Dziady (wandering beggars)

In some areas, dziady also played an important role in funeral rituals – they were hired to "guard" the corpse of the deceased or invited to a special kind of wake (the so-called "dziad's dinner").

He brought news from closer and further afield, told about sacred places, about life in other parts of the world, and about various unusual events (e.g. apparitions, wars, cataclysms, murders, etc.).

[2] In urban and modern communities dziady were very often treated as fraudsters who, under the "cloak of misery", were looking for an easy income, in various, often sophisticated ways, using human naivety.

In addition, the socialist system introduced in Poland assumed a planned liquidation of the "begging procedure", which significantly hindered the lives of the last representatives of this profession.

Already in the old Polish period, the first satirical dialogues depicting the environment of dziad in a parodistic way appeared (Peregrynacja dziadowska, Tragedia żebracza).