In most cultures death is solemn. In Săpânța, a village at the far northwestern edge of Maramureș, a local craftsman named Stan Ioan Pătraș decided it should be cheerful. Starting in the 1930s, he began carving and painting the crosses in the village cemetery with vivid portraits of the dead — and then adding verses in the first person describing how they lived, how they died, and occasionally what they thought of their neighbours.
The results are irresistibly human. A farmer is shown plowing his field; beneath him a verse notes he liked his wine too much. A woman is shown at her loom; the verse says she was always nagging her husband. A young man killed in a car accident has a cross showing the car, with a verse from the perspective of the deceased expressing some pointed opinions about his driver. Death, here, gets treated with the same frankness that Maramureș people bring to everything else.
There are now over eight hundred painted crosses in the cemetery, and the tradition has been carried on by Pătraș's apprentices since his death in 1977. The colours are extraordinary against a Romanian sky — cobalt blue, sunflower yellow, grass green. The cemetery is fully open and unfenced; visitors wander freely. The village also has a small workshop where crosses are still being made.