Tickets for Merry Cemetery & Stan Ioan Pătraș Memorial House

At the Stan Ioan Pătraș memorial house, see life (and death) through the eyes of the man who sculpted and carved a series of colorful, bizarre tombstones for people he had never even met. Then visit the Merry Cemetery itself.

Stan Ioan Pătraş was born in 1908 in Săpânța to a family of wood sculptors. He turned his hand to carving poems onto tombstones, but then went on to painting figures on them in colors made from natural pigments. Explore his house and see his art in progress.

In the Merry Cemetery itself, get up close to each individual, thought-provoking tombstone. See how the main color blue was used against other symbolic colors. Green for life, yellow for fertility, red for passion and black for... well, death.

Before he died in 1977, Pătraş made almost 700 tombstones in the two graveyards in Săpânța, later to be called the Merry Cemetery. Find out who died from drinking, who got hit by a taxi cab, and who was the village flirt - all by studying the images he created.

It's one of those rare times you might find yourself grinning in a graveyard.