2. Merry Cemetery is a cemetery in Săpânța, Maramureș
County, famous for the crosses of brightly colored
graves and naive paintings representing scenes from
the life and occupation of the buried. On some crosses
there are even verses in which the respective persons
are mentioned, often with humorous nuances.
3. The novelty of this cemetery is the differentiation from popular
culture, which considers death as a sad event. It was
hypothesized that Stan Ioan Pătraș would have been inspired
by the Dacian culture, about which, since Ovid Densușianu, it is
taught that they considered death as a happy event. The first
epitaph dates from 1935, and since the 1960s, the entire
cemetery has been populated with about 800 such crosses,
carved from oak wood, becoming an open-air museum of a
unique nature and a tourist attraction.
4. Since 2009, the cemetery is the objective of the annual
festival "The Long Road to the Merry Cemetery". [1]
Some crosses are painted on both sides. On one side is
placed a description of the life of the buried, and on the
other - a description of the reason for death. Most crosses
are written with spelling mistakes and archaic spellings.
On the cross of Stan Ioan Pătraș, the founder of the
cemetery, the following are written:
5. From a young child
I was Stan Ion Patras
Listen to me [sic] folks
What I will say is not a lie
How many days have I lived
I didn't want anything bad
But as good as I could
Anyone asked me [sic]
Woe is my world
That I hardly lived in it
On another stone it says:
Under this heavy cross
My poor mother-in-law is lying
He was alive for three days
I and she were lying.
You who pass by here
Try not to wake her up
That home if he comes
