Merry Cemetery – a graveyard with no taboos

You don’t talk ill about the dead. The authors of the colourful graves in Romanian Săpânța disregard this rule. With dark humour and incredible directness, they disclose people’s flaws and describe how they died. Welcome to the Merry Cemetery – a graveyard with no taboos, where death is a topic to laugh at.  

Merry Cemetery – one of the most unusual cemeteries in the world

Ioan Toaderu loved horses. 
One more thing he loved very much. 
To sit at a table in a bar. 
Next to someone else’s wife.

That’s a poem on one of 800 graves. The forest of blue wooden crosses is impressive. It’s a cemetery like no other in the world.

The necropolis attracts over 200 000 tourists to Săpânța every year, making it one of the most popular tourist attractions in Romania.

Celebrate life instead of grieving the death

The whole thing started in 1935 when the local artist Stan Ioan Pătraş carved the first wooden cross and decided to add a humorous inscription. He believed that celebrating life was more important than grieving death. 

Some researchers say his inspiration was the Dacian culture and their attitude to death. To me, the scenes from daily life and pictures reflecting their occupation resembled a bit the Jewish cemeteries, where certain symbols disclosed the deceased public function. 

While the Jewish tombstones are more symbolic (you knew someone was a rabbi if their hands joined in supplication on his grave), in the Merry Cemetery things are rather straightforward. The pictures show a farmer next to his tractor, a policeman in a uniform, and an electrician with a wire in his hands and sockets in the back. 

The pictures of the cemetery in Săpânța seem naive and unambiguous, yet there is a dose of symbolism in them. The omnipresent blue also called Săpânţa blue, represented hope and freedom. 

Red was, of course, a sign of passion, green meant life, and yellow – fertility. If you spot a blackbird on one of the crosses, you can be sure that this person died a tragic, or even suspicious, death. 

The Merry Cemetery is full of funny poems, ironically illustrating people»s lives, habits and interpersonal relationships. One is particularly beloved by the visitors: 

Underneath this heavy cross
Lies my mother-in-law poor… 
Try not to wake her up
For if she comes back home
She’ll bite my head off.

The local artist finds a way to laugh almost at everything. But some of the inscriptions are full of anger, like the one of this 3-years-old girl hit by a taxi.

Or a shepherd shot by a Hungarian.

I looked after my sheep 
Bad Hungarian came 
And shot me in the head 
Cut off my head from the body 
And buried me like that 
May he is damned forever.
Only the truth matters

It’s striking how honest some of the inscriptions are. While most of the world doesn’t speak ill of the dead, in Săpânța they don’t beat around the bush.

Pop Grigore is my name 
I loved my tractor the most And drowned my sorrows in the bottle. 
All my life I was miserable and sad 
Because my father left me when I was just a child. 
Maybe this was my fate 
To die young.

And surprisingly, the locals are fine with that. Dumitru Pop, who is now carving the crosses after his master Stan Ioan Pătraş passed away, says that the families want the epitaphs to represent real life. 

While the inscriptions on most cemeteries express the grief and sadness of those left behind, in Săpânța the deceased has the voice. The poems are in the first person and the present tense. According to Peter Kayafas, the author of the book The Merry Cemetery of Săpânța, this gives a feeling that their existence continues, interrupted but not stopped by death. It’s a way to keep them alive. Maybe that’s why their relatives don’t care if the poems mention alcoholism or the miserable life of the deceased. In the end, they were accepted and loved with all their flaws. 

If you are interested in other things to do in Maramures, check out my post about the traditional village of Breb.