Maciej Boryna’s funeral and burial

Maciej Boryna’s funeral and burial give public form to the loss of the household’s master and one of the village’s most powerful farmers. The ceremony moves from the quiet practical work of preparing his coffin to a crowded procession and a burial marked by prayer, collective lament, and judgment. Its rituals gather the community around Boryna, but they do not erase the conflicts that surround his family: grief for the dead man coexists with suspicion of Jagna and anxiety about what his absence means at home.

From the house to the church

Early one afternoon, The Parish Priest and the organist arrived with members of the confraternity carrying candles. A small group gathered as Boryna was placed in his coffin. Mateusz fastened it with wooden pegs; the priest recited prayers and sprinkled it with holy water. They then carried the coffin to the church while singing quietly, accompanied by Ambrozy’s funeral bell. The plainness of this first passage—neighbors, prayers, pegs, and a bell—sets the material handling of death within the village’s shared religious practice.

The following morning, the priest celebrated a votive funeral Mass with the parish priest from Słupsk and the organist. Boryna lay on a high catafalque surrounded by rows of burning white lights, while the village knelt around him. The Latin hymns do not hold to one emotional register: their sound rises into mournful wailing, sinks into sorrowful moaning, and then lifts toward an ethereal, heavenly register. People weep, sigh, and listen through the hour-long service. The liturgy makes grief collective without making it uniform; each person kneels among the others, yet the lament reaches each listener in a different way.

Procession and burial

When the Mass ended, Ambrozy removed the candles from the catafalque and distributed them among the people. The priest continued singing beside the coffin, swung a burning censer over it, sprinkled it with holy water, and led the procession out behind the cross. Bells and funeral song accompanied the walk through the village. The crowd moved together, but the mourners seemed enclosed in separate losses, as if they were walking across an empty land. Through the poplars, they could see the graves of earlier generations; the procession thus places Boryna’s death within a long family and village history.

Near the cemetery, The Squire caught up with the procession. He climbed down from his carriage and walked beside the coffin through the crush on the narrow road edged by birches and wheat. His presence brings a representative of the manor into the villagers’ rite of mourning, although the scene does not describe this as a reconciliation. After the priests had finished singing, Dominikowa, leaning on Jagna and already hunched and half blind, began a hymn asking for shelter. The people joined her fervently, and the singing carried them into the cemetery. Their shared prayer offers a moment of common confidence before they gather around the grave.

At the graveside, the priest addressed the assembled people and called them to accord and justice, urging restraint in sin in the face of death and divine judgment. Earlier, he had spoken of Boryna as having fallen on behalf of them all. These words give the funeral a civic as well as religious dimension: the dead farmer is presented as bound to the community, and the living are asked to consider their conduct toward one another. Yet the sermon’s appeal does not settle the disputes within the village; it makes the need for justice audible at the very moment when the mourners must part with Boryna.

Grief, judgment, and the household left behind

When the coffin was lowered and sand began thudding onto its lid, the assembly’s grief broke into cries and sobbing. Józka Borynianka clung to her father’s coffin and wailed. Hanka and other relatives wept alongside villagers who were not close kin; Jagna, too, mourned bitterly. That grief drew an immediate, hostile comment from someone nearby, who recalled the dance she had led Boryna, while another speaker suggested she was crying to avoid being expelled from the household. The burial therefore exposes a sharp divide between the feeling expressed in public and the moral story others impose on it. Jagna’s mourning is visible, but visibility does not protect her from suspicion.

The funeral’s effects are also registered in the cottage. After the people returned from accompanying the body, the house seemed empty and terribly quiet, and Józka Borynianka burst into tears. Hanka observed that although Boryna had seemed like a corpse for so long, his presence had still made the house feel as if it had a master. The remark distinguishes bodily life from household authority: his prolonged incapacity had not removed his symbolic place in the home, but his death makes that absence newly palpable. Even the family’s mourning unfolds amid work and uncertainty. Hanka has worried that Antek has not returned when expected and must help heap hay and clover as rain comes down. The funeral cannot suspend the demands of the farm or resolve the anxieties left by Boryna’s death.

Narrative significance

The funeral’s sequence—from the coffin’s practical preparation, through the church service and public procession, to the final fall of sand—turns private bereavement into a village-wide event. Its candles, bells, incense, hymns, and shared prayers establish a ritual language for loss; the crowded walk and the responses at the grave reveal how unevenly that loss is experienced. The Squire’s place beside the coffin and the priest’s appeal for justice widen the ceremony beyond kinship, connecting Boryna’s death to the community’s social order without claiming that old divisions have disappeared.

The burial also marks a change that is both intimate and structural. Boryna’s house has lost the master whose presence gave it authority, while the village has lost a figure whom the priest describes as having died on its behalf. But the ceremony closes neither the family’s uncertainty nor the villagers’ moral disputes. Its final movement into the earth confirms the death; the cries, accusations, and newly felt silence show that what follows remains unsettled.