Mysterious Romania (XIV) Sapanta's Merry Graveyard

Merry Graveyard? Yes, you read it right. There’s no mistake in the text, though the combination of the two words – merry and  graveyard or cemetery – may sound like a bad joke to some people. We generally see death and everything linked to it, a cemetery included, in a solemn, sad way.

Romanians have a saying: “A face haz de necaz.”  Meaning: grin and bear it.

The carved oak wood crosses display  a unique blend of folk art and tradition. Visitors are attracted by the merry colors and especially the moralizing epitaphs on the crosses. The few satirical lines manage to give another aspect to the most unfortunate moment in a man’s existence – death. The originality of this graveyard is the totally opposite  view on death, that is  normally regarded as a sad event.

This is the basic idea, in my opinion, of this oddity – Sapanta’s Merry Graveyard. Sapanta is a village in Maramures county, Romania. It has become a major attraction for tourists after 1990 due to its colorful wooden crosses with the native paintings that represent scenes from the life of the buried persons and even poetry in which those persons are described.

The creator. It all started with the crosses sculpted by a talented peasant, a local artist, Ioan Stan Patras ,born 1908 - died 1977. In 1935, Patras, who had just a minimum of education, sculpted the first epitaph for a boy who drowned in the Tisa river. After writing the  merry epitaph, Patras painted it with egg paint. This blue color came to be known as “albastru de Sapanta”/ Sapanta blue. Since then, for 43 years, the whole cemetery was populated with over 800 such crosses, carved  from oak wood. After Patras's death his work was continued by one of his apprentices who is restoring now the old crosses, while sculpting new ones for the people who leave this world in their community.

Present day status.The cemetery became an open-air museum and a tourist attraction.

Some of the crosses have paintings on both sides. On one side there is a description of the deceased’s life, on the other a description of the reason of his death. Most of the texts have spelling mistakes and many are written in archaic variants of the Romanian language.

Sapanta’s merry graveyard is considered the most important cemetery in Europe and the second in the world, after the Egyptian one in the Kings’Valley.  This distinction was offered to Sapanta’s Cemetery, in 1998 in the USA within the Symposium for Funeral Momuments. At that time the odd cemetery had already been included in the  UNESCO world heritage.

There are historians who consider that Patras inspired himself from the Dacian culture. Dacians view death  as a stage of  evolution in a person’s  existence. Their philosophy was based on the immortality of the soul and the belief that somebody's death was a joyful moment, as that person was getting to a better life.

Two hundred meters away from the cemetery, that unlike most cemeteries, is situated in the centre of the village, tourists can visit the memorial house of its creator. The museum displays both Patras’s life and also traditional costumes specific to Maramures and handicraft: icons, paintings, earthen pots created by Patras along his life.
One of the funniest epitaphs given as example is the one for a mother-in-law. I will try an approximate translation:

This heavy cross covers bellow

my poor, dear mother-in-law.

Had she lived for 3 more days

She’d have been reading these lines.

Beware you walking the path by

Don’t wake her up, I beg you try.

If she enters through my door

She’ll start to criticize me more.

But I’ll surely behave

So she can’t return from grave.

Stay here bellow,

 my dear mother-in-law.

The Merry Graveyard from Sapanta is, according to L’Express, the first, being followed by other cemeteries:  Pere Lachaise in Paris ( France), La Recoleta in Buenos Aires (Argentina), Grave Wood in New York (SUA), or Arlington National Cemetery (USA).

What do you think about this? In my opinion, no matter how funny or merry the epitaphs or colors are, the bitter truth is the same.