On the edge of Maramures, Romania’s most exquisite and typical region, close to the border with Ukraine, lies a small cemetery known as “joyful”. It is called hoz, anachronistic as it may be.
Indeed, as you pass through the gate, you are assaulted by an explosion of color, a sort of flower meadow of 800 rectangular painted wooden steles, all identical and different, crowned with a two- or three-pointed cross and topped with a small roof. And that’s what it’s all about, we think. “Joyful” because it is bright, colorful and inviting. But to stop there would be to miss the point.
Săpânța Cemetery is joyful because it speaks of the living, not the dead. It’s a storyteller, comical, banal, sad, mysterious, tragic, hilarious. Stories of life.
It all began in 1935 when a local craftsman by the name of Stan Loan Patras carved the first epitaph on abrightly decorated oak cross about the life of the deceased. Nothing could be more normal for an inhabitant of this region, where wood is a symbol of perennity and eternity. In Săpânța, as in almost all Carpathian regions, the forest has been the foundation of economic activity, and the inhabitants have always used wood in rural architecture, carving it with a wide variety of traditional geometric or floral motifs.
In fact, by recounting life after death on the stele of the deceased, it revived the tradition of the Romans who occupied these lands. The Romans, when announcing the death of someone, did not say that he or she had died, but rather announced it with the word VIXIT: “He lived”.
But Stan Patras decided to pay tribute to the living in his own way. Also a painter, poet and somewhat facetious, he succeeded in reconciling traditions and his own expertise, to give birth to this unique cemetery.
In his particular style of naive art, he set a kind of standard. All the steles and crosses are painted blue, in a particular shade now known as “Săpânța blue”.
Each stele is engraved with an epitaph written in short verses like a popular ballad. These verses are simple and spontaneous, written in the Maramures dialect, but they are witty and sum up the essential life of the person lying under the cross. Placed end to end, these epitaphs constitute a veritable chronicle of the lives of the people of this locality, with their preoccupations, thoughts, feelings, skills or dramas. Epitaphs can even be moralistic, praising or reprimanding, speaking of virtues or vices, of heroic zeal and even of cowardice or quarrelsome moods. In all cases, it is unique.
Beneath this heavy stone
Lies my poor mother-in-law
Three more days she would have lived
My epitaph she would have read.
You who pass by
Please don’t wake her up;
For if she came home right away
She’d yell at me as usual.
I’m doing my best
To keep her in this place.
Beneath the cross, the person in question is painted in bright colors, at an important moment in his or her life, often accompanied by elements of the world in which he or she lived. These drawings sometimes blend the real with the fantastic, depicting people in the motion of their lives; working in a workshop, going to school, singing or dancing, cooking, going to war…
It’s said that cemeteries are libraries, but in most cases, these libraries are closed to us forever, because the stories of these ended lives, have already been forgotten. In Săpânța, the library is always open and, from this cheerful and colorful setting, rises like an imperceptible rumor. We seem to hear cows, sheep, dogs and birds accompanying the noise of the woodcarver, the bus driver, the wool spinner and the pots on the stove. This cemetery is alive with the babble of epitaphs and painted representations.
Stan Patras dedicated his life to this work, and his apprentice, Dumitru Pop, took over so that the tradition lives on.
One does indeed leave this place “happy”, for here the deceased have not disappeared. They remain the people they were when they were alive, with their qualities and faults, their daily lives, their work, their ideas, their desires and their fears. They remain human beings who include us in the fabric of history and make us eternal.
Text by Claudia Meyer and photos by Claudia and Régis Meyer
