An old souvenir rule of thumb says: the more unique the place, the more unique the local souvenir. The small wooden cross from the village of Sâpânta, which you can only buy there in Romania, confirms this rule. This brightly colored cross is a miniature funerary stele depicting a man with a sheep, beneath a verse saying how pleased he was in his life that the sheep gave him food.
Sâpânta is located in northern Romania, in Maramures, one of the most rural regions in this already very rural country. However, the place has a spectacular cemetery that is one of the top sights in Romania. It's called the "merry graveyard" because the tomb decorations there consist of brightly painted, blue steles on which naively painted portraits of the deceased are seen, along with a verse about their life.
The steles tell very special stories in which nothing is embellished or concealed - bad habits are just as much a topic as weaknesses of character. For example, you can see a portrait of a man with horses. Below it is written: "Ioan Toaderu loved horses." The continuation on the back of the cross, however, is piquant. There you can see Ioan Toaderu sitting in a bar with many women. Underneath it reads: "But I also really loved sitting in a bar with someone else's wife."
Another stele, belonging to a three-year-old girl who was run over on the street, reads: “Burn in hell you damn taxi that came from Sibiu. Romania is big, why did you have to stop here and kill me on my doorstep?”
Among the best known is the grave of a woman who must have been a wicked mother-in-law. Passers-by are asked not to wake her: “Because when she comes home she will rip my head off. Please stay here, my dear mother-in-law.”
In principle, the grave inscriptions are messages from the dead to the living. They are written in the first person and mostly in the simple past tense. This gives the feeling that the life of the deceased was only briefly interrupted and not over yet. This corresponds to the belief of the Romanian Orthodox Church, which does not see death as a tragedy but as a transition to another life.
The inventor of these wooden crosses in Sâpânta was the woodcarver Stan Ioan Pătraș (1908–1977). The design of his steles has evolved over many years. First he began painting crosses with paint to better protect them from rain and frost.
From 1934 he wrote the first verses, inspired by conversations with the mourners. During this period it was common to attach photographs printed on porcelain to gravestones. This was enormously expensive, and it may be that Pătraş wanted to save the mourners costs with his painted portraits.
In the meantime, however, it costs many hundreds of euros to have such a cross made. In 40 years, Pătraş designed around 700 crosses. It was only shortly before his death that a French journalist made the cemetery world-famous.
His former apprentice Dumitru Pop continues the work. In an interview with the New York Times, he said that no one had ever complained about his work. It's the life of the deceased that you can't keep secret in such a small village anyway. The bigger problem: Everyone in the village actually has the same life, but would all wish for different verses.
A small souvenir cross costs 30 lei as a souvenir on site, which is the equivalent of around six euros. You can get it in the shop directly opposite the ticket office at the entrance to the cemetery. Yes, there is a fee to enter the Gottesacker, but that's okay, this is an attraction after all.
