The Memorial House "Stan Ioan Pătraş", also known as the Artists’ House, is the house where the artist that made the crosses from the cementery, Stan Ioan Patras was born and lived. Located at about 200-250 meters away from the cemetery, the house hosts the sculpture and painting workshop of the artist, and crosses made by him. The museum exhibits a number of sculptures in bas-relief, glass paintings, photographs of the artists’ life, but also newspaper articles. All of the exhibits displayed here make the Memorial House of Stan Ioan Pătraș a touristic site that cannot be missed by tourists visiting the Maramures County.

The merry cemetery dates from the middle of 1930 and is the creation of the local crafter Stan Ioan Pătraș, who was simultaneously a sculptor, painter and poet. Hes creativity transformed the place – a generally sad one – in a happy one, giving wood the colors of life and graving the crosses with lyrics inspired from reality and enriched with humor. This way, the cemetery became a wooden archive of the stories of the locals. The work of the artist Stan Ioan Pătraş was carried on by its apprentice Dumitru Pop Tincu.

The semantic of the name is quite far from the actual meaning of a cemetery, which makes Merry Cemetery a complex phenomenon. Even if as burials take place people go through all the normal feelings for the occasion, what distinguishes the cemetery of Săpânța from a space of grief and resignation is the desire to recreate the whole village and to give people a second life after death, through the paintings and poems of Stan Ioan Pătraş.

In the middle of August, the Intercultural Festival of Maramures Traditions "The long walk to the Merry Cemetery" is organized in Săpânța, and includes folk and classical music concerts, local products tasting, handicraft workshops and visits to handcrafters from Maramures County.