THE MEMORIAL TO THE VICTIMS OF COMMUNISM AND TO THE RESISTANCE. 1993-2014

The Paupers’ Cemetery
(at 25 kilometers toward Negreşti-Oaş)
Those who died in prison starting with 1952 were buried secretly ai night here on the banks of the Tisza (the frontier whith the URSS). Since the graves cannot be identified, a landscape project has been conceived, in which the cartographic outline of Romania is recreated using fir trees, and within this map, at the spot corresponding to the position of Sighet, a cenotaph has been build, dominated by a massive Byzantine-style cross. Within the cenotaph there are urns, bearing the Romanian folk motif of the „bird of the soul”, in which people from all over the country came to cast handfuls of earth from the places of execution, mass graves, and tombs of the victims. To the east, outside the symbolic borders created by the fir trees, there are plaques with the names of thoses who died after being deported from Romania to the Donbas and Siberia.
In the year 2012, after the biblical model of the Ladder of Life, at the entrance to the Papers’ Cemetery a monumental cross was erected, capped by a belfry and small platform from which the ensemble may be viewed (designed by architect Ştefan  Radocea).
On the same occasion, an information centre was also built, where visitors can receive directions about how to find their way aroud the cemetery. [pag. 39]