{"id":223764,"date":"2011-11-07T00:30:15","date_gmt":"2011-11-07T00:30:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/new.moldova.org\/2011\/11\/07\/the-death-is-cheerful-in-sapanita-226377-eng\/"},"modified":"2011-11-07T00:30:15","modified_gmt":"2011-11-07T00:30:15","slug":"the-death-is-cheerful-in-sapanita-226377-eng","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.moldova.org\/en\/the-death-is-cheerful-in-sapanita-226377-eng\/","title":{"rendered":"The Death Is Cheerful\u2026 in Sapanita"},"content":{"rendered":"Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

By Diana Ungureanu\/ Chisinau \/ Moldova.ORG\/ — In Maramures, in a village called Sapanita, there is a unique cemetery. It is not a dark one, as we used to see, it is one with a lot of color. <\/p>\n

In 1935, a native of the village Sapanita, Stan Ioan Patras, who was a sculptor, painter and poet, began to make another kind of grave crosses for villagers who passed away. Every cross made by him was colorful, with incrustation of images from the late-life and ironic or funny epitaph.<\/p>\n

After the death of the master Stan Ioan Patras, the successors continued this activity. So, in seventy years, the cemetery gathered about 800 graves. There is not a large cemetery, but it is an uncommon one, it attracts and shock with its variety of crosses’ colors. The style, which is characteristic for the zone where the crosses were made, is very nice and bold. The crosses are wooden, inlaid manually and brightly colored, the color of background being usually blue, “blue of Sapanita”.<\/p>\n

Publicized enough, the cemetery is well-known to foreigners, who come in a large number to visit the cemetery. I think that more impressive are the colors and style of the crosses than the epitaphs, that are written in a dialect of Maramures and which are hard to decipher even for a Romanian.<\/p>\n

It cannot be said that you will laugh a lot reading the epitaphs written on the crosses. Many of them are very sad, those related to youth or children. One thing emerges clearly, that locals believe or want to believe in the afterlife, with a cheerful attitude to death, as it was a deliverance of all difficulties of life – a Dacian philosophy about life and death.<\/p>\n

Whatever faith the locals have or had, it is certainly that they have done something new and unique in the world and it deserves due attention and a little meditation on the human condition and silence hurts nobody.
\nThe distance from Chisinau to Sapanita is 535 km.
\n <\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>In Maramures, in a village called Sapanita, there is a unique cemetery. It is not a dark one, as we used to see, it is one with a lot of color.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":223762,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223764","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-society"],"content_social_share":"Reading Time: <\/span> 2<\/span> minutes<\/span><\/span>

By Diana Ungureanu\/ Chisinau \/ Moldova.ORG\/ — In Maramures, in a village called Sapanita, there is a unique cemetery. It is not a dark one, as we used to see, it is one with a lot of color. <\/p>\n

In 1935, a native of the village Sapanita, Stan Ioan Patras, who was a sculptor, painter and poet, began to make another kind of grave crosses for villagers who passed away. Every cross made by him was colorful, with incrustation of images from the late-life and ironic or funny epitaph.<\/p>\n

After the death of the master Stan Ioan Patras, the successors continued this activity. So, in seventy years, the cemetery gathered about 800 graves. There is not a large cemetery, but it is an uncommon one, it attracts and shock with its variety of crosses’ colors. The style, which is characteristic for the zone where the crosses were made, is very nice and bold. The crosses are wooden, inlaid manually and brightly colored, the color of background being usually blue, “blue of Sapanita”.<\/p>\n

Publicized enough, the cemetery is well-known to foreigners, who come in a large number to visit the cemetery. I think that more impressive are the colors and style of the crosses than the epitaphs, that are written in a dialect of Maramures and which are hard to decipher even for a Romanian.<\/p>\n

It cannot be said that you will laugh a lot reading the epitaphs written on the crosses. Many of them are very sad, those related to youth or children. One thing emerges clearly, that locals believe or want to believe in the afterlife, with a cheerful attitude to death, as it was a deliverance of all difficulties of life – a Dacian philosophy about life and death.<\/p>\n

Whatever faith the locals have or had, it is certainly that they have done something new and unique in the world and it deserves due attention and a little meditation on the human condition and silence hurts nobody.
\nThe distance from Chisinau to Sapanita is 535 km.
\n <\/p>\n\n

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