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Today we have a very important question for you
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What do you guys think about death? Today we're challenging our beliefs about death
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We're in the town of Sapanza in northern Romania. Welcome to the Merry Cemetery guys
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This might be the happiest cemetery in the world. Well, sort of. We'll explain it. explain
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Okay, so we'll start with the obvious. So all the tombstones in the Mary Cemetery are painted this bright shade of blue
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It's also known as Sapanza blue, and again, Safanza is the name of the village where the
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Mary Cemetery is located. And also what is much different from the tombstones here is, like, there's engravings of
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how, like, the person lived or died, and a little poem that also, like, ironically states, like
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how they lived or died. It's not like the West where it's all like gray and somber
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and like messages on the tombstones are very like generic about how the person lived
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Here it's like, no, this person was an alcoholic, they cheated on their spouse, they died in a car accident
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they died in an explosion and their face got like ripped off. Much, much different
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Now I'll tell you why. So there's basically two reasons and like how this came about
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and the first one is like in the 1930s, this guy named Yoan Patrash, I think
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He was a very talented like wood carver and he was in charge of doing all the carvings here in the cemetery
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And when he was like 14, he started like experimenting with like these colors and like writing these poems
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And the poems were very, very honest. And this like for you to know like this is like a really small village So there like no secrets And it kind of stick like people like the honesty so they like kept doing and he did this for 40 years and they still do it today
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so the second reason is more cultural so the ancient ancestors the people that live in this region
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of Romania they had a very different way of interacting with life and death and we read that they
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cried when babies were born because life on this earth was so difficult but then they celebrated
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at the time of death because they were passing on to a better life in the afterlife so much much
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different than how we in the West interact with life and death. I think that kind of like
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ironic and in a way, like cynical way of like thinking about things or what inspired the artist, the
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woodworker, this name again, Yuan, and also like why the people in this village like accepted this way
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of like portraying their lives and their deaths. Very, very interesting. I also want to mention that
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like it's not necessarily a merry cemetery in the sense that like the poems are happy. They're like
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ironic and kind of tragic, but the way that they kind of like believe that this is okay is what makes
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it merry in a sense. Does that make sense? Did that make sense? Yeah, let's read so
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We have a translator app that we're going to try and use on some of these poems. We'll see how it works. So for this tombstone, the translation is absolutely useless
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but it is like one of the more famous tombstones. So I know that it's written from the point of view of like the son-in-law of the woman who passed away
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I sing something along the lines of like, please keep her dead. So she doesn't like come back to life and take my head off or something like that
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So again, very different than what we would write on Epitheps. I hope I never have to go through this with G I really hope so I pray I don have to go through it but I think this one would be a good one That cute I don know what it says but it seems like we do a lot of that
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Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers. Chin Chin. But don't die
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Why am I gonna die? No, because there's a cute one that has like a couple saying cheers
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Oh, we always say cheers. I said that that would be a cute one, but I hope I don't have to deal with it
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You deal with it. I die first. Weird. I don't think the app works perfectly because this one, I think he died in a car accident
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and he left his kid's young and his wife a widow, but his kid was a virgin when he died
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And he's hoping that his wife stays a virgin after his dead
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and that people don't forget to come to their grave to put flowers
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You think the wife stayed a virgin? TMI. Yeah, I don't know. I hope so
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If you speak Romanian, please translate. There still seems to be available space in the cemetery
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I don't know if you have to live in the village to be able to, like, eligible to be buried here
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But there's space if you're interested. Mary Cemetery in northern Romania. So this tombstone here is a good example
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kind of like showing how this isn exactly a Mary cemetery but also how the people in this village think about death So it written from the point of view of the mother who is cursing this taxi driver who chose the route through this village and ended up like killing her son
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Obviously very, very tragic, but it's like written here in a kind of like cynical, like not so funny way, but like still obviously like missing her son
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But like we would never call that out on like a gravestone in the west. So like very interesting how like culturally they kind of like accept
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because like obviously they chose the tombstone to be here in the cemetery and like approved of everything but very different than like what we're used to it's very interesting
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yeah very interesting this is where the brilliant creator of the merry cemetery is buried
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no one patrash stand and he designed his own yeah i think he wrote his own epith too
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and he has the most beautiful grave that must have been weird yeah so what do you think
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did you change your mind about death not entirely i like the idea very much about like celebrating death and i
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really like the honesty about like life too there's no like sugar-coating it yeah none of us are perfect in life so it's okay to like throw that out there yeah what do you think
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i don't know for me even though i'm a christian and i do believe like life is better after you die
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and there's heaven and all that stuff i find it very difficult to be happy about anyone dying
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even if they're old like even if it's you know like natural causes like i don't know i just find it
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very difficult i do admire that they do it like that here and i think it's really really cool to
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be here and like see it yeah right yeah but anyways let us know what do you guys think
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Right now we're going to... We're going to lunch. Oh but also we're going to..
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Oh, we're going to... Breb. That's what we're going to show you guys in the next video
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And if you guys want to watch more Romanian videos, I'm going to put the travel series here so you guys can check that on next
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Here, or here, or here. I don't know. Thanks for watching. Bye
