Romania and Moldova Travel Guide
Romania and Moldova Travel Guide
by Lonely Planet author Leif
Pettersen |
|
||||
| ©Romania
and Moldova Travel Guide 2008 Updated September 10, 2008 |
Sapânta Far flung Sapânta village has one of the most unique attractions in Romanian, the ‘Merry Cemetery’. This church graveyard is famous for the colorfully painted wooden crosses carved with portraits and warm, humorous elegies about the deceased. The pictures and inscriptions, shown in art exhibitions across Europe, illustrate a wealth of traditional occupations: Shepherds tend their sheep, mothers cook for their families, barbers cut hair, and weavers bend over looms. You can find pictures of the cemetery here. The cemetery attracts bus loads of Romanian and foreign tourists, while life in the village carries on as normal: old women sit and chat outside their cottages, colorful rugs are hung on clotheslines and beaten clean with wire swatters and the odd horse and cart trundle past. Sapânta lies 12km northwest of Sighet, just 4km south of Ukraine (as of now, this crossing is not open to foreigners). Buses run to Sapânta every hour (8am to 2pm) from Sighet bus station and return at 4pm and 5pm. Sapânta's second most popular attraction sits 500m down a gravel road off the main road, a new wooden church claiming to be the tallest wooden structure in Europe (75m). It's still under construction but already causing fervent debate, because of its controversial stone base. In the strictest sense, this pips the stone-free church in Surdesti by three meters, but the debate about the legitimacy of stone bases still rages and no one has declared a winner. Ask the resident nun to open the basement chapel. The wooden church is signposted off the main Sighet/Negresti-Oas road, though it’s easier to just look up and follow the steeple. Among the villagers rent rooms are the following: Pensiunea Ileana Camping Poieni |