The Romania circuit - the morning of the second day - Curtea de Arges - The 21st of May 2012

We headed towards Curtea de Arges, Wallachia's second capital city fairly early, so as to visit its Monastery or Episcopal church with a boxy type of structure  with whorls, rosettes and rather fancy trimmings rising into two twisted octogonal bellfries, which impacted us from no matter which angle we looked at it.

If the exterior was overwhelming as a whole, so were the details that embelish it, from the Albesti stone used for its construction to the decoration of the disks which link the arches with Arabian, Persian and Georgian motifs, the open shrine at the entrance consisting of a cornice and dome upheld by four pillars or even the small bells the birds sustain in their beaks and which are said to produce a subtle singing sound when it is windy.

It was soon obvious our guide was a rather interesting character who not only seemed to know a lot about historical facts but simultaneously managed to get our attention without too much effort, solely because of his capacity to transform the information into amazingly rich descriptions we all thoroughly listened to.

As the story goes a master builder, Manole whom the Prince Neagoe Basarab  had commissioned  the building to had the scaffolding deliberately removed, so as not to repeat the masterwork for anyone else. Not only had he had to immure his own wife within the walls of the Monastery, to allow the ghosts to keep the building from collapse, but also failed to escape with the aid of wings he made out of roof shingles crashing onto the ground where a spring is said to have gushed immediately.

The current Episcopal church is no longer Manole's original creation of 1512-17 but a re-creation of 1875-85 by the Frenchman Lecomte de Noüy and neither many of the frescoes which are to be seen  in its interior, whose originals were executed in 1517-26 by Dobromir of Târgoviste. They were nevertheless impressive.

When the visit was over I realised we were all impressed and I personally considered then that it was indeniably the  best way to start our approach to the Romanian culture.