Sucevita

This is the latest and in some ways the grandest of all the painted churches. Suceviţa stands in a serene, orchard-like quad not unlike that of an Oxford college but otherwise the setting is altogether different: a cluster of thickly forested conical hills enclose it on two sides while a wide valley floor opens the view to the east and the steppe on another. Its fortifications give the game away: this building was meant to withstand military attacks and provide refuge for the local population in times of war....

Suceviţa was built in the 1590s when Moldavia’s princes had succumbed to Turkish suzerainty and sought moral and covert political support from Orthodox Poland to the north. The glorious outpouring of colour on the external - and interior - walls combined with the size and proportions of this particular monastery would seem to give it pride of place over other main survivors from this extraordinary period in Moldavia’s history (Arbore, Humor, Moldoviţa, Probota and Voroneţ). But compared to the pugnacious defiance of the external scenes on other painted churches, the murals here are more ethereal, internalised and withdrawn from day-to-day political engagement. This isn’t really surprising since the principality’s circumstances had changed dramatically in the space of a few years.

By clinging to their religious origins, Moldavia’s once proudly independent rulers retained a sense of identity - something which the Turks allowed them as long as they didn’t rock the political boat too hard and went on paying tributes to Istanbul. Leaders such as Alexander the Good and Stephen the Great had established links with Orthodox monasteries on Mt. Athos, in Jerusalem and elsewhere in the Near East, and these ties became more important when Moldavia lost its autonomy.

The paintings may have disappeared from the external walls after this great church was finished, but other magnificent ecclesiastical buildings sprang up in the ensuing centuries. Ironically, the end of the era came with the Habsburgs’ annexation of Bucovina in 1775: Roman Catholics and Orthodox Christians had regarded each other more or less as anathema since the Great Schism of 1084 and the Habsburgs chased the monks of Bucovina into the mountains leaving the monasteries to be used as store houses and in some cases as stables for Russian cavalry during the First World War. The graffiti on their walls tells its own tale. Some of the monasteries were closed during the Communist period as well but today they are working again, although in most of them the occupants are nuns rather than monks. Romanians don’t have a separate word for a convent.