Painted Monestaries
Trip Start
Sep 03, 2007
1
4
11
Trip End
Sep 15, 2007
Suceava, Romania
Friday, September 7, 2007
(late 15th to early 16th century, and another WH site). Unfortunately,
the only way was a primary road, down to one lane most of the way,
through the mountains. The Carpathian mountains! I took a picture of
a tourist trap "Dracula Land". The mountains were gorgeous, but the
road was terrible, and the trip took several hours longer than expected.
We arrived in the first monastery and it was breathtaking. They are
painted on every surface with pictures about 3' X 5', inside and out.
They tell bible stories (mostly new testament and prophets) and
describe the saints and martyrs of the Romanian Orthodox church.
There are 9, and they all have similarities - frescoes of the last
judgment, the resurrection. But they are all slightly different. They
are all working monasteries. We went to 3 or 4. Luckily, they are all
open until 8 PM, since we didn't get to the area until 4 PM. One
monastery was getting ready for evening mass. One of the nuns was
walking around the church with a wooden pole, rhythmically beating it,
stopping at every corner to bow and bless, then mass started, with the
priest singing his part and the nuns answering.
The
monasteries were fairly spread out. In the Northern area, the village
signs were in both Latin and Cyrillic alphabet. Romanian and Russian?
Copy and paste this link into a new browser for pictures of the painted monasteries:
http://tinyurl.com/ynjurt
Comments
This time I went to your photo album first!
I looked at the painted monastery pictures - beautiful! Reminds me of St. Peter's in Vatican City. Okay, now I show my ignorance - I thought (phonetic spelling alert) Chowchescue (I know that's not near how it's supposed to be spelled but you know who I mean) suppressed the church during his rule and doesn't that usually mean they pretty much fall apart? (I'm thinking Cromwell and the churches and monasteries in England) So how did these survive?
Re: This time I went to your photo album first!
As of 2002 86% of Romanians identified themselves as Orthodox (Wikipedia), which is an incredibly high percentage. From what I observed, people not only say they are religious, they seems to attend church. Most houses in the rural areas have a chapel in the front.
Villiage signs in Northern area
>The monasteries were fairly spread out. In the
>Northern area, the village signs were in both Latin
> and Cyrillic alphabet. Romanian and Russian?
They are in Ukrainian because in those regions near the Ukrainian border there lives an ukrainian minority, and according to romanian law every village/city/etc with a minority of at least 20% is allowed to have bilingual signs. In Harghita and Covasna you will se Romanian/Hungarian, in south Transylvania, they might be Romanian/German and there are also places with signs in Romanian/German/Hungarian.