Almost all of us fear death and that's a natural thing. We instinctively try to prolong our lives when we're in a situation that could endanger us. Although death scares us all, there's a village in the Maramures county, called Sapanta, with a cemetery that tries to convince us that death is not as scary as we think.

The “Merry
Cemetery” (Cimitirul Vesel in Romanian) is a graveyard located in
Sapanta. It's popular for the colorful tombstones with paintings that
describe – with the help of small poems – the persons that are buried
there. Some persons have made connections to the Dacians who saw
death as a moment filled with joy and believed in the immortality of
the soul. The Dacians led their dead relatives on their last road
being happy and having the faith that the future will bring better
things.

The custom
was started by Stan Ioan Patras who created the first tombstone
crosses in 1935. The crosses were – and still are – sculpted in a
simple and original manner with local folkloric motifs and using
primary colors. The poems he wrote on the tombstones were written in
the first person, with different messages and close to the way how
locals spoke.

After one
year, he became much more experienced in his art and created narrower
tombstones, with relief figures painted on them and used colors
obtained from natural pigments. He seemed to have a favorite color, a
variety of blue that was named by experts “Sapanta blue”. The
colors had a special meaning, for example yellow was fertility, black
– death and green was life.

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