The fervent identification with suffering and redemption has dimmed little in these parts since the monasteries were painted, according to Ciprian Slemco, a divinity student-turned-private tour guide who walked us through two of the monasteries a few days later. "Eighty-six percent of Romanians are Orthodox. We are one of the few countries in the world that is still keeping the Orthodox traditions," Slemco said.
"We have been occupied by Turks; we have been occupied by the Austro-Hungarian Empire. We have been occupied by the Russians, by the Germans, after that by our own people, by [Communist dictator Nicolae] Ceausescu. [But] religion was never occupied in people's minds and people's souls."
The decorative walls of the red-frescoed church in Humor, Romania, illustrate gruesome scenes of saints being tortured.
(Photos Dana Wilson)
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The next day at Moldovita, a short drive southwest from Sucevita through lushly forested hills, sunshine accentuated gold-tinted saints under protective black eaves. The frescoes were meant to be "an open book," a resident nun explained, visual translation for an illiterate peasant population.
Education wasn't the only aim. The young sister pointed to one of Moldovita's dominant images, an action-packed depiction of the siege of Constantinople by Persians in 626, a battle won by the outnumbered Christians thanks to a timely storm they credited to the Virgin. The Christians are shown in Moldavian kit, the invaders as Turks.
Under Ceausescu, Moldovita was declared a "protocol church," according to the sister, required to provide meals and lodging to secret-police agents passing through the area. Its resident population had dwindled to nine by the time of the 1989 revolution.
Moldovita, like Sucevita, Humor and Voronet, is now occupied by several dozen nuns. (Arbore is uninhabited.) Abiding centuries-old rules, they rise before dawn for long days of prayer and work, although these days that entails leading tours and selling icons as well as raising crops and weaving clothes. Visiting the monasteries a few months after Ceausescu's downfall, Kaplan described them as belonging to another age, isolated and suffused with ancient mystery and grace. Visiting one of them last fall, we heard a chiming cell phone and turned to see a nun reach into her habit to take the call.
But ancient mystery and grace still have their part in Bucovina. Arbore, a drive of 15 dusty, often unpaved miles from Sucevita, has the most-faded frescoes but retains a village-church tranquility. When we arrived, local women were standing below the west wall's blue-and-green martyrdom scenes distributing bread and cake to parishioners.
Dan ascertained that we'd arrived before a memorial service for a village woman who'd died the year before. Before we could worry about our timing, we were welcomed with bags of bread and shots of homemade plum brandy, both integral parts of such ritual gatherings. We followed a procession across the street to the cemetery and watched while the priest led prayers accompanied by mournful singing.
A few days later at Humor, about 30 miles south of Sucevita and 25 west of Suceava, I walked the lovely grounds, dotted with flowers and wooden outbuildings, to the sound of chanting from the church, where a service marking a feast day for Mary was taking place.
Inside the red-frescoed church, congregants feverishly scribbled the names of loved ones on slips of paper for inclusion in a prayer for the dead. As a group of nuns sang, I studied the painted panels climbing to the ceiling, a fervid panorama of sacrifice and suffering: saints being burned, lanced and boiled alive; strangled, beheaded and dragged by horses; hung by their ankles and tossed over cliffs. There was nothing remote or allegorical about the violent images, or in the way the congregants crowded around the table and lifted it skyward at the climax of the prayer.
