In Slavic tradition, the festival commemorating the dead with offerings is called Dziady.
Dziady refers both to ancestral spirits and to the pre-Christian rites held to welcome them. The central idea was communion between the living and the dead: ancestors were believed to return temporarily to places connected with their former lives, where families honored them with food, drink, prayers, fires, and ritual observances.
The timing varied by region. Spring Dziady was commonly associated with early May, while autumn observances occurred around the turn of October and November. Christian traditions later absorbed or displaced some of these customs through observances such as All Souls’ Day, Radonitsa, and related memorial festivals.
A common mix-up is treating Dziady as only a modern Polish literary term because Adam Mickiewicz used it as the title of a famous dramatic poem. In folklore, however, the word has a much broader East and West Slavic meaning and remains associated with grave visits and symbolic meals in parts of Belarus, Ukraine, Russia, and eastern Poland.