Merry Cemetery

The Merry Cemetery (Romanian: Cimitirul Vesel pronounced [t͡ʃimiˈtirul ˈvesel]) is a cemetery in the village of Săpânța, Maramureş county, Romania. It is famous for its colourful tombstones with naïve paintings describing, in an original and poetic manner, the people who are buried there as well as scenes from their lives. The Merry Cemetery became 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 presumably vouched for the immortality of the soul and the belief that death was a moment filled with joy and anticipation for a better life (see also Zalmoxianism).

In 2017 there was published the first book, which is a collection of the epithaps from the Merry Cemetery, by young author Roxana Mihalcea, who gathered the epithaps in the volume Crucile de la Săpânța The indisputable merit of this work is the gathering of several hundred legible epitaphs from the Sapanta crosses. The author's texts enrich each chapter with in-depth commentary, accessible to the contemporary public, especially to the urban, less familiar with the rites of rural life in the past. So, the funerary lyrics from Sapanta get a sense beyond the disappeared world it evokes, giving readers valuable information about the everyday life of the...