Saturday, October 27, 2007

Sapinta, Sapanta - The Merry Cemetery

Sapanta, The Merry Cemetery, Romania

At Sapanta, or Sapinta, past Sighetu Marmetje, you will find the Merry Cemetery where a carver years ago began carving wooden markers with the customary little roof shapes above. He showed in the carving and in words how the person died, or his or her place in the community. See Sapanta at http://www.puzzleworld.org/Maramures/sapin01.



Carved are lives at beginning, or middle, or end.

Here there is a butcher's life carved on the marker, with the sheep and calf, a housewife, people doing the ordinary things of life.

Death by Firing Squad, Sapinta, Merry Cemetery, Romania

Thenlook more closely, as in this picture, and there is someone being shot by a firing squad.

Elsewhere is a child about to be hit by a car. See Paul's Blog at http://neptunerising.blogspot.com/2006/11/romania-bucharest-transylvania-and.html.  There is a fine closeup of one of the wooden markers, the child and the car. How she died is part of her life for the rest of us and any who see, forever.

On another marker, someone translated for me the last words of one fallen body:  The person now dead had just been trying to get home across the river, when some soldiers came along and shot him, for no reason. Another marker is of the wife, mourning.

Sapinta is in the north east, past Sighetu Marmetje. The original carver died in 1977, and the work is being carried on.

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