Wednesday 24 September – The gloomy predictions of the chap on reception – and Accuweather – turned out to be spot on. Yesterday’s sunshine was the merest memory, summer was over, clouds had descended to ground level
and the hotel had taken precautions against there being actual rain.
The forecast was for merely damp but not actually raining this morning and tomorrow afternoon, and the strong likelihood of rain this afternoon and tomorrow morning. Accordingly, we’d made an outline plan to get up and out early today to beat both the weather and the putative invasion of the breakfast room by the bloody tourists in the coach party. (The hotel’s normal breakfast arrangements had been replaced by a buffet, we assume because of the coach party.) Sadly, whoever was planning the coach itinerary seemed to have had the same idea, so when we got down to breakfast, it was still bedlam in the restaurant. We retired for a while and came down again later. Although it was much quieter, it was clear that the hotel staff were well on the back foot when it came to keeping the buffet refreshed. We eventually cobbled together something approaching the requisite sustenance as we watched the coach depart outside.
It was damp but not actually raining as we finished breakfast, so we donned light waterproofs and sallied forth. There were a few items we’d noted as being worth a visit. Because of their religious connotations, calling them “attractions” seemed to me to demean them a bit, so “items of interest” they were. The first one we planned to visit was called Chilia Daniil Sihastru, Daniil Sihastru’s hermitage. Its official opening time was 10am so we made our way towards it in a leisurely fashion, so as not to arrive there too early. En route, we passed a, or perhaps the, local market, where mainly food produce was on offer, although there were a couple of non-food stalls as well.
We had both had the Romanian “cabbage salad” at various restaurants during our time here. I was a little surprised on getting my first one to see that its ingredients were limited to one – cabbage – my normal expectation is that a salad is a varied thing, but there you go. Anyway, cabbage salad is definitely A Thing in Romania, and we were delighted to find that one stall had a machine for making it.
That is really quite an industrial-strength mechanism for making a bit of salad, which underlines the popularity of the dish here. The state of the guy’s van also demonstrates the ubiquity of the vegetable. The market was a pleasant distraction from the mainstream of today’s litany of religious site visits.
The hermitage is only 1km outside Putna. The thing itself isn’t huge, a tiny chapel hewn from the rock above a cave,
but is sited within a park area with benches and so forth, which contributes to an air of calm about the place. Whilst we were there, it remained locked, but I was able to get a shot through the door
showing a simple interior. Daniil Sihastru lived in the cave beneath for some twenty years of his life, in the mid 1400s, creating the chapel above; later he withdrew to the monastery in Voroneț. Whilst we were there, a handful of other people came to visit the site, one of whom was dressed in monk’s garb. As he left, he did the traditional Orthodox Romanian obesiance of three bows and crossing himself. The religious import of the place stems from the fact that Daniil Sihastrul (Romanian for “Daniel the Hesychast”) was a renowned Moldavan Orthodox spiritual guide, advisor of Stephen the Great, and (latterly) hegumen of Voroneț Monastery. He is regarded as a saint and it was on his advice that Stephen the Great built the Putna monastery.
I’m learning all sorts of religious vocabulary on this trip. “Hesychasm” is a contemplative monastic tradition among the Eastern Christian traditions of the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches in which stillness (hēsychia) is sought through uninterrupted prayer to Jesus. (I have to say that when I pray to Jesus, it’s rarely in a moment of stillness.) “Hegumen” is the title for the head of a monastery in the Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic Churches, or an archpriest in the Coptic Orthodox Church, similar to the title of abbot. Stay tuned for more arcane religious terminology, by the way.
After the hermitage, we headed back towards downtown Putna, with the next objective being further exploration of the handsome parish church we’d passed yesterday. In doing so, we passed a selection of the interesting and attractive houses in the village.
A short cut took us towards the church, past a promising entry in Google Maps, MishuCoffee, a small but perfectly-formed establishment where we stopped for a flat white. Another customer, a local, on hearing our Englishness, started chatting with us. He had worked for seven years in Wembley, “in construction” (i.e. a Romanian builder) and we had a pleasant few minutes talking to him before moving on.
The parish church seemed to be closed, but actually we were also interested in a building in its graveyard, a wooden church, formally dedicated to “Dragoş Vodă”, according to some commentaries the founder of Moldavia, who reigned in the middle of the 14th century.
It is dated from the early years of the 15th century, and tradition has it that it was brought by Stephen the Great from Volovăţ. It is the oldest and only medieval wooden church known in Romania. It was closed, so all we could do was to peek in through the windows.
The graveyard itself is a thing of beauty.
The parish church was closed, so we didn’t get a chance to look in, and instead moved on to the monastery, intent on looking inside the museum and the chuch there.
En route, we of course passed through the white portal that we first saw yesterday, but today stopped to look in more detail at the memorial beside it.
The memorial, consecrated in 2018, commemorates the Fântâna Albă massacre, which took place on 1 April 1941 in Northern Bukovina, which had been forcibly occupied by the Soviet Union under the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact of 1939. A number (disputed but hundreds if not thousands) of Romanian villagers were killed by Soviet Border Troops as they attempted to cross the border from the Soviet Union to Romania near the village of Fântâna Albă (now Staryi Vovchynets in Ukraine). Many more of the area’s villagers were subsequently deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan.
In the monastery area itself, the church is an active one; there had been a service going on whilst we were there yesterday
and thus we couldn’t sensibly have gone in anyway. So, today we had the chance. Entering the doors takes you into the narthex – another new word for me. A narthex is the vestibule of a Christian church, typically located between the main door and the central nave. Historically, it served as a place for unbaptized people to stand and listen to the service, as they were not allowed in the nave.
This narthex is spectacular!
As you might infer from the state of the narthex, the church itself is a remarkable place.
It includes the tombs of Stephen the Great and his wife
The church is rather darker than the pictures show – the camera has allowed me to bring out the colours from the gloom.
We also went into the museum there. As one would expect, it has many devotional items on display: elaborately worked crosses;
icons;
a display of hand-crafted gospels from the 15th and 16th centuries, inscribed and illuminated on parchment;
and some extraordinarily elaborate embroidery work.
Here is a detail from the right-hand one above, which dates from 1510.
It’s astonishing to contemplate how something so elaborate, intricate and finely-crafted could come into being – the work of just three monks.
As you exit the museum, you see a pretty much life-size protrait of Stephen the Great himself.
That’s a fitting way to exit the museum, after which we headed back to the hotel, via a mini-market to buy some milk for the mugs of Twinings finest Earl Grey which would sustain us through the rainy afternoon to the point where we could decently go for an aperitif (slightly modified by the fact that we had drunk all their tonic yesterday, so it was gin and bitter lemon instead) and dinner. The rain had arrived during the afternoon, so our plan thus far is intact. Let’s see what tomorrow afternoon brings….