Read the jokes the dead tell from their graves

The Merry Cemetery in Săpânța is a village churchyard of about eight hundred carved oak crosses, painted blue, each with a picture and a verse written in the voice of the person buried under it. Not the solemn version. The true one, mother-in-law included.

Săpânța is at the top of the country in Maramureș, about four hours north of Cluj by road.

The verses are in Romanian, so a guide reads them out one cross at a time, and the group moves through the rows the way people move through a gallery, stopping at the pictures first.

A local woodcarver, Stan Ioan Pătraș, carved the first epitaph in 1935. His own cross speaks in the first person too, and begins: I was Stan Ioan Pătraș. He died in 1977, and his apprentice, Dumitru Pop-Tincu, carried the work on until 2022.