7. Merry Cementery - Romania

In Săpânța there is one place that has been made famous all over Europe, attracting tourists to this inconspicuous village. The place is a Merry Cementery(Cimitirul Vesel). It is hard not to be surprised at the name of these kind of place. Religious traditions demand respect, sadness and mourning, but the Săpanța cemetery contradicts these rules, as if to say that beyond death there is something more, and people who have left the world are now in a better world and do not expect their loved ones. This is of course a kind of irony, because the cemetery was created by the hand of living people and it was they who gave it such a character. Specifically, it was a local artist - Ioan Stan Patraş, who in 1935 carved the first tombstone, and because the way the residents liked it, the tradition is cultivated to this day. The cheerful cemetery impresses with a riot of colors, with a vast majority of blue. There are no traditional stone monuments here, but only crates filled with earth and flowers. Instead of stone tablets with raw inscriptions or dates, there are beautiful wooden crosses, finished with a roof with carved edges. Crosses are fabulously colorful, decorated with floral motifs, rosettes, flowers or animal symbols, carved and painted in intense colors. The most important, however, is the board itself, placed under the cross. It does not contain dry data, but a picture, an illustration, a peculiar portrait of the deceased's life. The pictures depict people on motorcycles, at workshops, dancing, playing, caring for children or performing ordinary everyday activities. Some boards are portraits in traditional costumes. Each such picture from the life of the deceased is completed with a funny poem, referring to his everyday life. All this is done in a typical folk style, slightly caricatural, simple and disproportionate, but fabulously colorful.

The Merry Cemetery in Săpânța is important for the village. It is not only a tourist attraction that attracts many visitors, but is also a kind of epitaph for death. Colorful wooden monuments, funny and interesting, make death no longer so scary, which is of great importance in a society where the young are like a medicine. There is another advantage of this way of saying goodbye to the deceased. It is primarily a kind of chronicle of the local society. Review of preferences, lifestyle, its length. You can find out here who liked to drink, light up, who died in an accident or in a war, and who deserved to be especially well for the village. In the future, when there are no more living witnesses, the tombstones will certainly allow them to live on.

grave of the creator of the cemetery