What can make a name funny? Its sound? Its meaning? The person who bears it? A mistranslation? A political joke? A village whose name suddenly sounds obscene centuries after it was created? Or simply the gap between what a name promises and what its bearer turns out to be?
For three days, 9–11 September 2026, Baia Mare becomes an unusually appropriate place to ask such questions. The seventh International Conference on Onomastics “Name and Naming” (ICONN 7) has opened at the “Petre Dulfu” County Library under the theme “Onomastics and Humour.” Local coverage describes more than 80 participants from 20 countries, participating both in Baia Mare and online. The conference is organised by the Centre of Onomastics of the Faculty of Letters, North University Centre of Baia Mare, Technical University of Cluj-Napoca, in cooperation with Maramureș County Council and Visit Maramureș, with ICOS, the Nicolae Felecan Foundation and the “Petre Dulfu” Library among its partners.
The programme confirms just how widely the organisers have interpreted their theme. Humour is investigated in anthroponymy, toponymy, literature and film, political discourse, advertising, social media, translation, astronomy, gastronomy, folklore, sport and everyday naming practices. The academic sessions take place on 9 and 10 September, before the conference moves into the landscape of Maramureș itself on 11 September, with an excursion through Certeze, Săpânța, Sighetu Marmației and Sat Șugatag.
Rather than following room numbers and time slots, let us walk through ICONN 7 in another way. Imagine the conference as a House of Humorous Names, with several doors. Behind each lies a different reason why names make us smile - and sometimes why that smile deserves serious examination.
The five doors opened by the plenary lectures
The plenary programme already sketches the intellectual geography of the conference.
Emma Tămâianu-Morita - “Puns on brand and company names in Japanese TV commercials: A text-linguistic analysis.” Japanese advertisements turn names such as brands and companies into raw material for phonetic and lexical play. The paper examines Wasei Eigo, covert bilingualism and the creation of new Japanese words from commercial names, arguing that humour forms part of a broader “soft-sell” advertising strategy.
Peter Jordan - “Toponyms as ‘condensed narratives’ about the geographical feature denoted – occasionally not without humour.” Two tiny settlements in the narrow Raccolana Valley, Piani di Quà and Piani di Là — roughly “the plains over here” and “the plains over there” — illustrate how a place-name can compress a community's perception of landscape into a miniature narrative. Calling such tiny spaces “plains” is itself almost an act of geographical humour.
Margareta Manu Magda - “Criterii de apreciere a nuanțelor ironice în antroponimie (cazul limbii române).” Rather than merely collecting amusing names, Manu Magda asks a more difficult theoretical question: how do we recognise irony in anthroponymy? Her distinction between constitutive and functional irony places the interpretation of names within functional and cognitive linguistics.
Grant W. Smith - “Some possible terms for literary onomastics.” Smith approaches the subject from the terminological side. Since the ICOS list of key onomastic terms does not provide a developed terminology for literary onomastics, he proposes distinctions involving narratives, borrowings and coinages that could provide the field with a more precise analytical vocabulary.
And Justyna Walkowiak - “Once upon a hodonym: Fairytale and pop-cultural street names in contemporary Poland” takes us onto actual streets named after Winnie-the-Pooh, Sesame Street or Cinderella. These are not merely amusing municipal curiosities: Walkowiak argues that such names domesticate global popular culture, humanise anonymous suburban environments and help market neighbourhoods as family-friendly places.
These five lectures already reveal something important: onomastic humour is rarely “just a joke.” It can sell, classify, narrate, interpret landscape and reshape public space.
Room I: The Name as a Social Mirror
Personal names are perhaps the most dangerous place for humour, because a joke about a name is almost inevitably a joke about a person.
Annika Hussar - “On Estonian first names and their interpretation” reminds us that comic perception changes historically: an unusual Estonian name that sounds strange today may have been perfectly meaningful when it was bestowed, while spelling and cross-linguistic coincidences can create humour that the original name-givers never intended.
Gergana Petkova, Veronika Kelbecheva and Vanya Ivanova - “Being ‘Salfetka’ among Maria and Ivan in Bulgarian anthroponymy” set striking modern names against an older Bulgarian tradition of unusual or deliberately “ugly” protective names. Salfetka ‘napkin’ may surprise outsiders, but such names can carry individuality, family history and older naming logic rather than merely comic intent.
Kitti Hauber - “Names based on anecdotes. The cognitive schema of circumstantial Hungarian family names” shows another path from event to name: embarrassing, spectacular or humorous incidents become stories, stories become social knowledge, and sometimes that knowledge becomes a surname or nickname.
At the University of Miskolc, Judit Kecskés - “Sources of humor in vulgos, the special kind of nicknames used by students of the University of Miskolc” investigates a naming tradition in which student nicknames reinforce group membership while exploiting sounds, blends, incongruity and even unexpectedly long name forms.
Several Romanian papers approach nicknaming from complementary angles. Daiana Felecan - “Poreclele – sursă de umor în antroponimie. Între creativitate denominativă și pragmatică socială” develops an interdisciplinary account of the nickname as an unconventional anthroponym and examines the mechanisms and social functions of comic naming. Gabriela-Sînziana Ioaneș - “Poreclele – între funcția identificatoare și dimensiunea umoristică” places particular emphasis on the boundary between humour and offence: irony, metaphor, hyperbole and contrast may bond a community, but the same nickname can function as attenuated aggression. That boundary becomes still sharper in Daiana Felecan and Alexandra Iliescu-Bujor - “Fenomenul poreclirii în spațiul public românesc între umor și stigmatizare.” Their public figures - politicians, athletes and celebrities - demonstrate how quickly playful evaluation can become sarcasm, insult or stigma in television, online journalism and social media.
Simona Goicu-Cealmof - “Umorul și poreclele politicienilor români actuali” focuses specifically on contemporary political nicknames and the mechanisms by which appearance, behaviour, quotations, cultural associations and wordplay are turned into compact evaluations of public personalities.
Adriana Stoichițoiu Ichim - “Telescoparea antroponimică – sursă a umorului în spațiul public românesc” studies a particularly aggressive technique: deliberately blending a politician's name with another lexical element. These portmanteau anthroponyms become simultaneously playful, evaluative and persuasive instruments of political ridicule.
The potentially painful side of funny surnames appears in Oliviu Felecan - “Umorul în numele de familie românești.” His starting point includes memories of children searching telephone books for amusing surnames and prank-calling their bearers - behaviour we would now readily recognise as bullying. Historical requests to change “shameful” surnames show that onomastic humour has genuine consequences for the people carrying the names.
A comparable historical dimension is developed by János N. Fodor - “Negative connotation as a reason for changing surnames in Hungary in the 19th century.” Hungarian surnames resembling words meaning such things as ‘frog’ or ‘sausage’, or foreign surnames acquiring unfortunate Hungarian associations, could motivate their bearers to seek a different family name.
Sabrina Palinkas - “Umorul în antroponimia contemporană: mecanisme semantice și pragmatice în cazul numelor din județul Satu Mare” turns to unintended humour. A surname may be inherited, a first name deliberately chosen, yet the eventual combination can acquire comic meanings through later social interpretation. The important distinction is therefore between naming intention and subsequent reception.
The intercultural dimension becomes particularly visible in Ioana Dolca - “Practici onomastice în comunitățile rome: între identitate, creativitate și umor.” Rather than treating unconventional names simply as objects of laughter, the study examines them as identity strategies shaped by family choice, media culture and social aspiration, while also considering how outsiders perceive them.
Anna Tsepkova - “Language play in Russian unconventional anthroponymic practices (Case study: Contemporary nicknames of Novosibirsk region)” analyses parody, rhyme, homonymy, alliteration, pseudo-allusion and metaphor as ways of reshaping official names into unofficial comic ones.
Bíbor Klára Kovács-Sipos - “László László and Csák Norisz – Humorous name combinations in Hungary” explores surname–given-name combinations which internet users find funny because they accidentally resemble ordinary phrases, famous names or repetitive sound patterns - though some parents deliberately create precisely such combinations.
Kudzai Cathrine Bingisai - “Nicknames and their significance for the Shona speaking people in Zimbabwe” broadens the cultural field still further: Shona nicknames emerge through family, friendship, personal characteristics and particular events, and humour may function both as shared laughter and as mockery.
Naming even becomes a matter of legislation in Kitti Hauber, Judit Kozma and Bíbor Klára Kovács-Sipos - “Humouring around names. The bittersweet aspects of first-name requests in Hungary.” Hungary's regulated first-name inventory has generated both serious attempts to introduce unusual names and deliberate applications designed to test, mock or disrupt the naming system.
Finally, Mihaela Munteanu Siserman and Iulia Mateiu - “Despre utilizarea vocabularului sexualității în apelative românești și franceze: între derizoriu și complicitate” investigate Romanian and French forms of address drawn from sexual vocabulary, asking how expressions that look offensive in isolation can, depending on context, signal mockery, intimacy, solidarity or complicity.
The lesson of this first room is therefore uncomfortable but essential: a humorous name is never funny in isolation. There is always a name-giver, a bearer, an audience and a social relationship between them.
Room II: When the Map Starts Laughing
Place-names are safer targets - a hill cannot be offended. Yet even here the conference repeatedly asks whether humour belongs to the original act of naming or only to later interpretation.
Katalin Reszegi and Evelin Mozga - “Verbal humor in unofficial Hungarian toponyms” examine informal names documented by the Hungarian National Toponym Registry. A tiny stream may grandly become the Nile, a narrow field may look like a trouser leg, and an unprestigious area may borrow the name of an elite Budapest district. Humour grows out of metaphor, disproportion and social evaluation.
Adelina Emilia Mihali - “Oiconime românești – între etimologie și umor” examines Romanian media lists of supposedly “funny” settlement names and asks how many really have comic origins. Present-day speakers often reinterpret historically innocent names through modern homonyms, sometimes assigning obscene associations that have little to do with the actual etymology.
The same tension is central to Daniela Butnaru - “Fascinația toponimiei: între divertisment și rigoare științifică.” Fantastic etymologies, invented legends and even false place-names can flourish in journalism and social media precisely because they are entertaining. The danger, Butnaru argues, is that a good story may become more attractive than documented linguistic history.
Ana-Maria Prisacaru - “Nume de locuri licențioase între etimologie toponimică și percepție umoristică” makes the distinction especially vivid. Toponyms now interpreted as indecent may derive from personal names, landscape descriptions or older vocabulary. What modern users hear as vulgar may therefore tell us more about contemporary linguistic perception than about the original denominator.
The host region itself becomes a corpus in Luca Sângeorzan - “Umorul în nomenclatura stradală din Baia Mare și Maramureș.” Historical administrative changes and present-day mismatches between street names and their referents create opportunities for both diachronic and synchronic humour in the urbanonymy of Maramureș.
From Romania the map moves to Italy. Federica Cugno - “Forme e dimensioni dell’ironia nella toponimia di tradizione orale del Piemonte” uses material from the Atlante Toponomastico del Piemonte Montano to identify irony in traditional oral place-names, especially through antiphrasis, hyperbole and the playful replication of better-known toponyms.
Three Czech and Hungarian contributions approach the same phenomenon from different directions. Pavel Štěpán - “Humour in Czech toponyms” distinguishes genuinely humorous motivations from amusing folk etymologies and examines settlement names, fields, forests, waters and roads. Dávid Wendl - “Humorous toponymy of the Kalocsai Sárköz region (Hungary)” works toward a typology based on anecdotes, events, semantic associations, expressive sound and occasionally obscenity.
Martina Zirhutová - “Jára Cimrman in Czech toponymy: Mystification, humour, and cultural identity” introduces perhaps the perfect humorous commemorand: Jára Cimrman, the fictional Czech universal genius. Streets, paths, lookout towers and other sites named after a man who never existed turn an elaborate national joke into geographical reality.
And in New Zealand, Philip Matthews - “A town like no udder: Humour with a place name” examines how the town of Bulls has transformed its name into a local branding system through bovine puns. Here humour is not an accidental interpretation of a toponym: it has become an economic resource.
Place-names, these papers collectively suggest, sit somewhere between history and imagination. A map records geography, but it also records what communities have noticed, misunderstood, exaggerated, mocked and remembered.
Room III: Names for Sale, Names Online, Names in the Wild
Humour does not merely identify. It attracts attention - an invaluable property wherever names compete in marketplaces, media or digital space.
Tereza Slaměníková - “Humorous naming strategies in Taipei’s night markets” shows food-stall owners competing for the eyes and memories of customers through homophony, ambiguity and culturally embedded references, including Taiwanese Hokkien. Humour functions simultaneously as advertisement, social contact and local identity.
In Awni Khasawneh - “Humor in names: Representations of identity and popular protest in Jordanian naming practices,” commercial names, tribal names and digital pseudonyms become vehicles for satire, self-expression and symbolic protest. Naming humour here emerges as a form of cultural resilience under social and economic pressure.
Keita Ikarashi and Akihiko Sakamoto - “Japanese product names with oboreru: How multiple interpretations contribute to their ‘sense’” investigate the Japanese verb oboreru ‘to drown’. A burger can metaphorically be “drowning in cheese,” while the consumer may simultaneously be imagined as immersed in it. Commercial naming exploits exactly this semantic multiplicity.
Davide Astori - “Quando il nome fa il monaco. Per una creatività umoristico-ergonimica in italiano” examines invented pseudo-names and joke names whose sounds evoke professions, national stereotypes or familiar personalities. The joke depends on recognition - but also raises questions about translatability and stereotyping.
Humour also grows in a rather different naming ecosystem: folk botany. Delia-Anamaria Răchișan - “Fitonime amuzante” contrasts scientific plant terminology with regional popular names, where physical appearance, household use, animals, the human body and even taboo vocabulary preserve fragments of traditional rural humour.
The digital self receives its own onomastic category in Diana Dimirache - “Autonumirea digitală între mască, brand și umor: o analiză socioonomastică a pseudonimului online.” The online pseudonym can function simultaneously as mask, personal brand and comic performance, leading Dimirache toward the concept of “digital autoonomastics.”
Nicoleta Dănilă Amargheoalei - “Traducere și comic în denumiri și concepte din domeniul informaticii” explores what happens when names and technical concepts pass between languages - or through automated translation. Ambiguity and inappropriate semantic choices can generate accidental comedy, but those errors also expose where human interpretation remains necessary.
Daiana Felecan and Cristina Peride - “Romgleza ca sursă de umor: parodie și calcuri în discursul contemporan românesc” examine humorous Romanian-English mixing, from exaggerated code-switching to conspicuous English calques. The comic effect arises when bilingual forms feel deliberately overdone or unexpectedly alien within Romanian discourse.
Wine receives a personality of its own in Manuela Mihăescu - “Antroponimele și ‘personalitatea’ vinului.” Tasting notes anthropomorphise wine with bodies, legs, attacks and temperaments; their collisions between technical terminology and sensual metaphor can produce subtle, sometimes unintended humour while simultaneously creating a marketable identity for the product.
Names created inside artistic workshops form another specialised microculture. George Dan Istrate - “Caracterul ludic al supranumelor de atelier” examines Italian artists' workshop bynames, showing how an originally playful or descriptive nickname may ultimately become the historically dominant name of the artist.
Football provides an equally fertile field. Oliviu Felecan and Rebeca-Ioana Petruș - “Denumiri de cluburi sportive în România: între creativitate și umor” investigate lower-league Romanian club names inspired by animals, history, geography and intentionally playful concepts - a reminder that institutional names need not adopt institutional solemnity.
Even economics develops an onomastic sense of humour. Susana Duarte Martins - “Naming the economy: Identity, stereotypes, and irony in linguistic shortenings” examines motivated acronyms such as PIGS, STUPID, BRICS, CARBS and CASHH. Abbreviation ceases to be mere compression: it classifies countries, constructs narratives and encodes positive or negative evaluation.
And humour escapes the Earth altogether in Judit Kozma and László Szabados - “Humor in the heavens - From official nomenclature to witty acronyms.” Astronomical naming may look like one of the most tightly regulated naming systems imaginable, yet nicknames, acronyms and witty technical designations demonstrate that even official nomenclature cannot entirely suppress linguistic play.
Finally, Valeriia Neklesova and Olena Karpenko - “Participatory culture: Onymic play” take us into memes, fandoms and AI-assisted creativity. Names of famous people and phenomena are endlessly recombined, while obscure names may themselves be propelled toward virality through collective wordplay.
Room IV: Names Take the Stage - Literature, Theatre and Film
If real-world names accumulate unintended associations, literary names are often created precisely so that associations will accumulate around them.
Mariann Slíz - “Categorisation and typicality as means of onomastic humour” uses Jenő Rejtő's humorous novel A tizennégy karátos autó to show how comedy arises when characters misclassify names - confusing proper names with common nouns or drawing mistaken ethnic and social conclusions from what they consider a “typical” name.
The darker consequences of literary naming are addressed by David Morariu - “Names, naming and otherness: An onomastic discourse analysis of ethnic and xenophobic humor in the Romanian novel (1845–1947).” Drawing on a digital corpus of more than 1,200 novels, the paper investigates how supposedly comic naming can reproduce stereotypes about foreigners and ethnic minorities.
Andrada Savin - “Memory and nature in Thomas Perle’s ein jederman/domnul iedeman” examines a bilingual title whose echoes include both the Jedermann tradition and the Romanian company name Dedeman. Naming becomes part of a larger grotesque meditation on environment, identity, memory and Transylvanian–Austrian relations.
Translation is central to Denisa-Alexandra Ionescu - “I Malavoglia e i nomi parlanti. Studio comparato delle traduzioni in inglese e rumeno.” “Speaking names” condense characterisation and cultural knowledge, making their translation a test not just of language competence but of the translator's ability to reconstruct an entire cultural world.
Religious texts provide two surprising varieties of onomastic irony. Mirona Bence-Muk - “La valenza ironica dei nomi propri nel testo della Sacra Scrittura” explores the tension between a biblical name's meaning and the reality experienced by its bearer, interpreting this not as sarcasm but as a subtler theological form of irony. Octavian Gordon - “Umorul sobru al lui Dumnezeu: contraste ironice în antroponomastica Patericului egiptean” finds a similarly restrained “name humour” in the Apophthegmata Patrum, where irony leads toward spiritual reflection rather than laughter.
Film history receives its own remarkable translation story in Marcela-Cristina Oțoiu - “Umorul în traducere: cazul lui Stan și Bran.” The Romanian transformation of Laurel and Hardy into Stan și Bran is treated as an unusually successful cultural adaptation: the protagonists' names are domesticated so thoroughly that generations of Romanian viewers know them through their Romanian onomastic alter egos.
Romanian literature occupies a substantial part of this room. Raluca Giurgiulescu - “Umorul numelor în literatura română. Particularități ale antroponimiei comice la Marin Sorescu” places Sorescu within a longer Romanian tradition of comic character naming, from Alecsandri and Caragiale onward, and shows how the names of La Lilieci help build its vivid rural universe.
Tünde-Emese Șterța - “Valențe comice ale numelor proprii în literatura pentru copii” - with Daiana Felecan also named in the abstract volume - treats humorous names as more than decoration: because children readily respond to them, they can stimulate attention, interpretation, imagination and reading pleasure.
In the theatre of the absurd, Florina Babici - “Antroponimele ionesciene – între umor și paradox” examines the names in Eugène Ionesco's The Chairs and The Bald Soprano. Generic-seeming names, antonomasia and contradictions between designation and character produce a specifically tragicomic onomastic logic.
Animation offers a spectacular laboratory for wordplay. Alina Bugheșiu - “Names as objects of lexical-semantic wordplay in Pinky and the Brain (1995–1998)” analyses more than seventy examples in which names from cinema, music, literature, politics, geography and other domains are altered until their referential function gives way to comic semantic play.
Marie A. Rieger and Vincenzo Amendolara - “From Winnetou to Winnetouch. The role of names in the deconstruction of exotifying adventure novels” look at Michael Herbig's parodies of Karl May. Names become instruments through which a culturally iconic but increasingly problematic Western mythology can be humorously dismantled and re-evaluated.
In Brazilian literature, Anna Maria Godoy da Silva and Márcia Sipavicius Seide - “Between irony and humour: The first names Omar and Halin in the novel Two Brothers by Milton Hatoum” locate irony in the mismatch between etymological meaning and fictional biography: names suggest qualities that the characters' behaviour conspicuously fails to realise.
Traditional narrative receives a Romanian counterpart in Silvia Iluț - “Numele umoristice din basmele românești: funcții și valențe expresive.” Names such as Flămânzilă, Setilă or Strâmbă-Lemne do not merely identify fairy-tale figures; they sketch bodies, appetites and personalities while activating a recognisably local tradition of verbal humour.
An unusual historical case comes from George Dan Istrate - “Sinergia dintre textul literar, imaginea vizuală și denominație în simbologia Accademiei della Crusca.” In the seventeenth-century Accademia della Crusca, pseudonyms, mottos, portraits and the famous flour-and-bran symbolism form an integrated semiotic system in which playfulness and scholarly seriousness coexist.
Felicia Mich - “Antroponimele – mecanisme ale umorului în La Lilieci (vol. IV–VI)” revisits Sorescu through Freud. Humorous personal names and nicknames become mechanisms through which a community processes poverty, tension and negative affect, converting difficult experience into socially manageable laughter.
And Daiana Felecan and Maria Diana Iuga - “Ipostaze ale onomasticii umoristice în literatura română” widen the lens to non-canonical Romanian authors, examining how suggestive and ironic anthroponyms characterise individuals, expose social types and construct comic situations.
This room perhaps makes the conference's central principle clearest of all: in literature, a name can function like a miniature text.
Room V: When Laughter Carries History, Resistance and Power
Some of the most thought-provoking ICONN 7 papers concern situations in which humour appears where one least expects it.
Žaneta Dvořáková - “Names in Czech jokes during World War II” turns to joke collections from the German occupation. Humour offered temporary escape, but also resistance and a means of ridiculing political power and collaborators; proper names were among the raw materials through which that resistance was encoded.
Halyna Matsyuk - “Theory of humorous onomastics and its development based on new lexical resources in contemporary Ukrainian linguistics” applies an interdisciplinary model to military call signs in Bohdan Zholdak's screenplay narrative Ukry, treating wartime pseudonyms as secondary nominations whose meanings can carry a specifically humorous component.
Edlira Abdurahmani - “Dimensions of humor in Albanian onomastics: A temporal, spatial, contextual, and cultural analysis” argues for a broad cultural reading of humour. Albanian nicknames, anthroponyms, urban names, commercial names and other naming practices reveal how humour varies according to time, community, register and cultural mentality.
Katalin Reszegi - “Verbal humor involving proper names: A cognitive linguistic approach” asks what happens inside the mind when a name becomes funny. Both the phonological and semantic “poles” of a proper name may trigger associations, incongruities and inferences; the laugh therefore emerges through active cognitive interpretation rather than residing automatically inside the name itself.
Vlad Arhipov-Fokshek - “Historical humor and sacred meaning of the idiom ‘бісові діти’ in light of the historical image of ‘boyar Foksha’: A comprehensive analysis” proposes a reconstruction linking the anthroponym Foksha, the toponym Focșani and migration history through linguistic, toponymic and genetic-genealogical evidence. Its conclusions are presented in the abstract as an attempt to move a folkloric figure into the sphere of historical investigation.
And Veronika Štěpánová - “When names amuse: Humour in the Czech Language Consulting Centre” provides a useful reality check for the entire conference. Calls and emails to professional linguists contain anecdotes, folk etymologies and creative interpretations of names - and sometimes what a linguist regards as a serious answer is itself interpreted by the public as a joke. Expert and popular notions of “funny” are not necessarily the same.
So what exactly is “onomastic humour”?
After seventy scheduled contributions, a surprisingly coherent answer begins to emerge.
A name can be funny because of its form - rhyme, repetition, blending or resemblance to another word. It can be funny because of its semantics - especially when literal meaning clashes with its referent. It can become funny historically, after linguistic change makes an innocent old form resemble a modern taboo word. It can be created deliberately to attract customers, ridicule a politician, strengthen a group, advertise a neighbourhood or construct a fictional character.
But ICONN 7 repeatedly moves beyond the mechanics of the joke.
Humorous naming can create solidarity, as in student and community nicknames. It can produce stigma, bullying or pressure to change one's surname. It can become political resistance, or political aggression. It can turn a food stall into a brand, a fictional genius into a place-name, a celestial acronym into an astronomical joke, and a fairy-tale character into a street address.
That is why the theme “Onomastics and Humour” is more substantial than it might initially appear. The conference is not merely assembling curious names. It is examining the moment at which a name ceases to be a neutral identifier and begins to perform.
It may perform identity.
It may perform intimacy.
It may perform ridicule.
It may perform memory.
It may perform commerce.
And sometimes it simply performs the wonderfully human act of refusing to take language completely seriously.
A fitting final journey through Maramureș
After two dense days of plenary lectures and parallel sessions, ICONN 7 leaves the conference rooms on Friday, 11 September. The official excursion travels from Baia Mare through Certeze and Săpânța - including the Merry Cemetery and Peri Monastery - to Sighetu Marmației, its Village Museum, and Sat Șugatag, before returning to Baia Mare.
It is difficult to imagine a more appropriate conclusion to a conference on names and humour than Săpânța's Merry Cemetery: a cultural landscape in which names, identities, occupations, biographies, memory, irony and laughter literally meet on the same monuments.
The local headline calling Baia Mare “the capital of names” for three days therefore feels less like journalistic exaggeration than a rather accurate description.
For three days, at least, names are not merely being catalogued in Baia Mare.
They are being allowed to laugh.
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