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What were soul cakes and how were they connected to prayers for the dead?

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Anastasis (Christ ascending from hell), apse fresco, c. 1320; in the Church of the Holy Saviour at the Monastery of the Chora (now the Kariye Museum), Istanbul. — purgatory *Anastasis* (Christ ascending from hell), apse fresco, c. 1320; in the Church of the Holy Saviour at the Monastery of the Chora (now the Kariye Museum), Istanbul.

Soul cakes were traditional round or oval sweet buns associated with the observance of All Souls' Day, a liturgical feast established in the 11th century to encourage devotion to the souls in purgatory.

These cakes were offered to individuals in exchange for their prayers for the dead. This practice was rooted in the belief that the living could perform acts of intercession—or "suffrages"—to help lessen the severity of the temporal punishment that souls in purgatory were undergoing. By offering these cakes, the living sought to aid the departed in their process of purification after death. The custom was part of a broader range of folk traditions that emerged alongside the development of purgatory as a central concept in Western Christian theology.1