Picture of the Day: Merry Cemetery in Romania

              The Merry Cemetery is a cemetery in the village of Săpânța, Maramureş county,Romania. It is famous for its colourful tombstones with naïve paintings describing, in an original and poetic manner, the persons who 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 Stan Ioan Pătraş, 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.