Romania's oldest monasteries are not where you would look for them

Three monasteries on one river

What separates them came after the founding. Igriș and Bizere belonged to the Latin church, and the Latin houses of the kingdom were dissolved in turn: first by invasion and war, then, in 1556, by a decision of the diet. Hodoș-Bodrog was, or became, Orthodox, and the Orthodox houses of the Banat came through Ottoman rule without an act dissolving them.

Older than all of them, and empty for nine centuries

Almost two centuries before the houses on the Mureș, someone cut churches, graves, galleries and cells into a chalk hill in Dobruja. The complex at Murfatlar is dated by an inscription in the nave of one of its churches reading leat 6500 — the year 992 by our reckoning.

Its walls carry Greek, Slavonic and Glagolitic inscriptions, and a script no one has yet read. It is the oldest known monastic site on the territory of the present country, and it has had no community for close to a thousand years. Chalk does not take kindly to air: since it was uncovered, the complex has been crumbling.

Between Murfatlar and the Mureș there is one more house, at Cenad. Around the year 1002, Ahtum, who held the place, brought craftsmen from Constantinople and raised a monastery of the Byzantine rite there, with Greek monks. In 1030, after Ahtum was defeated, the Greek monks left and Benedictines took their place under Bishop Gerard. The same house passed from one rite to the other because its ruler had changed.

Two centuries to Vodița

Of the eight monastic sites the sources place before the year 1200, seven are in the Banat, Crișana and Transylvania — three, three and one. The eighth is Murfatlar, in Dobruja. In Moldavia and Wallachia there is not one.

The line of princely foundations in the south begins only in the 1370s. The monk Nicodim raised Vodița at the expense of Vladislav I; the house is named in a document of 1374. Tismana follows around 1377, then Cozia in 1388. In Moldavia, Neamț enters the records in 1393, and Putna is raised by Stephen the Great in 1466.

This is why “which is the oldest” has two answers. The houses in the west are the first on record. Those of the south and east have, instead, fourteenth-century churches still standing with communities inside them. Bucovina lodged in everyone's mind because painted churches survived standing there, rather than because they came first.

How they emptied

Three times on this territory, a decision of the state took their land or their people at a stroke.

1474 and 1556. Matthias Corvinus dissolved the abbey of Cârța on 27 February 1474 and gave its estate to the parish of Sibiu. Eighty years later, the diet meeting at Sebeș dissolved the Catholic bishopric of Alba Iulia and secularised the estates of the Catholic monasteries between the Tisza and the Carpathians. The Latin houses of the west, the oldest on this map, ceased to be monasteries within a few decades.

1863. On the eve of Cuza's secularisation, nearly a quarter of the arable land of the Principalities was held by monasteries, much of it through houses dedicated to Greek monasteries and the eastern patriarchates. The law voted on 13 December and promulgated on 17 December 1863 passed all of it to the state. The monasteries remained, but remained poor.

1959. Decree 410 left in the men's monasteries only those over fifty-five, and in the women's only those over fifty. Some 4,750 monks and nuns were put out of monastic life. The Securitate reckoned it had dissolved ninety-two monasteries.

What is left

Of the 461 sites that could be dated and located, 205 are recorded by the heritage list itself as ruins, former monasteries, or buildings that now do something else — a school, a museum, a parish church, a hospital. The other 256 are carried plainly, without such a note.

124 of all of them appear in today's public list of monasteries: 109 from the 256, and 15 from the 205. At Vodița, Snagov, Soveja and Berislăvești a new community has settled beside a wall the list counted as finished, and the map gives them a mark of their own.

Those 124 are a lower bound, and a low one. The public list I used does not carry Neamț, Sucevița or Râmeț, three of the best-known monasteries in the country. The figure says a house is on that list, not how many people are in it.

How this was counted