Mirăuți Church (St George)

The Church of St George in Suceava, known as Mirăuți Church, stands at Strada Mirăuți no. 17, close to the Princely Court. No written records of its foundation survive, but the masonry technique and glazed bricks, identical to those of the Princely Fortress, together with coins of Petru I Mușat found in the graves, show that the first church was built during his reign (1375-1391). Excavations in 1976 uncovered the foundations of a large building without side apses or buttresses, dated to the late fourteenth century. From 1402, when Alexander the Good brought the relics of St John the New here from Cetatea Albă, the church was the seat of the Metropolis of Moldavia, a role it kept until the new cathedral of St George at the Monastery of St John the New was built (1514-1522). Stephen the Great endowed the church, and his first wife, Lady Evdochia of Kiev, was buried here in 1467; her tombstone, found during the 1992-1998 excavations, is kept by the Bukovina National Museum. Around 1513 the church was badly damaged, and the relics were moved to the new cathedral in 1589. The present building was rebuilt in the first half of the seventeenth century and abandoned after 1700. Under Austrian rule it was used as a storehouse, and in 1898-1903 the architect Karl A. Romstorfer led an extensive restoration that gave it its current appearance; the interior was painted at that time by the Viennese painter Karl Jobst, in tempera and in a Western style. The church was reconsecrated on 2/15 November 1903 by Metropolitan Vladimir de Repta. The church keeps the trefoil plan of Moldavian churches, with a bell tower above the porch. Between 1992 and 2001 it was restored under the architect Virgil Polizu, and the excavations of those years uncovered 32 graves, including the crypt of Lady Evdochia. Since 1957 it has been an Orthodox parish church, dedicated to St George (23 April), and it is a class A historic monument (LMI code SV-II-m-A-05475).