Săpânța's Merry Cemetery is seven or eight hundred oak crosses, each one painted edge to edge in the same cobalt blue, each one carrying a flat painted scene of what the dead person did all day — weaving, herding, driving, soldiering — above a rhyming epitaph written in their own voice, usually at their own expense.

Stan Ioan Pătraș cut the first in 1935 and settled the style a year later: narrow planks, painted relief figures, pigments borrowed from local rugs and glass icons, lettering crowded in wherever the verse ran long. This system keeps that logic — blue is the ground, everything else is a shape riding on it, and the text is never filler.