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The guide showed us the wall in the then Catholic Church where the murdered Ruler (Mihnea Voda cel Rau) was buried. In that square now stood the statue of “Teutch,” the Lutheran theologian and historian of the mid-19th Century. “No Catholic or Lutheran church was taken over and turned into Orthodox,” our guide said. Instead, our biggest Orthodox Cathedral was built here as a smaller copy of Istanbul’s Hagia Sofia.”
I climbed the former Council Tower and looked down. Buildings painted red, apricot, pea green and blue with red-tile roofs shone below in three cobblestone squares connected by pedestrian malls. They had distinct windows shaped like “eyelids”.
Not everyone appreciated icons in Romania. The Lutheran Saxons who lived in Transylvania in the 16th century did not. They “destroyed many of them and the frescoes in most churches,” our guide said. Among the few exceptions where frescoes were kept was the Cathedral in Sibiu which we were now visiting.
The rest was mostly the nave which was for men. Behind it was the narthex for women. Outside was a space, the exonarthex, for those who could not enter the church proper, “like the divorced and criminals,” our guide explained. The walls of exonarthex were elaborately painted with religious scenes. Heaven was detailed in the frescoes on the left and hell on the right.
The Orthodox Romanians had not been as tolerant. “They did not like the fact that the mother of one of their Rulers in the early 16th Century was a Catholic. When he visited Sibiu in 1510, they assassinated him in the square in front of this church after he attended service.”
On this summer afternoon, the 14th Century church on the road that crossed the picturesque valley of the Olt River in the Transylvanian Alps looked more like a destination for Romanians on holiday. Families with children crowded the space. Supplicants still managed to light candles...
The church was a small structure. Orthodox churches are modest because “people should not feel humble in the house of God,” our guide explained. The interior of the Cozia church had three parts. A screen of painted icons, iconostases, separated the priests’ chamber.
No place in Bucharest gets as many tourists as the Parliament Palace, and most want to see its balcony. We followed the crowd. The vast space in front of the balcony provides an ideal venue for a mass audience to hear speeches delivered from it.
Dacian was what the Romans called a Thracian tribe that had lived here for many centuries before a Roman legion came in the 1st Century and occupied this land for a hundred years. In the reliefs which depicted their battle, the Roman soldiers were identified by their familiar eagle insignia behind their heads, the Dacians by their own animal “draco,” resembling a wolf.
The sweeping view from the balcony was of the boulevard below, built to complement the Parliament Palace. The Palace’s grand scale is carried over there. The Boulevard of the Victory of Socialism was deliberately constructed half a meter wider than the Champs-Elysees.
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