Voroneț Monastery

Voroneț is the most celebrated of the painted churches of Bukovina, the village monasteries of northeastern Romania whose outer walls are covered from ground to eaves with frescoes. The church of St George was built in 1488 by Stephen the Great, Prince of Moldavia, reportedly in just three months and three weeks, in thanksgiving for his victory over the Ottomans at Vaslui. Local tradition ties its founding to Daniil the Hermit, who is said to have told the prince not to give up the fight and to build a monastery if he won; Daniil became its first abbot and is buried in the church.

The exterior paintings came six decades later. In 1547 Metropolitan Grigorie Roșca added an exonarthex at the west end and had the whole outside painted. He left the west façade entirely without windows, clearly to make room for a single composition: a vast Last Judgment that fills the wall from top to bottom, with the river of fire dividing the saved from the damned, and the dead rising from their graves. What makes Voroneț famous is its colour, an intense azure background so distinctive that it is known in Romania simply as Voroneț blue. It has earned the church the nickname "the Sistine Chapel of the East".

The architecture is modest and mixed: a trefoil plan with three apses, a tower over the nave, small Gothic windows and door frames, and a steep, broken roofline that probably follows the original shingled roof. On the north wall, earlier decoration survives from before the paintings: rows of glazed ceramic discs in yellow, brown and green, with the Moldavian aurochs head, rampant lions and two-tailed mermaids. The monastery was also a school of calligraphy, where the Codex of Voroneț and the Psalter of Voroneț, early Romanian translations of scripture, were copied; both are now kept by the Romanian Academy.

Monastic life ended soon after 1775, when the Habsburgs annexed northern Moldavia, and resumed only in 1991 with a community of nuns, who have since built new living quarters and a pilgrims' house. Voroneț is one of the painted Churches of Moldavia inscribed together by UNESCO, and many visitors combine it with nearby Humor.

Getting there

The monastery lies in the Voroneț valley, about 4 km south of the town of Gura Humorului, a walk of roughly 45 minutes. Gura Humorului has direct trains from Suceava (under an hour) and Bucharest. The nearest airport is Suceava Ștefan cel Mare (SCV), about 41 km away.