The Dark Humor of Sapanta’s Merry Cemetery

Making jokes about dead people is considered disrespectful and traditionally frowned upon, but not in the small Romanian town of Sapanta. The villagers here have learned to embrace death with humor, as evident from the brightly colored tombstones in the local cemetery with epitaphs that often contain short funny rhymes full of wit and poking fun at the dead, telling their life stories or revealing their dirty secrets. One epitaph read: "Underneath this heavy cross Lies my mother in law poor Had she lived three days more I’d be here and she would read You that are passing by Try not to wake her up For she comes back home She’ll bite my head off But I’ll act in the way That she will not return Stay here my dear Mother-in-law." Photo credit The tradition was started by the village carpenter Stan Ioan Patras who was tasked with building the crosses and tombstones out of oak. After attending the traditional three-day-long funerals villagers would gather at the local watering hole to drink and tell stories about the deceased. Patras started turning these stories into brief poems and began carving them onto the oak slabs. He scrawled his first verse on a tomb around 1935. He continued creating them until his death in 1977, and is estimated to have built in excess of 800 limerick-filled tombs. After his death, his apprentice Dumitru Pop has taken over and has been continuing this unique tradition ever since. Nowadays, when someone in the village dies, the family comes to Dumitru Pop and asks him to create a cross, which he hand-carves from oak in the small workshop behind his house. He paints the oak slab blue and decorates it with floral borders and a riot of colors. He then paints an image depicting the person's life and composes a poem. Pop alone decides what the picture will portray and what the verse will say. His poems often have a touch of dark humor, telling witty stories of infidelities, indiscretions and a fondness for alcohol.