Bucovina is a part of north-eastern Romania and southern Ukraine. The Habsburgs named it when they annexed the region in 1784 after dismembering Poland with the Russians. Bucovina means the land of beech woods.
The Romanian part of Bucovina is extraordinarily beautiful, running as it does from the rolling steppe in the east to the Carpathian foothills in the west, between Romania, the Ukraine and the Black Sea to the east.
The prettiest areas are in the west of Bucovina, in the foothills and heights of the Carpathians where luxuriant mixed forests shelter rare wild flowers and colonies of monks and nuns recall the days when it was known as the Second Mount Athos.
In English one of the most evocative descriptions of Bucovina was written by Gregor von Rezzori in The Snows of Yesteryear, which recounts his experiences of growing up in Bucovina and Transylvania between the two world wars.
Bucovina’s most famous cultural attractions are the so-called ‘painted’ churches, a group of five or so unique monastery and lay churches from the 15th and 16th centuries that are enveloped in frescoes both outside and in.
Painted in the Byzantine style, the murals give a fascinating insight into the troubled history of the late medieval period when Moldavia was struggling to evade the tentacles of Ottoman
