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Despite their growing incidence over the last decades, national days of mourning received curiously sparse attention throughout social sciences and death studies. This study investigates the 327 national mournings observed across European countries between 1989 and 2017 in terms of their national variance, temporal dynamics, typology of events that led to their declaration, and victimology. Drawing on a Durkheimian-inspired conceptualization of national mournings as political rites of solidarity and reconciliation, this article finds empirical support for the thesis that the frequency with which European countries declare national mourning is a negative function of a society's level of social integration.

National days of mourning are state-sponsored rituals of collective grief enacted in the public sphere by political authorities to symbolically mark and emotionally cope with a socially significant loss. These officially declared and ceremonially performed state rituals of communion in grief provide privileged epistemic opportunities for unravelling the politics of grievability underpinning a society's willingness to mourn its dead. This paper focuses on comparing and contrasting two case studies – the Colectiv nightclub fire and the flu epidemics – in order to grasp the politics of national mourning in the Romanian post-communist context. After identifying the criteria of grievability underlying the declaration of national mourning in cases of mass death as consisting in a 'chronotopic togetherness' in death that is characterised by an 'instantaneity of emotional shock,' the paper argues for enlarging these criteria of grievability so as to include the victims of socially invisible traumas inflicted by structural violence, such as those killed in epidemics and car road accidents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]