The story of Merry Cemetery

Most cemeteries ask you to lower your voice. This one may make you smile. The oak crosses of Săpânța are painted in bright colours, with naive pictures of the people buried beneath them and scenes from their lives and work.

Many carry verses that remember them, often with humour, sometimes poking gentle fun at the dead, or at family life; one man even wrote an epitaph for his mother-in-law. It all began in 1935. At the suggestion of the Greek-Catholic priest Grigore Rițiu, a teacher of Romanian and Latin, the local craftsman Stan Ioan Pătraș made the upright part of the crosses a little wider, leaving room for an epitaph, and carved the first one. From the 1960s the whole cemetery filled with around 800 such crosses.

After Pătraș died in 1977, his apprentice Dumitru Pop-Tincu carried on the custom. Some crosses are painted on both sides: one side describes the life of the person, the other the cause of death. Look closely, and you will spot spelling mistakes and archaic forms of writing.