Sucevița Monastery
Mănăstirea Sucevița
- UNESCO World Heritage
Interesting facts
- On the south wall, the Tree of Jesse includes pagan Greek thinkers such as Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras, Solon and Sophocles among the ancestors of Christ.
- According to legend, a woman seeking atonement for her sins hauled the building stone to the site in a buffalo-drawn cart for thirty years.
- Its founder Gheorghe Movilă was the Orthodox Metropolitan of Moldavia, the head of the church in the principality.
- The church is dedicated to the Resurrection of Christ, so its patronal feast is celebrated at Easter.
- Two small open porches on the north and south sides, with arches on columns, echo the architecture of neighbouring Wallachia rather than Moldavia.
- The gate tower holds a small chapel above the entrance passage and carries the coat of arms of Moldavia.
- It is often described as the only painted monastery of Bukovina whose frescoes survive complete on both the inner and outer walls.
- The monastery is first documented in 1582, though tradition places a wooden church and a hermitage in the same valley earlier in the 16th century.
Why it is worth it
Sucevița is the last and most complete of the painted monasteries of Bucovina, the churches of northern Moldavia whose outer walls were covered in frescoes so that the Bible could be read in the open air. It was founded in the 1580s by the Movilă family, great boyars who produced bishops and princes: Gheorghe Movilă began it, and his brother Ieremia, ruling prince of Moldavia, added the fortifications and is buried inside. The frescoes followed in the first years of the 17th century, which makes Sucevița one of the last flowerings of the style.
The church itself combines the Byzantine plan and Gothic stone details typical of Moldavian architecture, with a tall drum over a star-shaped base. Its painting, inside and out, is said to hold more images than any other church in the region. The masterpiece is on the north wall: a vast Ladder of Virtues, after John Climacus, in which monks climb thirty rungs towards heaven helped by red-winged angels, while those who fall are dragged away by grinning devils into hell. The west wall, by contrast, is bare; local legend says the work stopped after a painter fell from the scaffolding and died.
Unlike most of its neighbours, Sucevița is still enclosed by its fortress. The courtyard, nearly square at about 100 by 104 metres, is surrounded by walls six metres high and three metres thick, with a tower at each corner, and it served as a princely residence as well as a monastery. Inside the walls a museum shows embroidered tomb covers of Ieremia and Simion Movilă with portraits worked in silver thread, church silver and illuminated manuscripts from the time when the monastery was a centre of copying and then of printing.
The church was added to UNESCO's Churches of Moldavia listing in 2010, and it is a stop on the Via Transilvanica long-distance trail.
Getting there
The monastery is in the village of Sucevița, about 17 km from Rădăuți and around 50 km from Suceava. The nearest airport is Suceava Ștefan cel Mare International (SCV), about 49 km away. It can be reached by car or bus from Rădăuți or Suceava.
On these lists
From the encyclopaedia
Sucevița Monastery is an Eastern Orthodox convent situated in the Northeastern part of Romania. It is situated near the Suceviţa River, in the village Sucevița, 18 km away from the city of Rădăuţi, Suceava County. It is located in the southern part of the historical region of Bukovina. It was built in 1585 by Ieremia Movilă, Gheorghe Movilă and Simion Movilă.
Wikipedia · CC BY-SA 4.0
47.77814, 25.71118per Wikidata