Cemetery Vesel Transilvania

The Merry Cemetery is a cemetery in the town of Săpânţa, Maramureş County, famous for the crosses of the colorful tombs and naive paintings representing scenes from the life and occupation of the inhabited people. On some crosses there are even verses in which the persons are mentioned, often with humorous nuances.

The novelty of this cemetery is the differentiation from folk culture, which considers death as a sad event. It was hypothesized that Stan Ioan Patras would have been inspired by the Dacian culture, of which, from Ovid Densusanu, they are taught that they considered death as a merry event. The first epitaph dates back to 1935, and since the 1960s, the entire cemetery has been inhabited by about 800 such crosses, carved from oak wood, becoming an open-air museum of unique nature and a tourist attraction.

Since 2009, the cemetery is the goal of the annual festival "The Long Road to the Merry Cemetery". [1]

Some crosses are painted on both sides. On one side is a description of the buried life, and on the other - a description of the cause of death. Most crosses are written with spelling mistakes and archaic scripts.

On the cross of Stan Ioan Patras, the founder of the cemetery, are written the following:

With a young baby
I was Stan Ion Patras
Let me listen to [people] good people
What I'm gonna say is not lies

How many days have lived
I did not want bad hits
But how well I could
No matter what is required

You're poor in my world
That I hardly lived in it

On another stone, write:

Under this heavy cross
My poor mother-in-law
Three days to live
I was lying with her.
You are walking here
Try not to wake her up
That at home if he comes
I have been with my mouth
Yeah, so I was wearing it
That he did not back up
Stay here, my darling