Southern Bucovina
The painted monasteries of Southern Bucovina, in the northwest corner of Moldavia, are rightfully acclaimed as masterpieces of art and architecture, steeped in history and perfectly in harmony with their surroundings. Founded in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, they were citadels of orthodoxy in an era overshadowed by the threat of infidel invaders. Grigore Roşca, Metropolitan of Moldavia in the mid-fifteenth century, is credited with the idea of covering the churches’ outer walls with paintings of biblical events and apocrypha for the benefit of the illiterate faithful. These frescoes, billboards from the late medieval world, are essentially Byzantine, but infused with the vitality of the local folk art and mythology. Though little is known about the artists, their skills were such that the paintings are still fresh after 450 years of exposure. Remarkably, the layer of colour is only 0.25mm thick, in contrast to Italian frescoes, where the paint is absorbed deep into the plaster.
Perhaps the best of these are to be found at Voroneţ, whose Last Judgement surpasses any of the other examples of this subject, and Suceviţa, with its unique Ladder of Virtue and splendid Tree of Jesse. Moldoviţa has a better all-round collection, though, and Humor has the most tranquil atmosphere of them all. Nearby Putna monastery, though lacking the visual impact of the painted monasteries, is worth a visit for its rich historical associations.
The monasteries are scattered across a region divided by rolling hills – the obcine or “crests” which branch off the Carpathians – and by the legacy of history. Although settlers from Maramureş arrived here in the mid-fourteenth century, the area remained barely populated for two centuries until Huţul shepherds moved south from the Ukrainian mountains. They lived in scattered houses in the hills, and the region was a sort of free republic until the Habsburgs annexed northern Moldavia in 1774, calling it Bucovina, a Romanianized version of their description of this beech-covered land (Büchenwald). Soon the place was organized and the Huţuls moved into villages such as Argel, Raşca, Moldoviţa and Ciocâneşti, where they could better be taxed and drafted into the army. Bucovina remained under Habsburg rule until the end of World War I, when it was returned to Romania, only to be split in half in 1940 – the northern half being occupied by the Soviet Union and incorporated into Ukraine, where it remains today. Thus, Romanians speak of Southern Bucovina to describe what is actually the far north of Moldavia – implying that Bucovina might be reunited one day. Names aside, the scenery is wonderful, with misty valleys and rivers spilling down from rocky shoulders heaving up beneath a cloak of beech and fir. The woods are at their loveliest in May and autumn.
Mănăstirea Suceviţa
Mănăstirea Suceviţa (Suceviţa monastery) – the last and grandest of the monastic complexes to be built in Bucovina – is a monument to Ieremia Movilă, Prince of Moldavia, his brother and successor Simion, and his widow, Elisabeta, who poisoned Simion so that her own sons might inherit the throne. The family first founded the village church in 1581, followed by the monastery church in 1584, and its walls, towers and belfry in stages thereafter. The fortified church’s massive, whitewashed walls and steep grey roofs radiate an air of grandeur; its frescoes – painted in 1596 by two brothers – offset brilliant reds and blues with an undercoat of emerald green.
The church
Entering the monastery through the formidable gate tower, you’re confronted by a glorious Ladder of Virtue covering the northern wall, which has been largely protected from erosion by the building’s colossal eaves. Flights of angels assist the righteous to paradise, while sinners fall through the rungs into the arms of a grinning demon. The message is reiterated in the Last Judgement inside the unusual fully closed porch – reputedly left unfinished because the artist fell to his death from the scaffolding – where angels sound the last trumpet and smite heathens with swords, Turks and Jews can be seen lamenting, and the Devil gloats in the bottom right-hand corner. Outside the south porch, you’ll see the two-headed Beast of the Apocalypse, and angels pouring rivers of fire and treading the grapes of wrath. The iron ox-collar hanging by the north doorway is a toaca, beaten to summon the nuns to prayer.
The Tree of Jesse on the south wall symbolizes the continuity between the Old Testament and the New Testament, being a literal depiction of the prophecy in Isaiah that the Messiah will spring “from the stem of Jesse”. This lush composition on a dark blue background amounts to a biblical Who’s Who, with an ancestral tree of prophets culminating in the Holy Family. The Veil represents Mary as a Byzantine empress, beneath a red veil held by angels, while the Hymn to the Virgin is illustrated with Italianate buildings and people in oriental dress. Along the bottom is a frieze of ancient philosophers clad in Byzantine cloaks – Plato bears a coffin and a pile of bones on his head, in tribute to his meditations on life and death. The paintings on the rounded east wall are no less impressive, depicting the Prayer of All Saints; cast over seven levels is a procession of angels, preachers and apostles, alongside – on the third level just above the window – the Virgin Mary holding the infant Jesus, and, above her, Jesus depicted as the Great Bishop and Judge.
Inside the narthex, the lives of the saints end in burning, boiling, spit-roasting, dismemberment or decapitation – a gory catalogue relieved somewhat by paintings of rams, suns and other zodiacal symbols. Ieremia and Simion are buried in the small tomb chamber (camera mormintelor) between narthex and naos, in marble tombs carved with floral motifs. The frescoes in the tomb chamber are blackened by candle smoke, but those in the nave have mostly been restored and you can clearly see a votive picture of Elisabeta and her children on the wall to the right. Ironically, her ambitions for them came to naught as she died in a Sultan’s harem – “by God’s will”, a chronicler noted sanctimoniously.
Suceava
Crossing the industrial sprawl between the stations and the city centre, it’s difficult to imagine SUCEAVA, 150km northwest of Iaşi, as an old princely capital. The city’s heyday more or less coincided with the reign of Stephen the Great (1457–1504), who warred ceaselessly against Moldavia’s invaders – principally the Turks – and won all but two of the 36 battles he fought. This record prompted Pope Sixtus IV to dub him the “Athlete of Christ” – a rare accolade for a non-Catholic, which wasn’t extended to Stephen’s cousin Vlad the Impaler, even though he massacred 45,000 Turks during one year alone.
While Stephen’s successors, Bogdan the One-Eyed and Petru Rareş, maintained the tradition of building a new church or monastery after every victory, they proved less successful against the Turks and Tatars, who ravaged Suceava several times. Eclipsed when Iaşi became the Moldavian capital in 1565, Suceava missed its last chance of glory in 1600, when Michael the Brave (Mihai Viteazul) completed his campaign to unite Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania by marching unopposed into Suceava’s Princely Citadel. In terms of national pride, Suceava’s nadir was the long period from 1775 to 1918, when the Habsburgs ruled northern Moldavia from Czernowitz (Cernăuţi), although Suceava was able to prosper as a trading centre between the highland and lowland areas. Under communism, this role was deemed backward and remedied by hasty industrialization – the consequences of which long blighted the town.
Save for the lovely ethnographic museum and a clutch of churches, there are few real sights in town itself; instead, Suceava’s principal attractions are a good twenty minutes’ walk from the centre, namely the superb Village Museum to the east, and the Zamca monastery to the west. For visitors though, Suceava is primarily a base for excursions to the painted monasteries.
Festivals in Ilişeşti
Many villages in northern Moldavia, including Ilişeşti, 15km along the main road west from Suceava, still hold winter festivities that mingle pagan and Christian rites. Preparations for Christmas begin in earnest on St Nicholas’s Day (December 6), when people butcher pigs for the feast beside the roads – not a sight for the squeamish. Women get to work baking pies and the special turte pastries, which symbolize Christ’s swaddling clothes, while the men rehearse songs and dances. On Christmas Eve (Ajun), boys go from house to house, singing carols that combine felicitations with risqué innuendo, accompanied by an instrument that mimics the bellowing of a bull. After days of feasting and dancing, the climax comes on the day of New Year’s Eve, when a dancer, garbed in black and red, dons a goat’s-head mask with wooden jaws, which he clacks to the music of drums and flutes, and whips another dancer, dressed as a bear, through the streets. It’s a rather bizarre twist on the new year driving out the old, apparently. Ilişeşti also hosts the From the Rarău Mountain Folklore Festival (De sub montele Rarău), on the second Sunday of July. Ensembles from three counties – Bacău, Neamţ and Maramureş – participate, and it’s a chance to experience a round dance (horă), shepherds’ dances, fiddles, flutes and alpine horns, plus a panoply of costumes. Ilişeşti is easily reached from Suceava by buses and maxitaxis towards Gura Humorului.
Suceava festivals
Suceava’s principal annual event is the Stephen the Great Medieval Festival, in mid-August, a three-day jamboree of theatre, music, dance and, naturally enough, medieval games, all held within the suitably appropriate surrounds of Suceava Fortress; just a week or two later, in the same venue, is the Bucovina Rock Castle Festival, a three-day gathering of mostly Romanian, and occasionally international, bands.
Târgu Neamţ
TÂRGU NEAMŢ, with its systematized concrete centre, is far smaller and duller than Piatra, and therefore a less attractive stopover. However, it does possess Moldavia’s finest ruined castle, Cetatea Neamțului, as well as a couple of worthy memorial houses.
Mănăstirea Agapia
An easy, and very lovely, 7km walk from Văratec, Mănăstirea Agapia (Agapia monastery) actually consists of two convents a few kilometres apart; most visitors are content to visit only the main complex of Agapia din Vale (“Agapia in the valley”), at the end of a village with houses with covered steps. The walls and gate tower aim to conceal rather than to protect; inside is a whitewashed enclosure around a cheerful garden. At prayer times a nun beats an insistent rhythm on a wooden toaca while another plays the panpipes; this is followed by a medley of bells, some deep and slow, others high and fast. The convent church – much smaller than the one at Văratec – was built in 1644–47 by Prince Basil the Wolf’s brother, Gavril Coci. Its helmet-shaped cupola, covered in green shingles, mimics that of the gate tower. After restoration, the interior was repainted between 1858 and 1861 by Nicolae Grigorescu, the country’s foremost painter at the time; he returned to stay at Agapia from 1901 to 1902.
Grigorescu’s close attachment to the convent can also be seen in the museum, which stars an entire room of the painter’s Renaissance-style work – the most celebrated of which is a large canvas entitled The Laying of Christ’s Body in the Tomb – as well as portraits of the Vlahuţă family. Icons, vestments and embroidery from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries complete a sizeable collection. An enticing variety of breads, jams and syrups, all harvested by the nuns, is available from the kiosk outside the convent entrance.
Mănăstirea Neamţ
The twelfth-century Mănăstirea Neamţ (Neamţ monastery) is the oldest in Moldavia and is the region’s chief centre of Orthodox culture; it is also the largest men’s monastery in Romania, with seventy monks and dozens of seminary students. It was founded as a hermitage, expanded into a monastery in the late fourteenth century by Petru I Muşat, and then rebuilt in the early fifteenth century by Alexander the Good, with fortifications that protected Neamţ from the Turks. It also had a printing house that spread its influence throughout Moldavia. The new church, founded by Stephen the Great in 1497 to celebrate a victory over the Poles, became a prototype for Moldavian churches throughout the next century, and its school of miniaturists and illuminators led the field.
Outwardly, Neamţ resembles a fortress, with high stone walls and its one remaining octagonal corner tower (there used to be four). On the inside of the gate tower, a painted Eye of the Saviour sternly regards the monks’ cells with their verandas wreathed in red and green ivy, and the seminary students in black tunics milling around the garden. The sweeping roof of Stephen’s church overhangs blind arches inset with glazed bricks, on a long and otherwise bare facade. Its trefoil windows barely illuminate the interior, where pilgrims kneel amid the smell of mothballs and candlewax. At the back of the compound is a smaller church dating from 1826, containing frescoes of the Nativity and the Resurrection. Outside the monastery stands a large, onion-domed pavilion for Aghiastmatar, the “blessing of the water”, to be taken home in bottles to cure illness.
Mănăstirea Văratec
Hedgerows, alive with sparrows and wagtails, line the narrow road winding through Văratec to the pretty nuns’ village and Mănăstirea Văratec (Văratec monastery), its whitewashed walls and balconies enclosing a lovely garden shaded by cedars. The novices inhabit two-storey buildings named after saints, while the older nuns live in cottages. Văratec was founded in the eighteenth century, around a church that no longer exists; the site of its altar is marked by a pond with a statue of an angel. The present church, built in 1808, is plain and simple, culminating in two bell-shaped domes. To cope with the harsh winters, the nuns have sensibly installed stoves by the columns dividing the narthex from the nave, so that both chambers are heated. The gilt pulpit and the gallery over the entrance to the narthex are unusual, but the interior painting is not great. There’s a museum of icons to the south, and an embroidery school established by Queen Marie in 1934. It’s an odd but not unfitting site for the grave of Veronica Micle, the poet loved by Eminescu, who couldn’t afford to marry her after the death of her despised husband; she killed herself two months after Eminescu’s death.
Walks from Văratec
In fine weather, it’s an agreeable walk through the woods from Văratec monastery to Agapia; the 7km trail takes about an hour and a half, starting by house no. 219, back down the road from Văratec Convent. It’s also possible to walk along the road connecting the two convents (from Văratec, walk about 1km back towards the main road, then turn left; from Agapia take the asphalt road across the bridge at the end of the nunnery village). Picnic tables are provided, but camping is not allowed. Another beech-tree-lined trail from Văratec, marked by blue dots, leads west to Sihla hermitage (2hr), built into the cliffs near the cave of St Teodora, and hidden by strange outcrops. A back road turns off the main road from Târgu Neamţ to the Ceahlău massif, 2km west of the turn-off for Neamţ monastery, and passes the Sihastria and Secu hermitages en route to Sihla – an easy 10km hike. The Sihastria hermitage was founded in 1655 and subsequently built over with a new stone church in 1734; the Secu hermitage dates from 1602 and has Renaissance-style paintings inside as well as the grave of Bishop Varlaam, who in 1634 printed Canzania (“Romania’s teaching book”), the first book written in Romanian.
Muzeul Neculai Popa
About 10km southeast of Târgu Neamţ, the ramshackle village of TĂRPEŞTI is the location for the delightful Muzeul Neculai Popa (Neculai Popa Museum), the family home of the eponymous folk artist (1919–2010).
Set in Popa’s own yard, the museum’s diverse works (all collected by Popa himself) are displayed with care and wit. The main building is devoted to Popa’s folk art collections, including paintings by Romanian artists – starring some delightful Naïve paintings – an unusually good set of icons and old Moldavian handicrafts such as thick leather belts and painted trousseaux. The colourful masks and folk costumes on display in the second building, made by both Popa and his wife, Elena, are occasionally used in children’s pageants recounting legends such as that of Iancu Jianu, an eighteenth-century forest bandit known as the Robin Hood of Wallachia. Popa’s son, Damian, now runs the museum, and is only too happy to show visitors around (his English is excellent); there is also a gallery where folk art and icons are sold. His life-size wooden sculptures in the garden are of various family members, including a wonderful one of Popa himself, with tools in hand.