn’s extremely delicate skin could be badly damaged by the procedure, sometimes becoming almost one continuous wound.

But according to the belief behind the ritual, the new skin that grew afterward would become a kind of natural “armor,” protecting the child from illness and misfortune later in life.

Blackening Teeth

Russian writer Alexander Radishchev described a woman in his Journey from St. Petersburg to Moscow like this:

“Praskovya Denisovna, his newlywed wife, was fair and rosy. Her teeth were black as coal.”

Blackened teeth became fashionable among some wealthy Russian women, including noblewomen, merchants’ wives, and prosperous peasants.

One explanation was surprisingly practical.

Fashion-conscious women used whitening preparations containing mercury compounds to make their teeth look brighter. Over time, those substances could badly damage the enamel, leaving teeth dark, decayed, and uneven.

So women would deliberately blacken the remaining teeth with charcoal or similar substances to make them all look the same.

In other words, one beauty trend destroyed their teeth — and another beauty trend was invented to hide the damage.

Source: thevoicemag.ru