St Nicholas Wooden Church in Budești Josani

The wooden church of St Nicholas stands in the lower part of the village of Budești (Josani), Budești commune, on a small hill in the village centre. Budești lies in the Cosău valley at the foot of the Gutâi Mountains, about 30 km south of Sighetu Marmației, and is first documented in 1361 in a charter of King Louis the Great. The village has two wooden churches listed as historic monuments, at Susani and at Josani. The church was built by the village community in 1643, the year given by an inscription on the door frame that was lost when the entrance was widened in 1923; dendrochronological dating of the logs confirms that the timber was felled in the winter of 1642-1643. It is a log church with a rectangular plan and a polygonal, recessed altar apse, 18 m long and 8 m wide, with a 26 m tower. The altar has a half-dome, the nave a raised barrel vault resting on brackets, and the bell tower rests on the beams of the narthex. The shingle roof has a double eave, and the tower spire is flanked by four small corner turrets. The interior painting and most of the iconostasis icons date from 1762 and are the work of the painter Alexandru Ponehalschi. The Baroque painting of the altar apse was made in 1812 by Ianoș Opriș. The painted canvas of the nave vault has been lost. The church keeps icons on wood from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, a collection of icons on glass and part of the chain mail of the outlaw Pintea Viteazul. The church was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in December 1999 as part of the "Wooden Churches of Maramureș" and is listed as a historic monument under code MM-II-m-A-04530. Formerly Greek Catholic, it was taken over by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1948 and is used by the village's Orthodox parish.