Friends on the list

Papillon the motorhome has completed touring Romania, a very interesting place.

You are invited to view it at.
http://papillontravels.net/romaniaindex.htm

All is well here on a rainy Saturday



Tom and Judy in
Lapsze Nizne, Poland

Hi Tom&Judy:

Excellent! Really enjoyed this entry on Romania. So many wonderful photos and really interesting meaning behind the Merry Cemetery.

thank you for another wonderful read!

Wonderful narrative and photos. A lovely country, the country of my birth! I left 46 years ago, never been back: long story...

Thank you. I will send the link to some of my friends and family. They will love it.

Tom and Judy, I will translate the merry funeral monuments for you sometime next week; at least those that have anything other than dates on them. They are very naive inscriptions, some quite touching, others whimsical. Many are written in the first person: those gone present themselves to the visitor...

Doru

Thanks for the private and public note, corrections made. We enjoyed all of Romania but at times the roads left a little to be desired.

In terms of translations there may be a project for you. There are hardly any on the net. Heard there was an english book on them but never did see one.

Google the place name and you will find a number of sites with more photos.

If you could read the inscriptions you could spend hours there. It was quite moving.

Hope that you can return to visit someday if that prospect suits you. Hope to see you in Savannah.

Tom and Judy in Kracow, Poland

My pleasure.

I think the photos you posted are quite representative.

A point to be made is that these are folkloric creations, as far as I know all made by the same folk artist, who is himself buried there (one of the photos is of his grave). I wonder if they just closed the place when he passed away, or whether a new popular talent has risen to continue the work.

The inscriptions are all in naive, popular rhyme and quite repetitive, so translating a few of the more typical will cover the field, so to speak... The reproduce the folsky (very local) dialect will impose some forced styling and the results will never give justice to the sweetness of the original words. This is from a part of the country where words are likened to honey; you get the picture.

So I'll do just a sampling.

quote:

A point to be made is that these are folkloric creations, as far as I know all made by the same folk artist, who is himself buried there (one of the photos is of his grave). I wonder if they just closed the place when he passed away, or whether a new popular talent has risen to continue the work

We were at Sapanta six years ago and met the new artist who has taken over from the original painter, who is buried there. The new work is in the style of the old, but you can definitely (even an untrained eye) tell the difference.

I promised to post here some translations of the texts found on some monuments in the Merry Cemetery of Sapanta (Maramures, Romania) which were included in Tom and Judy's photo travelogue (see link in their post above).

In the meantime I have received from them a pretty "generously sized" file with photos and this becomes a life project!

While I work on those, here are a few translations for the curious, to get a flavour of what's scripted on those head panels:

(text in brackets represents explanations where deemed necessary)
(I added punctuation for easier reading-there is none in the texts. For authenticity, the punctuation should in fact go.)

1. Scroll all the way down to the one showing a man in police uniform. Here is the text:

I here rest
And my name is Stan Ion
The Ion of Mihaies (Father’s first name was Mihaies, the family name Stan).
And I was a cop in Iasi (city name)
And from there in Brasau (folk name for Brasov, another city name)
I was a good cop
But now I have to give you my salute
Since you will not see me for long
As I left this world
At the age of 58
In the year 1952 I died.

2. Next to it there one belonging probably to a Communist Party official, as attested by the symbol of the hammer and sickle:

Here I rest
and Holdis Ioan is my name.
As long as I lived
The Party I loved
And I fought
To make the people happy.
I children did not have
And I grew
and the village farmstead I helped.
Lived 72 years 1975.

3. And to close for tonight, if you look a bit higher, there a monument showing a chap with a cigarette in his mouth and a bottle in his hand:

(Tuica is a pretty potent brew made from plums, biggest source of drinking excess in Romania)

Tuica is pure venom
She brings tears and torment
And this it brought to me too
Death put me under her foot.
He who likes tuica a lot
Will have at the end my lot
As I have loved tuica a lot
And with it in hand I died.
Here rests Dumitru Holdis
Lived 45 years
Dead of forced (read: sudden, compelled) death
In 1958.

Well, enough for now!

I must say no translation will do full justice to the folkloristic purity of the words and to the sweetness of the local dialect, but sometimes a little peek tells much of the story of what's behind the slightly open door. And so, we get a peek!

Refreshing this topic with a link to an article on Sapanta published by The Toronto Star on September 13, 2007, while we were away in Italy. Faithful friends made sure we dont miss it and I have already sent the link to Tom and Judy, wherever their motorhome would have decided to have them by now...

THanks for sharing these photos -- I am so intrigued by Romania and it is moving higher and higher on The List. I'm glad to know there will be people who can answer questions when it's time to start planning