Painted Monastries (Saceava ~ Romania)

October 2019

Saceava was our first experience of Romania and not too bad a place and our first taste of the mini-bakeries that exist here. Each has an oven with a conveyor belt so as to ensure a constant supply of fresh hot pretzels and other goodies are present. There is pretty much always a queue outside these places.

Our first task here was to change out leftover Ukrainian Hryvnias into Romanian Lei - an easy task we assumed. Yeah Right. It would appear that nobody wants Ukrainian Hryvnia - think we may have to wait till we hit a big airport.

Second task was to check out the local beer, which is aptly named Ursus (lots of bears in Romania) quite nice and only 3 NZD per half litre in a restaurant.

Now Saceava is in the region called Bucovina and Bucovina is famous for it's Painted Monasteries. Saw the big four Humor, Moldovita, Sucevita, and Voronet and have to say that they are indeed impressI've.

The painted exterior walls are decorated with elaborate 15th and 16th century frescoes featuring portraits of saints and prophets, scenes from the life of Jesus, images of judgement, angels, demons, and heaven, hell and quite often StGeorge slaying a dragon.

Typically the rear wall of the Monastery will have a detailed frescoes of the last judgement and from what we can gather the bottom right are sinners (Jews and Turks - yes I know not very pc) being greeted by Satan and near the top Michael opening the gates of heaven and Peter pushing the sinners into hell.

Understand the people in the oneses are those being resurected but couldn't figure why there was an elephant, sea creatures or the zodiac, was present.