Sapanta
Sapanta is the village where the Merry Cemetery is . It’s about as touristy as it gets in Maramures and you might even see a coach full of package holiday tourist here, but it’s worth the trip to explore the cemetery. The Merry Cemetery is famous for its colourful painted tombstones describing, in an original and poetic manner, the persons that are buried there as well as scenes from their lives. The Merry Cemetery is an open-air museum and a national tourist attraction. The unusual feature of this cemetery is that it diverges from the prevalent belief, culturally shared within European societies – a belief that views death as something indelibly solemn. Connections with the local Dacian culture have been made, a culture whose philosophical tenets vouched for the immortality of the soul and the belief that death was a moment filled with joy and anticipation for a better life . This is true at funleras in Breb that are seen as celebrations of the persons life and normaly a good party. What I want to do is… what did the girl in the pic at the top of the page die of? Too much of a good time? All is reveiled in a book we have that you can read the night before we go to Sapanta and the Merry Cemitery so you can look our for teh interesting stories. It’s a great treasure hunt type game with kids. Choose your favourat tomb and who ever finds their first wins!
It was all started by a certain Stan Ioan Pătraş who was born in 1908 into a family that had a long tradition in wood sculpting. From an early age he was attracted to sculpture, painting and poetry and at the age of 14 he started to sculpt oak crosses. In 1935 Stan Ioan Pătraş, started to carve onto the tombstones small poems written in the first person: ironic poems, with grammatical errors very close to the archaic language the locals spoke. At the beginning he carved only 10 tombstones a year using oak as the base wood.
By 1936 he had already perfected his style: the tombstones became narrower, he started to paint relief figures on them using bright coloures obtained from natural pigments. The main colour he used was blue, now known as the Săpânţa blue. Pătraş made almost 700 tombstones in the two graveyards in Săpânţa, now known as the Merry Cemetery. He died in 1977, leaving his house to a disciple, Dumitru Pop, who chose to live in his master’s house who later turned it into a museum.
Once you have read all the gory stories of how people died and the funny stories as well. There are a good selection of souvenir shops here that sell traditional crafts but we recommend, if you don’t mind to buy goods from Breb, direct from the locals. Hard currency is scarce in Breb and so any money the locals can earn to buy the few things they need on market day that they cannot make them selves goes a long way. After the Merry Cemetery you can visit the tallest wooden structure in Europe. A new monastery that is being built a few miles away. It’s a great place to relax and let the kids charge around playing hide and seek in the huge wooden structures.
