The laughing cemetery

...Men's occupations vary more: here are a miller, tractor-driver, miner...

...May 29, Tuesday...

...Seven panels of massive and detailed crowd scenes decorate both front and back: scenes of battle, of mourning, of celebration...

...When the Austro-Hungarians ruled here, they prohibited Orthodox churches of stone...

...Not only the body, he says, should be nourished...

...This woman hit by a train...

...Its priest, Father Gheorghe Nemes, has sleek gray hair and warm brown eyes...

...The new Romanian flag is the old flag, three broad vertical stripes, red, yellow, blue-except that in the middle, in the yellow, where Ceausescu had a sun over mountains, everyone has cut a circular hole...

...Because it's open right now to visitors, for who knows how long...

...The valley people have gathered around the village hall...

...To the left, the flag of France...

...We follow...

...We cross the border from Hungary, and drive the ten minutes into Oradea...

...At each of perhaps a hundred graves, flowers bloom inside a concrete frame, and a wooden cross tells the name of the dead...

...Many pictures show the manner of death...

...Christ is infinitely more than diseased historical time...

...And so the people twinned themselves with a village in France, hoping international attention might slow Ceausescu down...

...Roses and blue poppies bloom at the base of her black skirt and rise onto the matching vest...

...It still is...

...To the right, the Romanian flag, that circular gap in its center...

...Below, an open book shows a dove with an olive branch...

...A man at a booth sells candles, which we light and place in sand with the hundreds of others, beneath a metal cowl...

...A drizzle begins...

...Bricklaying, carpentry, prayer, and the planting of trees...

...women in flowered skirts and flowered scarves, and heavy socks and cardigans though the sun is warm...

...Large and convincingly, beside the altar-screen, a painted Christ raises Lazarus...

...Here this Sunday the marchers are singing the same song: asking this church to join with them, the bride...

...Afterward in Father Nemes's office suite-in one of those adjacent apartments-we watch on television the Ascension Day service led by the Patriarch in Bucharest...

...But his congregation kept on growing...

...Maramures in the central north, tucked against the Soviet border...

...Puzzling over the local slang we come up with this merry translation: While on earth I played the game, Johnny Cupca was my name...

...Three times they march singing around her house...

...He ripped out two fingernails of Nadia Comaneci...

...The Romanians were left instead to build of their forests' wood, which the Protestant rulers hoped would rot with time-like the Orthodox church itself...

...In this Transylvanian city, neglect and decay...

...Father Nemes watches through happy tears...

...Nicu their playboy-addict-sadist son kept a torture chamber...

...Though metal bells are no longer forbidden, the toaca still summons the faithful, each nick in the soft board a record of their worship...

...In a corner of the sanctuary we take a spontaneous ecumenical Ascension-Day communion-the priest, we two of the United Church of Canada, and Katalan Halasz our interpreter, an ethnic Hungarian Protestant...

...May 24, Thursday...

...May 26, Saturday...

...A resonant translation...

...it has held till now...

...He was seventeen...

...Alexandra Radu Ionescu, 1972-1989...

...Timisoara, birthplace of last December's revolution...

...But those of Romanian Orthodox faith have worshipped for a generation in inherited churches such as this one...

...We notice many onlookers crying...

...We have flown across the Carpathians to Bucharest...

...Then, all begin to sing: an ancient folk-tune, in Phrygian-Greek mode, mournful, yet affirmative...

...A soldier cutting off this man's head...

...May 20, Sunday...

...In the main square where no-one-knows-how-many died there is ferment still: makeshift stages and banners (Jos Communismul: Communism Down), and sleep-in protesters, and vendors of new political papers, and knots of men and women reading them, or engaged in vehement discussions...

...They stop outside a church: their bishop's cathedral, until Ceausescu gave it to the Orthodox...

...The woman who painted this began in the mid-1970s, when had started to grow crueller and more repressive, with more and more obvious symptoms of insanity...

...Caci nici de la rasarit, nici de la apus, nici din muntiipustiei nu vine ajutorul...

...Outside it we are drawn to three polished oak crosses which honor the revolutionary dead: gifts of the maestros of Birsana, Romania's foremost village of carvers...

...Of all denominations, the Communists disliked most the Western-oriented Greek-Catholics...

...Father Nemes brings from behind the altar screen another tray of consecrated bread...

...and so the bishop's installation must take place outside...

...We've encountered in this graveyard material deep in Romanian character: Through their long appalling history they've kept a laughter so profound and persistent that you'd have to call it religious...

...Inside the church, an assistant priest and the congregation are celebrating Ascension Day Mass...

...Chronic liars, the Ceausescus deceived everyone, including themselves...

...May 16, Wednesday...

...We attend a new Orthodox church in a laborers' district of Oradea...

...At eye-level all around the thick log walls runs a carved representation of twisted-hemp rope...

...On the wall hangs a battered wooden board, the toaca...

...Truth became hard to determine...

...Their mood is cautious though not cynical, accepting though not passive, pleasant though hardly festive: the peasant mood implanted by centuries of living with the valley and the seasons-and with capricious overlords...

...On each white sleeve, hand-embroidered tulips and bluebells climb to the shoulder as if up a trellis...

...Many surrounding Securitate brought their children to him, secretly, to baptize...

...Jerome whisks and plunges joyfully from room to room, showcase to showcase, from one sacred artifact to the one adjacent, leaping and pointing-"Look at this one...

...Umbrellas above and the rain-spattered lace underskirts below create about the bishops a heartwarming sense of human susceptibility...

...Five generations of Stancius have been monks at Cernica...

...In the new Romania, in time, perhaps, good will and tough negotiations may settle such matters...

...He leads us around his church's facades, neo-Byzantine domes above caramel-painted stucco walls...

...Maramures villagers gather apart from the bishops...

...We walk up Lorau's single dirt side-street to the Orthodox church...

...Satan and two grotesque minions cower in dismay below: Christ comes to judge...

...What she wears represents hour after hour of loving handcraft, a tradition of making beautiful things, decorating life to praise it...

...Christmas evergreen branches entwined with recent roses still adorn all three memorials...

...Largest in the middle, with the Father and the Holy Spirit, Christ has arrived...

...This is a day to share...

...Jerome is handsome, a broad-browed man in his thirties, with glittering brown eyes and flowing hair and a beard that descends to his long black gown...

...People catch disease, alas...

...All wear their festive and distinctive village costumes...

...While we eat, says Jerome, we must ponder what task God has given us this food for...

...Icons for example, painted on glass-cheery, naively painted saints, floating fantastically in perspectiveless space, like paintings of the early Chagall...

...We explore among the markers...

...Painted saints keep watch, and incense and the cantor's resonant voice surround us...

...May 27, Sunday...

...The singers have adapted an old folk custom...

...We've never seen such profound exuberance...

...Two outer pillars are carved in that symbol of the rope-unity from bondage...

...He surveys the assembled...

...Craftsmen with hammer and chisel are at work making permanent markers, identical white slabs, one for each who died...

...Last fall Ceausescu put Lorau on his list to be razed...

...Some wear Western clothes-suits and ties, dresses and nylons and heels...

...Jerome brings us to lunch in the huge refectory...

...the under-brick gapes through...

...Everyone tells, unprompted, tales of the Ceausescus...

...most bear a photo...

...Smelt that the monks catch in the lake, wine from their own vineyard, bread baked here in the kitchen, aromatic soup of vegetables from the monastery garden...

...At Europe's edge where East and West blocs meet, Romanians struggle for their own solutions...

...Smiling groups of nuns float and rustle by-float, because we cannot see their feet touch the ground beneath their habits...

...Now instead of wine, Father Nemes says, he harvests life: not vin but viata is his word-play in Romanian...

...An old woman with a rag is wiping each marker...

...To the villagers the liturgy, unlike elections, is familiar, the cantor's song and the old slow chants...

...But more, because Romania's been monstrously misgoverned by certifiable psychotics-the Ceausescus-and yet we are friends of friends of many good people who live there...

...Some folk into health I put, Some of their ills I made kaput...

...After the ceremony the bishops and the priests and nuns withdraw through the streets...

...Ascension Day...

...Yes: On either side of the altar-screen, the congregation has erected flags...

...They march through the city center, singing...

...The most moving moments of this day are yet to come...

...Beggars abound, stowed on sidewalks with pant-legs pulled up to show us, ostentatiously, ulcerous legs, withered legs, artificial legs...

...May 23, Wednesday...

...Those of Strimtina wear orange-and-black-striped aprons...

...But then, irked at this congregation's health, the Ceausescu State expropriated parts of the churchyard, and put up cheap apartment blocks, stocked with Securitate, the secret police...

...That such an event," he exclaims, "could be broadcast in my country...

...The monastery's museum fills Jerome with particular happiness...

...The women of Sacel wear elf-toed high-laced moccasins...

...They got sick-I raked in cash...

...An image of woven unity-craftily made from an image of bondage...

...For neither from east nor west nor from the desert mountains shall come our aid...

...Bishops in gold-embroidered cloaks move in procession down the promenade, through these applauding crowds...

...Here each wooden shingle is curved across its bottom edge, giving an effect like scales, the texture of living skin...

...Twenty minutes east of the city, we cross a narrow causeway to an island in a lake: the Romanian Orthodox monastery of Cernica...

...Once, vineyards surrounded it...

...There is Maimonides, and Krishna from the Bhagavadgita...

...Beneath each picture, memorial doggerel has been carved, four-beat lines in rhyming couplets of Sapinta dialect...

...Rain falls on bishops too...

...Jerome puts on an LP to share the meal by: choral music of communion liturgy...

...At the village of Sapinta we peer over the high stone fence of a churchyard-peer onto row upon blue wooden row of tall slabs of cross-topped grave markers: The Laughing Cemetery...

...The illustrated ceiling and walls show tableaux from Cernica's history, and from the brothers' work...

...Rare among Romanian priests, he has served abroad...

...We spot Cleopatra, and there the Marquise de Pompadour...

...One shows a doctor-white coat, stethoscope...

...One of Romania's most isolated districts...

...Till then, the villagers have gathered in the rain for a prayer and courtship, singing the old song...

...Where are they going...

...Mere history is redeemed...

...and lecturing and telling tales of each in a tumbling mixture of English and Romanian...

...The mark of the old regime ripped out, leaving a mutilation where the future and the center should be...

...Here is a mood of infinitely less detachment than that of the voters down the hill...

...This morning's service includes a baptism...

...Leaders hold aloft on standards the banners of each congregation...

...Vampires who got blood transfusions daily from children...

...Still in Carpathian foothills, west of the town of Beius, we climb a steep hill to Transylvania's best wooden church...

...Election day, Romania's first since the Communists came in...

...This woman spins wool...

...When a young man is in love, villagers gather with him outside the home of his hoped-for bride to be, singing to her to come outside to join them, and to join with him in married love...

...The name means Great Bath, after the healing thermal waters beneath the city...

...On election day, symbol of hope for a new beginning to Romania's battered history...

...foreigners are rare, and life has changed little since medieval days...

...In the final room, Jerome leads us to a painting of the Apocalypse...

...Men and women pray and tend the graves-cultivate the gardens, drape wreaths around the crosses...

...Though the verses and tableaux show life hard and unpredictable, their style-the doggerel and cartooniness-makes you laugh...

...Here are displayed treasures of the centuries since Cernica's founding...

...The mother wears her traditional handmade costume...

...In the central park by a temporary platform a crowd has been gathering since dawn...

...The style is naive, the perspective flat, the colors bright, the costumes traditional...

...Here in oil is all of human history represented...

...In English, Jerome...

...My job as a doc was to treat earth's sons...

...Each village style is unique...

...A young man in a floppy straw hat walks grave to grave reciting from memory his favorite verses...

...A stubborn, distinctive beauty, born from repression...

...The priest anoints her infant with water and with oil...

...Here comes the papal envoy, cheery red face and shining purple-pink gown...

...The post-Ceausescu government has promised to return all confiscated Greek-Catholic properties...

...Others dress in their village costumes...

...Ceausescu, of course, did not allow religion on the airwaves...

...Over and over they sing the same four lines...

...Not just in a painting, and not in some millennial future, but now and always, says Jerome, if we have prepared ourselves...

...We want to know: How have some kept their souls in a country where so much has gone so wrong...

...An Orthodox congregation occupies the former Greek-Catholic cathedral in Baia Mare...

...another bends to a kitchen table...

...They confiscated churches and turned many over to the Orthodox...

...Hymns in oak to the revolutionary Christ, type of Romania's martyrs, who in face of Caesars and Ceausescus rendered unto their God what was God's, and died...

...From the square you look down the promenade to the tall church formerly of Turges Laszlo, the Hungarian-Protestant priest whose sermons against repression were sparks that helped set the revolution burning...

...They continue to sing...

...One cross rises four metres high, in designs of astonishing complexity, as if the carver did not want to stop...

...On each is carved a representation of whoever lies beneath...

...Some are stolid, some in tears...

...She beams with shy pride...

...Look at this...

...Monk Ieronim Stanciu greets us...

...We've come to watch the installation of Lucian Muresan as Greek-Catholic bishop for Maramures...

...We're in Lorau, a Transylvanian village by the Crisul Repede River, tucked into Carpathian foothills...

...The carver shows death in gruesome detail: the severed head spurts blood...

...It's huge, two meters high or more, at least three meters long...

...After a while, without some context of authentic information, you don't know what not to believe...

...We're each alive on earth just once...

...Here in the capital me people have placed a heroes' cemetery, burying together the Bucharest martyrs of December's revolution...

...They were paranoid hypochondriacs who for fear of germs never wore the same clothes twice...

...Men in shapeless suit coats and narrow-brimmed felt hats...

...The ear of one paper quotes the 75th Psalm...

...Struck by a wooden mallet, its tone spreads loud and resonant...

...Lorau is still here, and the French flag, to show what these worshippers affirm, that God's community is international...

...Mother with child and family and closest friends kneel in a cluster for his blessing...

...May 22, Tuesday...

...Above, a banner drapes the monument's multiple roofs, embroidered with the head of Christ in thorns...

...After voting they do not go home, but stand outside to talk...

...Did a faith that their God gives new life help these villagers through the years of Ceausescu...

...The people took lovingly to wood, a material to them alive and organic...

...Still in Maramures, through the mountain pass south to Baia Mare...

...On many buildings, the stucco has peeled and sags...