Sapanta Merry Cemetery goes on TV5 Monde
The Merry Cemetery in Sapanta, Maramues County, famous for it flaring crosses engraved with unusual epitaphs is promoted by a TV5 Monde documentary due on Sunday. Entitled “Roumanie, les recits d’un cimetiere/ Romania, stories of a cemetery”, the documentary, a 2013 Germany-France co-production, presents the life of Sapanta locals who seem to have a special relation with death.
The film starts by presenting Maramures region, northern Romania, “the region of wooden carved churches and handicrafts”. Then, the documentary goes on with introducing some locals, including an 85-year-old woman who serenely waits for her end. The old lady says she doesn’t know how long she will live, but surely knows that she is “ready.” “Locals in Sapanta, an orthodox Romanian village, have a special bond with death. Families are saving money so that they can order a wooden cross by artist Dumitru Pop. The sculpture has to be richly adorned in order to picture the life of the dead person”, the documentary describes.
Directed by Vincent Froehly, the documentary, also running on www.tv5mondeplus.com, invites tourists to visit “the merry cemetery” and to admire “this work of art”.
Famous for its colorful tombstones with naive paintings describing, in an original and poetic manner, the persons that are buried there as well as scenes from their lives, the Merry Cemetery became an open-air museum and a national tourist attraction.
The cemetery’s origins are linked with the name of Ioan Pătraș Stan, a local artist who sculpted the first tombstone crosses. In 1935, Pătraș carved the first epitaph and, as of the 1960s, more than 800 of such oak wood crosses came into sight. Ever since Pătraș died in 1977, his apprentice, artist Dumitru Pop Tincu, has been carrying on his work. The epitaphs are either funny, free and easy, or universal and profound.
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