Character Studies

Image: Wikimedia Commons

In contrast to the usual lugubrious tombstones, the “merry cemetery” in Săpânța, Romania, fills hundreds of colorful markers with darkly humorous biographies of the town’s residents:

Here I rest

Pop Grigore is my name

My tractor was my joy

Drowned my sorrow in my wine

I lived a troubled life

For my father left me young

Such my fate was

That I should leave life

Death, you took me early

I was only 33.

Here I appear as well

On my father-in-law’s cross

Pop Grigore is my name

And I want to tell you all

That I learned in school

Finished high school

I was an accountant

And helped the state

The cuckoo sang my song

To die in Sighetu

And I left this life when I

Was 35 years old.

One more thing I loved very much,

To sit at a table in a bar

Next to someone else’s wife.

Death with ugly name

Swiftly you took me away

You did not feel sorry for me

I must see my girls

And son get married

Build them beautiful house

And give them good advice

On how to live in this world

Marie, my wife

You remained as a host

To be their mom and dad

Marry them well

And raise Irina with care

I cannot join you anymore

For I have stepped on foreign lands

I have nothing more to say

From this other world I am in.

The tradition was started by local carpenter Stan Ioan Pătraș, who in 1935 began carving candid epitaphs for the town’s residents, like a Romanian Edgar Lee Masters. Pătraș died in 1977 and left the business to his apprentice, Dumitru Pop, who says that in 30 years no one has ever complained about the tradition. “It’s the real life of a person. If he likes to drink, you say that; if he likes to work, you say that … There’s no hiding in a small town … The families actually want the true life of the person to be represented on the cross.”

“The people here don’t react to death as though it were a tragedy,” the town’s Orthodox priest told the New York Times. “Death is just a passage to another life.”