Unseen Romania

Sapanta - The Merry Cemetery

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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