Death a laughing matter at Romanian cemetery

SAPANTA, Romania (Reuters) - Visitors stroll past rows of graves, pointing at epitaphs, reading them out loud and laughing unashamedly.


But not even a tearful family laying flowers on a fresh grave takes offence because in the Merry Cemetery of Sapanta, tucked in a remote corner of northern Romania, life and death are celebrated equally.


"Come you all, I will give you plum brandy, drink from this glass to forget your sorrows ... instead of one, you will see double. When I lived I made strong brandy, all this I left at age 54," reads the epitaph on a cross showing a deceased woman next to her distillery.


Hundreds of brilliantly decorated wooden crosses have marked the graves of villagers in Sapanta since a local wood carver started the tradition in the 1930s.


Stan Ion Patras, who died in 1977, carved and painted his first bright blue cross in 1935, with a likeness of the deceased on top and a poem below.


Inspired by stories told about the dead person during the traditional three-day feast before the funeral, Patras would compose rhymes describing the person's life or death.


"When I was a young man in the village, I loved to dance to the sound of the fiddle. But then I got married and my wife wouldn't let me," reads one poem.


The crosses apparently eased relatives' suffering and Patras got more and more orders, filling the cemetery around the village's Orthodox church with what is now the cultural legacy of this community of 5,000 people.


A farmer tends his sheep, a barber cuts hair, an old woman weaves and a young mother feeds her family. A vet and a teacher lie next to a lumberjack and a hunter.


TOURISTS FLOCKING


Since the cemetery was discovered by tourists in the 1970s, visitors from around the world have come to Romania's remote Maramures region near the border with Ukraine to see it.


"Cemeteries used to terrify me when I was a child," said Alexa Varriano, a visitor from New York. "But not this one. This is beautiful."


Her friend, Andrea Gissing from Seattle agreed: "It's more a celebration of life than mourning."


When Patras died his pupils carried on his work and today Dumitru Pop, the only person still making the crosses, gets orders from around the world. A new cross takes two weeks to make and costs up to 10 million lei.


"Since the collapse of communism in 1989 more and more tourists come every year. People in the village are very proud that strangers come and read what is written on their parents' graves," Pop said.


Buses drop tourists in front of the cemetery -- declared a cultural heritage monument by Romania -- and a small trinkets market has appeared at the gate, to Pop's disapproval.


"The things they sell are not hand-made, young people now work with machines. I want to find an apprentice who respects tradition," he said, seated in Patras's home, now a museum.


The walls of the two-roomed house are covered with Patras's work which portrays both religion and Romania's communist past -- a carved wood panel showing dictator Nicolae Ceausescu hangs next to a nativity scene.


TRUTH MUST BE TOLD


Pop's next mission is to create a museum to display more than 100 old crosses he has stored over the years, many made by Patras. In Orthodox tradition, graves are often reused by relatives and crosses are replaced to mark the latest death.


Pop says the most important element of a good cross is the truth, that a person's life must be shown honestly.


"If I see someone drinking all day long, I will say it on his cross. If I make a mistake people will judge me, not the dead person," he said.


Some crosses are shockingly candid. A man is shown with a cigarette in his mouth, holding a bottle of the local plum brandy "tuica" with death, a black skeleton, at his feet.


His epitaph reads: "Tuica is pure venom, it brings tears and pain and it brought death at my feet. Whoever likes tuica will go like me, because I loved tuica I died with it in my hand."


Another shows graphically how a local shepherd was killed by a "bad Hungarian" who first pointed a rifle at the victim and then beheaded him.


And a two-year-old girl killed in a road accident is shown standing by her house as a car drives towards her: "Accursed be that taxi from Sibiu, in such a big country it had to come to our house to strike me down."


But most crosses show snippets of people's everyday chores and pleasures and together create a colourful picture of village life.


"We had heard about this place and we came to visit," said Maria Leonti, an elderly visitor from a nearby village. "Now I wish I could be buried here."