Today was leaving day for the Senior Campers’ Club from Holland and so we woke to the sound of much industry as 22 motorhomes and caravans were readied for a convoy. There were a few very “particular” men among the group, so there were windscreens to be polished and bumpers to be buffed. We had noticed yesterday that several of the motorhomes had special little blocks of wood to keep their windscreen wipers off the windscreen when they are parked up. I’m not sure what that was about? Having driven for 40 years and over 500,000 miles I’ve never had a problem because my windscreen wipers sit on the windscreen when the vehicle is parked!
Today was a sightseeing day and not just the beautiful natural sights of this part of Romania. This area is known at Southern Bucovina and is renowned for its painted monasteries. They were erected in the 15th Century to celebrate the defeat of the Ottoman Turks. Both the insides and the outsides were decorated with frescoes to illustrate the bible for illiterate local peasants. Eight of them are now UNESCO World Heritage sites and we decided to see two of them, partly because Sarah has seen enough monasteries on this trip and to be frank even I wasn’t up to a 150 km drive to all eight!
The first we visited was Humor. This monastery is said to have the best internal mosaics. After a quick LIDL dash we arrived at the monastery to a smattering of tat stalls. Humor is still an active nunnery and the nuns showed they were no slouches on the commercial front. It was 5 lei (€1) each to get in but 10 lei (€2) to take photos. I happily coughed up my 10 lei, bearing in mind that the outstanding feature of Humor is its internal frescoes, only to arrive at the monastery door to be told no photos are allowed inside, even with my freshly purchased camera permit!
Humor Monastery
The monastery is distinctive in style with rounded ends and a huge overhang on the roof. Given the thunderstorms we have experienced in the last two days I’m sure the latter comes in very useful. The frescoes on the outside have faded considerably but those inside, which I couldn’t photograph, were very impressive. They are still extremely vibrant even after 500 years and cover every inch of the interior.
En route to Humor we had spotted many storks, which nest on top of electricity poles. The poles have a special platform on some of them, to encourage the storks. Just outside the monastery a stork had shown much more initiative and built and nest on top of a tall dead tree stump. I thought this looked more photogenic and so nipped back to Basil for my bird lens. I’m a little disappointed with the result, partly because of the washed out sky and partly because the stork wouldn’t pose properly.
Stork. If you look hard you can see the chick just under the adult’s chest.
It was then on to Voronet, which apparently has the best external frescoes. This time we had to run a long gauntlet on tat merchants, but there was no hard sell. This monastery, which Sarah decided to skip due to monastery overload, was the more interesting of the two. The external frescoes are fairly complete and I though the internal frescoes were the equal of Humor.
Voronets Monastery
Voronets Monastery
It is a shame the photography inside was again forbidden, because there was a formidable array of frescoes depicting saints maimed in increasingly gruesome ways. Beheaded, stabbed, speared, burned and even boiled. The beheadings were particularly fascinating because the disembodied heads still had a golden halo as they rolled around the floor. Given the enemy of the day was the Ottomans it is not surprising that the killers in all these scenarios wore turbans! Plus ca change plus c’est la meme chose.
Not those turbans!
We returned, after a quick lunch, to a much quieter campsite, but it is already filling up. This time mostly Romanians, perhaps in preparation for the weekend. Tonight we are supposed to be having a communal meal but I made a little mistake in not telling the site owner about the dogs. He is going to ask the others if they mind, so my dinner tonight is in other people’s hands!