The Wooden Churches of Maramures

Romania's Maramureş county is a land of horses and haystacks, bucolic hills and traditional dress – it’s one of the most untouched corners of Europe.  The region is famed for its wooden churches; old, towering, unique and beautiful, they occupied us for days.
This is the controversial church at Săpânţa Peri monastery, still very much under construction.  Why is it controversial?  Well, it starts with a boast: this is supposedly the tallest wooden structure in Europe, and the townspeople want you to know it.  Standing at over 250 feet (!), it’s certainly a giant.  But the tallest?  In Maramureş, that’s a touchy subject

We arrived at Săpânţa Peri to find picnicking families and a deserted worksite.  Nearby to the church was the shell of a massive, wooden monastic building, shingled roof still unweathered, walls not completely fleshed out, cascades of dormers and rooflines spilling down from a high cupola.  It was a huge structure, but it was still dwarfed by the church, which stuck up above the treeline like a skyscraper.  We wandered through the lower levels of the church, which was open and unfinished, with untidy piles of lumber and beams scattered around.
The church was designed in the traditional style of the region with megalomaniacal plans to be the tallest wooden structure in Europe, which seems like it should make the people of Maramureş proud.  It doesn’t.  The thing is, they already had the tallest wooden building, and it’s not remotely new.

In the tiny town of Şurdeşti, another giant stands much more demurely, hemmed in by leaves and pastoral fields.  Built in 1766, it represents one of the pinnacles of Romanian wooden architecture.  Looking up from the old grave markers and daisies around the base, it doesn’t actually look that tall – but, incredibly, Şurdeşti is only about fifteen feet shorter than Săpânţa’s new church.  Soaring 236 feet (!!), the steeple was, for 250 years, the highest wooden thing on the continent.
And, according to one way of thinking, it still is.

There is a little bell button by the arched gateway to the cemetery for calling the priest – he will sometimes come with the key to let travelers inside.  We pressed the button three or four times, but nobody materialized, which was fine.
What’s endearing about Şurdeşti’s church is how tiny it actually is.  The chapel is not much bigger than the base of the steeple, just a small room and porch designed for a few families to worship in.  Flower boxes and sprigs of pussywillows decorated the exterior, the carvings were simple and unpretentious. This is a church without pomp.  We found ourselves feeling sorry for it, now overtaken by a modern building just miles away.

Not everyone considers the battle of steeples finished, though.  Most people in Maramureş will quickly point out that Săpânţa Peri has an unusual and VERY untraditional (their words) stone base that rises at least enough to disqualify the church from contention.  We sort of agree, though it doesn’t seem as though the Săpânţa Peri base is actually tall enough to be the difference between the two.  Either way, there’s really no comparison.  Şurdeşti is by far our favorite, an old underdog that has charm, character and history on its side.
Maramureş churches aren’t only impressive for their height, though – there’s a wealth of other quirks and beauties among them.

In Budeşti, the old church is nowhere near as tall as some, but it has some of the most amazing paintings.  Many Maramureş chapels are decorated on the inside with icons and murals (unfortunately, most don’t allow photographs inside), but there are few that can match those found at Budeşti.  Painted in two periods – the 1400’s and 1762 - the artwork inside is the reason to visit.
When a village woman - who was probably the priest’s wife, we think she said he was eating lunch -  unlocked the door we were astounded.  Dusky, darkened, biblical scenes literally covered the rough boards of the walls and ceiling, the beams and altar.  The paintings were done in a simple way that suggested a dedicated but untrained hand.  Luckily, we were allowed to photograph the door, which should give you some idea of what was inside.

Budeşti, like many of the wooden churches, was painted as a kind of teaching tool.  The scenes were supposed to help villagers – most of whom were illiterate – learn the stories and lessons of the bible.  This chapel’s most notable paintings were designed, also, to frighten; a whole wall near the door was dedicated to scenes of hell.  Many of the tiny images involved naked sinners being sodomized by devils using nails, pitchforks and bellows to terrifying effect.  It was startling, but also a little humorous (very imaginative).

In Ieud, where we stayed with a welcoming family in a house that overlooked meadows and forest, the oldest of all the Maramureş wooden churches sits on a hill by the river.  Dating from 1364 (and reshingled every several decades since) the church is one of the older all-wood buildings still in use in the world.  Sitting among ancient graves on the site of an even earlier, ruined castle, the fir wood building has survived six and a half centuries of rough winters, invasions, and weekly use.  Intriguingly, the oldest printed volume in the Romanian language was found in the attic some time ago, though it’s now housed in a museum.

Iued’s other, more central church was “only” built in 1717, but was similarly given UNESCO world heritage status for its huge collection of icons painted on glass.  We couldn’t track down the priest, so we never made it inside – but we could see the steeple from our bedroom window.

Full Steam Ahead!

The engineer puffed on a cigarette while he waited for us to embark.  Elvetia, the 1954 Romanian built locomotive he was perched in, puffed along with him.  Heavy mists were slowly lifting from the Carpathians and the lightened clouds, having shed a good amount of rain the night before, were moving across the sky.  It was 8:30 in the morning and we'd maneuvered around potholes and horse-carts to make our train - one of the last wood-fired, steam-powered trains in Europe.  You could smell the lumber in the smoke, its brown bark adding sweetness like the burnt caramel on crème brûlée. The smell reminded Merlin of sugaring in Vermont.  At 9am, with the shrill whistle of a gargantuan teapot, we were called on board.

The CFF Vișeu de Sus, also called The Carpathian Forest Steam Train, is referred to simply as "mocăniţă" by locals and the signs they have posted along the road. It's a derivation of the Romanian word "mocan," which means shepherd or mountain dweller. The mocăniţă which begins its journey in Vișeu de Sus snakes its way up into the Carpathian Mountains to collect timbre and shepherd it back down to the village. Its narrow gauge track follows the Vasar River toward the Ukrainian border, up into the Vasar Valley. The valley is unique to the Carpathians in its lack of habitation - well, human inhabitants at least. Deer, bears, sheep, abound. And those quickly proliferating beasts known as 'tourists.' 

Okay, now's the time to say it. This was a tourist ride, as are all of the wood-fired, steam-powered trains that leave this and any other station in Europe.  They are such rarities that it only makes sense to utilize them in this way - to offer a technicolor experience to people's sepia toned dreams of old-timey travel.  A Swiss nonprofit helped turn this railway into an attraction, to preserve the track, the trains and offer aid to the community around it in an ingenious way.  Merlin and I talk about foreign aid like this a lot, likening it to buying someone a cow instead of giving them milk money.  The 'cow,' being tourism.  Because of this, we assumed the "CFF" on the side of our train referenced the Swiss Federal Railways.  It actually stands for Calea Ferată Forestieră, "forestry railway" in Romanian.
In most of the world, roadways began to push locomotives out of business in the 1950s and 60s.  Romania isn't most of the world, though, and steam locomotives were still being built as late as 1986.  Along our way, we saw two of these re-jiggered vans moving right along next to us.  For loggers and livers in this neck of the woods, the train track is still the only access route.  We'd actually seen one of these on our first day in the country, crossing from near the Serbian border to Cluj Napoca.  What a crazy thing to see sidle up next to your passenger window.  On that modern diesel-powered bullet of a train, the van putted alongside and then fell back into the distance.  During this ride, it smoothly moved forward beyond us. 

At least two people are needed to run a steam locomotive.  Ours was staffed with five.  You had the engineer, the boilerman and a third fellow who swapped places with both of the others.  In addition, two young women acted as conductor and kitchen car cook.  One donned a lop-sided cap when collecting tickets, the other was in charge of grilling hot dogs at our lunch break.  They chatted the whole time, along for the joyride.  The other three had no choice but to run this thing like they always would, whether it was just doing a loop with some foreigners with cameras on board or not.  That's the amazing thing about this ride, to actually feel the mechanics of this bad boy.  To feel it jut and spurt, to watch them feed logs into the boiler and gather water from the river to replenish the locomotive tanks.  It's like watching men re-cobble a street - outmoded skill sets that become lost arts.

The Vaser Valley has had economic significance since the 1700s, when it was still a part of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire.  When the railway was built at the beginning of the 1930s, German speakers and Romanian Jews were running the show.  They would cut down trees up in the heavily forested mountains and then send them down to saw mills in Vișeu de Sus.  The two World Wars affected both ethnic groups in some really dire ways and the lumber industry diminished - almost vanished.  Even with modern transport, the area is not the cash cow that it was in its heyday.  It was amazing to see the loggers' settlements along the river.  In just under three hours, I think we saw four.  The bridges made us gasp - two long logs strapped together with a railing.  Don't be fooled, it was actually just one log, until it bent toward the water. 

At the start of our journey, we passed more houses.  At each one, someone stood outside to watch us go by.  We waved, they waved back.  I wondered how many of the very old ones had watched the first wave of trains pass by.  How amazing they must have seemed.  How amazing they still are.  The Maramureş region is still a part of the world that remains mostly car-less.  Houses do not have driveways, horse-drawn wagons are the norm.  It only makes sense that these locomotives would draw a crowd.  Especially with a bunch of foreigners on board.  A German couple who were so intent on picture taking that they reminded me of that video of Britney Spears attacking a car with an umbrella (yes, I've seen it. so what?)  Cultural paparazzi these two were.  For all our grumbling, they elicited smiles and waves from everyone we past.  Their photos were probably amazing.

Diesel trains that run along this same track do most of the dirty work these days, leaving these antiques for lighter loads. We saw weighed down carts awaiting pick-up and the trains that retrieve them sliding down the track on neutral.  This is how this line was designed, allowing small trains to move upward at a steep enough pace that their return trip (with looooaads of wood now attached) would be aided by gravity.  Our own train picked up small delivery of its own - all tourist rides are still working trips for the local logging industry.  If no one shows up, they still go up to get the logs that are waiting.  We wondered how our train was going to turn around to go back in the direction from which we came.  It simply didn't.  The main cab disattached, moved back and around and joined back up with our cars on the other side.  The conductor navigated our way back in reverse.

We may not have needed to be on the train for four-odd hours to get the point.  Sure, I may have begun to think of The Kinks' song "Last of the Steam-Powered Trains."  And I don't know where I'm going/Or why I came.  I wasn't the only passenger that napped.  But don't they say it's all about the journey and not the destination?  Isn't that basically what our lives right now are all about?  It was amazing to have done it, especially in Maramureş County, where boarding a steam locomotive didn't feel all that unusual and it being anything other than wood-fired would have been bizarre. They use wood for absolutely everything here. As I'm sure we'll explore in greater detail really soon. 

The Sârbi Țuică Still

Just off the pothole-riddled road in the center of the little hamlet of Sârbi, under a ramshackle wooden roof next to a stream, we found this old woman turning a crank slowly, her eyes glazed over, her mouth set in a slight smile.  She was making ţuică, a traditional plum brandy that Romanians can’t exist without.
Ţuică is firewater, moonshine - a 100 proof, scald-the-tongue tradition that isn’t exactly legal but is still the national drink.  Accompanied by the rushing burble of the water beside her, the woman seemed an unlikely outlaw distiller, but there she was.

We took a small detour to Sârbi because there's an interesting brook laundry whirlpool there - a kind of sluice-fed, foaming vortex of rotting boards where the village women wash their rugs and other sturdy cloth.  Nobody was doing their washing, but there was a group of people tasting and buying ţuică.  In the same complex was a sawmill and fulling mill, plus a turn-off in the road where men stood around and watched the passing traffic (which consisted of at least as many horse carts as cars).
The cooling bath was fed with a pipe that ran directly from the stream, and was hung with the cups and buckets of the tasters.

The still was hand-pounded copper, with a long, swan-necked top that looked particularly unstable.  A woodfire was hissing in the brick beneath the still, the crank turned a scraper that kept the mash from sticking.  An enameled bucket caught the intermittent spurts of alcohol that emerged from a low spigot. With one's nose close to the collected, clear ţuică, the effect was eye watering - the fumes were enough to get drunk on.

Ţuică is served before every respectable dinner in Romania, usually just a small amount in a shot glass to clear the palate and prime the stomach.  The man who was giving tastes of ţuică seemed – because of his ruddiness, tilt and excitement  – to be a lifelong connoisseur.  A few bottles of differently aged liquids sat on a table with a plate of bread.  Everyone partook, including our host.

The mash sat uncovered in plastic barrels, smelling strongly under the midday sun.  It was not, as one might say in America, “safely stored,” but it doesn’t matter; any bacteria will get killed in the still.
Plums are the most commonly grown fruit tree in Romania, and are used almost exclusively for making brandy.  As with 19th century American apples, the breeds aren’t developed for eating, but instead for their fermenting properties.  The "Prun Tuleu gras" is the king of Romanian plums, but isn't much by itself - the flesh is very firm and apple like, it doesn't have the liquidity that Americans are used to. Every country house has at least one tree.

Operations like the one in Sârbi aren’t entirely legal, but they’re tolerated.  Traditions run strong in Romania, and the thought of enforcing the ban on home distillation is particularly loathsome to peasant communities who couldn’t afford store bought liquors or the permits needed to make their alcohol comply with the law.  The effect of the ban is limited - ţuică is sold everywhere, in plain sight, on roadsides and in little stores, often in repurposed wine or soda bottles.  But the majority of the stuff is made at home or at a communal still for a family’s own use – it would be impossible and mean to enforce the ban.

At our homestay in Ieud, we were presented with a bottle of the host’s own ţuică every night before dinner.  We had a few tiny glasses, then let it be.  The bottle had been reused a number of times, the threads of the cap had worn out.  The family had grown a pear inside the glass themselves, which initially caused some confusion.  Eventually we got it straightened out; the pear was for flavoring (minimal) and decoration (very pretty), the alcohol was one hundred percent plum.
Perhaps worried about our taste (or tolerance) for the stuff, our host mother also brought out a bottle of cherry liquor and a precious decanter of black-currant alcohol, deep purple, that she wanted Rebecca especially to try.  It was all very tasty, but the ţuică was our favorite - it considerably loosened up the table conversation.

A Prison Worth Entering

In the decade between 1945 and 1955, around 200 people were incarcerated at the prison of Sighetu Marmației. Bishops, priests, historians, artists, military men, professors, intellectuals, anyone who 'threatened' the stronghold of the totalitarian communist system of Romania. Most inmates were over the age of 60 and were never even tried for a specific crime.  Today, converted into the Sighet Memorial Museum, it holds more men and women than it ever has before - thousands of Romanians and millions of international victims of communism in the 20th century. The museum is the work of the International Center for Studies Into Communism who tirelessly unearth and enlighten as much about this period of history as possible. 

There are signs all across the region of Maramures advertising the museum.  "Have You Visited?" it asks above a photo of these statues, 'the convey of martyrs' - 18 naked men and women in varying displays of agony.  Their view of the horizon has been blocked by a wall, a symbol of communism's effect on the human spirit. The photo makes the poster's question seem threatening. "Why haven't you visited yet?" While it may not be the best marketing strategy, it is in line with the museum's mission to stress the importance of remembrance. To educate young people and re-educate older ones "who for half of a century have been misled with false history."

It is a beautifully curated museum.  You can tell, instantly, that there is a passionate group of researchers behind the project.  Upon entering, we were handed an information packet to bring around with us.  This was not simply a translation of the exhibits' text, it was a history, a mission statement and a story.  Honestly, it was difficult to remember to look up and around myself, my nose buried in the engrossing material.  How they dealt with the space was equally impactful - keeping a few cells exactly as they looked during the worst years of the prison.  Because so many of the cells were plastered with research, timelines, photos, records, you really felt the isolation of these sparse rooms.  The truth and the story inherent in this space didn't need to be spelled out.

The prison was once a veritable filing cabinet of human lives. Earmarked in society, they were sorted and shuffled and slammed closed behind metal doors. Inside the cells, these lives jumped out from the walls. But once you were back in the hallways, it was like a closed cabinet once more. With fencing draped across almost every empty space and natural light shining in like a sick tease, you thought only of the prison itself. Its coldness. Even a large group of young school children couldn't lighten up the atmosphere - braided pigtails, pink sweatsuits and all.  

The amount of information, evidence and personal items in the museum was staggering.  Many of the rooms reminded me of the hours my brother spent in front of the microfilm machine in our public library.  He was working on a 7th grade term paper about the Holocaust.  I looked over his shoulder.  Photos, clippings, records, files. Most of the data-heavy rooms would include something sensory as well.  Faint tapping could be heard in the cell dedicated to prison poetry, which was shared cell to cell through Morse code.  A room about the redistribution and confiscation of family-owned farms had a large box of brilliantly green sod at its center and this cell - focused on work camps - displayed one of the many fruits of the prisoners' labor, a motorcycle.

It's sort of surprising to think that the full truth of this period in Romania's history wouldn't be more widely known and accepted by this points. This isn't Albania, where the dictator whose thumb the country was under for decades was also instrumental in cutting them loose from Nazi Germany, and then Soviet Russia. Neither is it Serbia, where a number of people we spoke to fondly remembered certain elements of Tito's regime.  If you can rate such things, Nicolae Ceauşescu's rule over Romania is considered one of the most oppressive and ruthless of the Eastern Bloc.  The term "most Stalinist" is thrown around - and there's no way that adjective could mean anything good. And, yet, this sort of memorial is necessary. There's a reason Ceauşescu cherry-picked his 'historians' and threw the rest in this prison. There's a reason it's still difficult to get the people who were there to feel safe speaking freely. 

The International Center for Studies into Communism has, in a little under a decade, recorded over 5,000 hours of eye-witness accounts, compiled tens of thousands of documents and published books that add up to almost 40,000 pages. Not to mention creating this wonderful museum. They say that it is all to "resuscitate the collective memory" and to rob the communists of one of their greatest victories, blinding and brainwashing whole nations. The information packet we were given at the museum ended with this proclamation:  
“Can memory be relearned?” the answer of the Memorial to the Victims of Communism and to the Resistance in Romania is a resounding “Yes”. 

I sure hope so.

What To Do in Cluj-Napoca

We arrived in Cluj-Napoca on a half-empty train with rain-streaked windows.  That morning we'd crossed the border from Vršac in a Serbian taxi.  The driver was fast, the landscape was a blur of sunrise and outstretched fields.  It had been a glorious day.
On the journey from the plains of the southwest into the foothills of Transylvania, the landscape changed.  Farms were smaller, men mowed hay with scythes, draft horses replaced tractors and, instead of concrete, the houses in the mountains were made of wood.  Romania, in our first glimpse of it, was rural in the extreme, like a gothic fairytale.
But then we got to Cluj-Napoca and spent two damp days floating in a sea of modernity, music and food - the dripping forests, wolves and castles would have to wait.  Above, "Rupa and the April Fishes" - a San Fransisco based band that sang in French and Spanish - plays to a crowd of soggy urbanites.  As we were passing by, a group of young mimes showed up in stripes and facepaint. The mimes danced soundlessly, we felt bemused, the setting could have been anywhere.

We had come to Cluj-Napoca - which is called "Cluj" informally - because it seemed a promising start to a big wilderness.  It was supposed to be our doorway to Romania.  What we found was a separate thing, receiving almost nothing from its surrounds, a kind of island of cosmopolitanism.  After two days we knew nothing about the country and our minds were swirling instead with concert dates and cinema premiers (the Transylvania International Film Festival begins June 1st, there are posters everywhere).
Cluj had been described in our guidebook as a university city, which meant two things to us.  First: the guidebook would probable be out of date.  College towns change quickly, what was new and popular two years ago will be passe by the time we visit.  Second: the town wouldn't be out of date.  If there are students and young people, a city can't help but feel stylish.  Students don't care about how old the town museum is, or the story behind the belltower or what the old mayor said about the Hungarians - they want good places to eat and exciting places to drink.  Case in point: Kaja Tanya restaurant on Inocentiu Micu Klein.  A daily menu, vegetarian options, excellent food, cheap prices, bottles of liquor being passed from hand to hand - it was great, it was fun, we began to fall in love with the city, rain be dammed.

In an old theater space, thin, good looking youths had gathered for an art and fashion fair.  The paint on the ceiling was flaking off, the floor was scuffed and creaky, the whole building felt as though it had just been opened to the world after decades of decay.  It would have felt like Bram Stoker's version of a boutique, but the venue wasn't the point - we were the only ones looking at the light fixtures and crumbling moldings, everyone else was focused on the present.
The clothes were made for very angular people, a few photographers roamed around to document the coming together of Cluj's fashionable set.

The rain never stopped.  We spent two nights and the day between jumping from shelter to shelter, hoping for a break in the weather but never finding one.  What we found instead was exemplary coffee (at Toulouse cafe, the milk was artistically frothed, the espresso perfect) and a cafe crowd that spoke a fluent, easy mix of Romanian and English.
A big stage had been set up outside in the square.  We listened (sipping our second cups) to a full orchestra play for a few umbrella-holding pedestrians, the conductor exuberant, the string section shivering, the audience very meagre.

On a side street, an "international foods festival" was taking place to very little fanfare.  There were some excited customers huddled at picnic tables, but there was a lot of food and few mouths.  Local restaurants had set up tents to dish out hot bowls of ramen and boards of sushi, German sausages, goulash and generic "Shanghai Express."  This man was beginning a huge batch of paella while talking to a reporter - he had his earbuds in and a camera slung around his shoulders.  He seemed excited.

Our best meal in Cluj was at Baracca, a grey-toned box of lights and wine bottles on Napoca street itself.  When we lived in New York, we played (as all New Yorkers do) at being restaurant critics and knowledgable gourmands.  That seems like a long time ago now - it's difficult to find good food in the hinterlands, much less great food.  An elegant, well cooked plate brings with it the thick aroma of nostalgia, an opportunity to dredge up fond recollections and old discussions at different tables.  Now, we talk less about the food we're eating and more about the dim-lit places of the past.  Do we get homesick?  No.  But we often dream of traveling in the New York of our memories.  Was the grilled duck breast at Baracca good?  I can't remember, I was lost somewhere else.

It shouldn't be surprising that a city like this, in Transylvania, is so worldly.  In metropolitan streets, influences and culture jump from country to country, city to city, bypassing everything in between.  What was surprising about Cluj-Napoca was how quickly it had appeared from the pines and hayfields, like a sudden patch of electric light springing up from the 19th century.  Just a few miles away from where we were eating, sheep were being penned in for the night, women were cooking over woodfires.

We finished our last night in Cluj at Old Shepherd Pub on Matei Corvin street, with bottles of Silva beer.  The young owner had spent some time in Britain and insisted that he was modeling his bar after the English pubs he'd grown to love.  He also insisted that we drink his favorite local brew instead of British ale and the cellar space had more of the lost Alphabet City grunginess of the old East village than anything one could find on Avenue A today.
We left Cluj in another downpour, having seen almost none of its sights but feeling that we knew it well - both because its demeanor was familiar and because we'd spent so much time in its boîtes.

The Merry Cemetery

Not this man, but another buried nearby in Săpânţa's cemetery loved his horses.  "One more thing I loved very much, To sit at a table in a bar, Next to someone else's wife,"  his gravestone continues.  The words were not exactly his and who knows if he'd be too happy about them being his epitaph.  They were written by Stan Ioan Pătraş, the artist who created 700 of the unique tombstones that fill what is now dubbed "The Merry Cemetery." Each epitaph is written in first person and is a tribute to the villager it represents. Sure, this might mean betraying a person's taste for O.P.P. or strong liquor, but mostly the words simply convey what that villager did day in and day out.  Every so often, it also describes the circumstances of the person's death.

The art is simplistic, folky and bright.  People mostly look the same, which makes their action in the scene even more of a characterization.  We couldn't read any of the words while we were there, but were completely immersed in looking at the portraits.  Women were most often weaving, farming or cooking - but what instruments they were using alluded to that special dish that they may have been known for. Dough rolled out, carrots chopped or mixing bowl in hand.  Men were represented as the butchers, bartenders, shepherds, policemen and soldiers that they were. Their roles in the community.

A noteworthy number of men are depicted alongside their tractor, truck or car.  This doesn't necessarily mean they were mechanics.  Driving around the village of Săpânţa, even today, the houses don't have driveways.  Vehicles are not simply something everyone has.  What those paintings of the red pick-up or blue two-door are really showing is the pride that their owner had felt.  The accomplishment, the ownership.  As the years on the tombstones move on through the 40s, 60s, 80s, automobiles pop up more and more.  They begin to be depicted not just as part of a legacy or portrait, but also in the 'scene of death' illustrations.  Many of the gravestone have art on both sides.  Life on the front, death on the flipside.

One epitaph, written for a 3-year old, curses that "damn" taxi that "couldn't find somewhere else to stop" and struck her.  The verse is angry and heartbreaking.  Such is the case with accidental deaths caused by reckless driving or alcoholism. You can hear the blame being cast. But what else is an artist to do? Especially when you know these people personally.  When people had a chance to offer input for their own grave, I'm sure they did.  In cases where the deceased had been sick for a long time, there are declarations of gratitude to the caretakers and supporters. 

I feel like each decorated cross turns the person beneath it into a sort of folk legend.  Some are tragic figures, others are comic, most are archetypes, some are heroes. "They're lives were the same, but they want their epitaphs to be different, " Dumitru Pop remarked to the New York Times in 2002.  The Merry Cemetery has become somewhat of an unlikely tourist attraction in a tiny town just miles from the Ukrainian border.  Pop, who has been making the gravestones for almost 40 years at this point, confessed to carrying around a notebook to record juicy Sunday morning gossip.  His mentor, Pătraş, was right about there being no secrets in Săpânţa.

Stan Ioan Pătraş created the tombstones from 1935 until his death in 1977.  Before he passed, of course, he created his own.  It is in the same style most of the rest, double-sided with a portrait on the front and a scene from his life on the back.  The tableau he chose shows him at a work table, creating a tomb marker while a young man plays a violin.  His autobiographical epitaph talks about the "cross he bore," in supporting his family.  It lacks the humor or irony of many of his other verses.  His home, now a small museum, paints a different picture.  His life's work pops off the wall like a celebration.  It hardly feels like a chore, a burden - then again, these were also the instances in which his art didn't need to be consumed by death. 

Newspaper clippings, portraits and - fittingly - post-mortem degrees cover some walls, but really, what you notice is all of the art!  And all of the religious iconography that the Merry Cemetery is noticeably lacking.  Above the bed are portraits he created for Communist Party members.  He had been embraced by them, a local artist who was tied more to folk traditions than Western influence. Nicolae Ceauşescu himself, along with his equally notorious wife, stopped by to have their portraits done.  

Pătraş left his house and workshop to Dumitru Pop, his best apprentice, who continues the tradition to this day.  When we arrived at the small cottage, Pop was working away outside.  The familiarly shaped cross lay on his workbench, painted "Săpânţa blue."  He simply nodded and let us into the home and then sat in the corner as we looked around.  I wondered whose cross we'd taken him away from his work on.  Was he close with them?  Were they already dead?  Will he create his own marker like his teacher had - and, if so, what will it say?

Calling it "Merry Cemetery" may be a little misleading.  A signpost that translates it to "Happy Cemetery" in town is even more so.  Some paintings show obviously dejected people, some tributes are downright morose.  That's what makes the place so incredibly captivating - it is 'merry' only in its lack of soberness.  "Lively" would be a better word, I think.  Just like each person's life, these wooden crosses are unique and personalized, but also undeniably connected.  Dripping with local color, in many ways they are indistinguishable from one another.   The Merry Cemetery feels like its own little village within a village, with secret or mundane or too-short lives under each peaked roof.

Serbian Painted Churches

In the Church of Saint Nicholas in Sremski Karlovci, we finally admitted it.  We were having fun looking at religious architecture.  Painted in dizzying patterns of yellow and blue, adorned with countless icons, lit by intricate stained glass windows, the interior was vibrant and spirited.
There are some types of cultural experiences that are inescapable in Europe – pork schnitzel, curtainless showers, restaurant touts and churches, to name a few.  We go into loads of cathedrals, temples and synagogues and usually they're pretty boring.  Or, they don't allow photos or we don't go in at all because the doors are locked.  We treat churches as an obligation usually, something to check off our daily list.  But in Serbia, we've actually become a little excited about them, and have been visiting many more than we usually do in a country.

The reason: Serbian churches are usually painted and beautiful.  

We stopped at Krušedol Monastery, outside of Igir, on a whim, thinking that the bright red gatehouse was the church itself.  Instead, there was only a pathway leading into a parklike space - silent except for songbirds and the trickle of a nearby stream.  There was no one around, the grounds were completely enclosed by a high wall.  Nestled into a lush, inconspicuous valley, just off a (mostly dirt) lane, the monastery seemed like a secret.  

The church itself was attended to by a few monks in robes and beards.  The door was open, nobody stopped us from going in.

The Krušedol monks were silent and welcoming, but we still felt nervous about approaching the iconostasis (which was breathtaking).  The walls here are enough to look at, though.  Built in the early 16th century, the monastery was painted in two stages - once in 1543-6 (when the main frescoes were done) and later in 1750-6, when some fire damage was repaired and a few new additions were made.

The paintings cover every inch of the interior, and the hues run from dusky to smokey blue.  Sunlight dripped in through a few high windows.  I shouldn't have worried about the photographs; just before we left, a young monk turned the lights on so that I could get a better picture.

In Serbia, painted walls aren't only the preserve of Orthodox churches. Walking into the Catholic cathedral of St. Gerard, in Vršac, is like entering a bizarre forest of color.  The pillars are vined with green and the canopy is an autumnal riot.  The light plays in interesting ways on the patterns, turning a narrow palette of green, yellow and ochre into rich and dark shades.  It must have taken someone years to complete.

It's rare to find a church in Europe that feels alive, other than on Sundays or saints days.  But in Vršac, the cathedral felt open and ready for visitors.  Townspeople wandered in and out, talking to one another.  We were treated to an organ performance by an older man who was playing for a group of schoolchildren - nobody minded us taking pictures, nobody cared that we were wandering around.  It was a wonderful, welcoming experience.

At St. George's cathedral, in Novi Sad, the atmosphere was more hushed, but still enjoyable.  On a hot, muggy day, the cool darkness of the cathedral was welcoming, the iconostasis was almost luridly decorated and the whole place was the epitome of high baroque grandeur - except that it was built at the end of the nineteenth century.  It's a style.  The Serbs obviously like their churches ornate and colorful.