Xavier Ferrer Chust
Monastery, 2013
Monastery. 2013
The course of the small river Moldova, in the plains of Eastern Europe, gives its name to the region of Moldova, today divided by political hazards between the Independent Republic that bears that name and that corresponds to the former Bessarabia, a small part in the southern Ukraine, and eight of the districts in northwestern Romania. Together with the monasteries of Bucovina, the twelve existing in Moldova constitute an extraordinary European heritage, and that of Neamţ, which has its roots until the 12th century, is considered the Jerusalem of the Romanian Orthodox Church. Promoted by Stephen the Great in the 15th century, the monasterial enclosure dedicated to the Ascension of Christ, with two churches, two chapels and a circular building with a bulb dome, is a benchmark of the country's religious architecture. Its library, which today has around twenty thousand volumes, made it a key place for the cultural and artistic impulse in the slow formation of Romania as a State. The objective of the work has been to deepen in the contemporary permanence of this haven of spirituality and culture in which, together with the most rigorous traditions of orthodox monastic life, coexist naturally, the influences of the historical vicissitudes that have shaped the social environment. of the country: the independence struggles against the Ottoman rule, the pressure of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and later that of Soviet Russia, until reaching the current democratic stability at the end of the communist period
