Nativity of the Virgin Wooden Church, Ieud Deal

The Nativity of the Virgin wooden church in Ieud Deal stands in the village of Ieud, the seat of the commune of the same name in the Iza Valley, Maramureș County. It is called the "church on the hill" because it sits on a rocky slope, unlike the village's other wooden church, the church in the valley. It was built by the local noble Balea family and is an old Greek Catholic place of worship. For a long time the church was dated to 1364, a date taken from the Greek Catholic vicar Tit Bud, who based it on an inscription in the attic. The inscription, on the sill beams of the tower, actually records a repair of the tower in 1827 by the craftsmen Cionca Alexa and Iusco Ion. In 1997 the Icelandic researcher Ólafur Eggertsson used tree-ring dating to place the church in the second decade of the 17th century. The parish census of 1774 states that both churches in Ieud were renovated in 1764-1765 by the nobleman Mihai Balea; the sill beams were replaced and the windows enlarged at that time. The Ieud Codex, a manuscript some historians consider among the earliest writings in Romanian, was found in the church attic in 1921. The wall painting covers the entire interior, in the sanctuary, nave and narthex. It is neither dated nor signed; the art historian Anca Pop-Bratu attributed it to the itinerant painter Alexandru Ponehalschi, and archive documents most likely link it to the 1764-1765 renovation. Texts in Romanian, written in Cyrillic letters, survive below the nave windows. The church holds many icons, a large number of them also painted by Ponehalschi. The building is 7.15 m wide and 11.87 m long, with no porch, its walls made of spruce logs and its sill beams and door frames of oak. The painting was restored between 2007 and 2009. The church is a class A historic monument, LMI code MM-II-m-A-04588, dated to the 17th century. Since 1999 it has been part of the UNESCO site "Wooden Churches of Maramureș", together with seven other wooden churches in the county.