Photos

This picture have been taken in the so-called "Merry Cemetery" in Sapanta, a small village of Maramures region, close to the border between Romania and Ukraina. The merry cemetery of Sapanta has been, for more than fifty years, the creation of the sculptor Stan Patras, who died in 1977. In the beginning he sculpted about ten crosses a year. The method of work has been preserved unaltered to this day by his apprentices.
The likeness of the deceased, carved and coloured, usually catches one of his lifetime's characteristic attitudes, surrounded by floral arabesques, above an epitaph written in the first person, as if uttered by the deceased himself for he who may read it.
Today's Sapanta inhabitants like to say that this joyful attitude toward death is an heritage of their Dacian ancestors, that, unlike roman conquerors, thought that life continued after death in heavenly grasslands...