Merry Cemetery (Cimitirul Vesel)

The Merry Cemetery is one of Romania's most extraordinary sights: a village graveyard where every grave is marked by a tall oak cross painted vivid blue and carved with a naive painting and a witty, often darkly funny epitaph describing how the person lived — or died.

A taxi driver's cross shows him behind the wheel. A nagging mother-in-law's cross records what her son-in-law thought of her. A man killed by a car is shown at the moment of impact. The inscriptions are written in the first person, in rhyming Romanian verse: "Here lies my mother-in-law / If she had lived a little longer / I would be lying here / and she would be reading this."

There are around 800 such crosses in the cemetery, each one unique. The tradition was started in 1935 by local woodcarver Stan Ioan Pătraș, and has continued without interruption ever since. The quality of the carving and painting is genuinely impressive — these are not tourist trinkets but a living folk art tradition in a working cemetery, where new crosses are still being added for newly-buried villagers.

Small admission fee. Open daily.

things to do sight folk art
A story
Stan Ioan Pătraș began carving the first decorated crosses in 1935, working entirely alone for decades. When he died in 1977, his apprentice Dumitru Pop Tincu took over the workshop and the tradition — carving Pătraș's own cross, which stands in the cemetery alongside the hundreds of others he made. Pop continued the work until his own death in 2013; his son carries it on today.