Month: December 2022

The Merry Cemetery:The Dacian Way of Death

On December 18, 2022

I have never shared the view that cemeteries are gloomy places but will allow that they may be tinged with sadness. In the Northern Maramures region of Romania however is a cemetery like no other: The Merry Cemetery (Cimitir Vesel) at Sapanta. Here the celebration of life takes precedence over the grief of death, and death itself is no solemn affair.

The Dacian Culture may have inspired these attitudes. Dacians, early inhabitants of these lands, believed in the immortality of the soul and for them the moment of death was one of exaltation, filled with supreme happiness in anticipation of a better life. Herodotus describes how the Dacians were fearless in battle and joyful when dying, going laughing to their graves to meet their god, Zalmoxis.

The forest of oak headstones in the Sapanta cemetery is the work of the wood carver Stan Ion Patras. Between 1935 and his death in 1977 he carved over eight hundred commemorative tablets, including his own. He painted these singular memorials in vivid, symbolic colours. Predominant is the radiant, deep “Sapanta blue” speaking of the sky, hope, freedom. Green represents life, yellow fertilility, red passion, and black death.White doves symbolise the soul and a blackbird hints at a suspicious death.

On the grave markers Patras carved portraits of the occupants and naive pictures recording their occupations.

There is a distinctly gendered division of labour:

Below the painted carvings Patras inscribed epitaphs, written in the first person, enabling the inhabitants of the graves to tell the stories of their lives. Far from lauding them or whitewashing them with virtues, the whimsical, witty doggerel records indiscretions, shortcomings, weaknesses, faults, foibles, flaws, failings, and infidelities with cheerful insouciance. Even the modes of death, drowning, drinking, and a disproportionate number of car accidents, provide a source of humour. And the soul who was murdered and buried without his head fails to disrupt the prevailing merriment:

Yet even in Sapanta I found one grave which broke with the relentless good cheer. The speaking poem of a three-year-old girl killed by a taxi read:

May you burn in hell

Taxi driver from Sibiu!

In all of Romania

You could find no other place

But here, near our house

To stop and hit me

And bring grief to my parents.

For as long as they live they will weep for me.

Three -year-old girl killed by a taxi from Sibiu

But habitually the latter day Dacians continue to greet death with equanimity; Patras’ apprentice, Dumitru PopTincu, continues his master’s work, and the burgeoning cemetery cocks a defiant snook at mortality.

The Thames is Capricious. We Escape Leptospirosis; Others are Less Fortunate

By Gravedigger

On December 4, 2022

In Children, Drowned

I had long harboured a desire to swim in the River Thames. Conscious of my own limitations, this was no ambitious plan to cover the length (over two hundred miles, I don’t think so) nor to venture into the tidal waters below Teddington Lock. The Port of London Authority strongly discourages both activities with dire warnings of powerful tides overpowering the strongest of swimmers; eddies and undertows sucking them under in seconds; danger from water traffic in the form of clippers, ferries and working boats; and the biting cold of the water leading to crippling breathing spasms.

Something more modest then, a gentle width somewhere in the Middle Reaches of the Thames. Here opinion was divided. Public Health England warned of gastrointestinal diseases from contaminated surface run off, and from water containing raw sewage routinely pumped into the river after heavy rains; the possibilities of contracting Leptospirosis or Weil’s disease from animal urine; high recorded levels of microplastics in the water; and dangers of collision with leisure traffic. Enthusiasts, by contrast, rhapsodised about an arcadian Thames: a sparkling , idyllically pastoral river with 125 species of fish, over four hundred invertebrates, and flourishing flora.

By dint of slightly overemphasising the latter perspective, I persuaded a friend to accompany me, and we took to the river at Clifton Hampden. Our respective partners, both non-swimmers and of the firm conviction that immersion, in any volume of water greater than that required to fill a decent sized bathtub, is a supreme folly, sat on the bank guarding the clothes. They wore expressions which said No Good Will Come of This.

And it must be confessed that we entered the water with some trepidation, feeling our way cautiously out into the river, wary of what lay beneath our feet, dreading that moment when the cold-water hit our stomachs, alert to the dangers from passing boats, and with mouths firmly closed. But once in the river the pleasure of swimming, pushing weightlessly through the water, took over. It was not cold, it did not look particularly polluted, and folk waved cheerfully from passing boats. Across and back, and we turned around, enthusiastic to repeat the exercise.

Cautiously we set out: I let Kay take the lead… there might be something nasty under foot

Later in the pub we regaled our sceptical partners with the delights of Wild Swimming. But there was a sobering coda. Walking along the Thames Path a few miles downriver, we paused to admire the thirteenth century flint church of Saint Bartholomew at Lower Basildon, and in the churchyard discovered the hauntingly beautiful grave of Harold and Ernest Edward Deverell. Aged fifteen and sixteen, they drowned while bathing close by in 1866. The marble sculpture of the two boys, in their old- fashioned bathing trunks, and looking far younger than their teenage years, is heart-rending.

Looking much younger than their teenage years

They were lovely and pleasant in their lives, and in their death they were not divided

A guide to the church records starkly: “ One brother got into difficulties and the other went to his aid: sadly, both drowned.”

There is a small risk even in those little adventures which look quite safe on a summer’s afternoon, and the boys’ deaths were tragic. Yet too much caution renders human existence a tepid affair, with little point to life if we act in constant fear of its end.