Attraction
St Nicholas Church in Densuș
The Church of St Nicholas in Densuș, in the Hațeg Country, is a thirteenth-century stone church built largely from Roman pieces brought from Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa. It preserves wall paintings from 1443 signed by the painter Ștefan and is considered one of the oldest churches in Romania.
The Church of St Nicholas stands in the village of Densuș, Densuș commune, in the western Hațeg Country, not far from Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa, the former capital of Roman Dacia. The national list of historic monuments dates it to the thirteenth century, with additions from the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, while its entry on UNESCO's Tentative List states that it was built no later than the fourteenth century. Specialists in medieval archaeology place it among the churches of the Romanian knezes, and a hypothesis put forward in 1775 by an Austrian officer, that it was originally a Roman funerary monument, is not supported by recent research.
The building has a square nave pierced by a stone tower and a deep semicircular apse, with a diaconicon on the south side. Most of the stone comes from the ruins of Ulpia Traiana Sarmizegetusa: columns, limestone and marble blocks, funerary pieces and terracotta pipes. The four interior pillars that carry the tower are each made of two Roman altars set one on top of the other. Two Roman lions were placed on the stone-slab roof.
The interior painting is signed "Ștefan painted", and a Slavonic inscription in the apse dates it to 23 October 1443. The master Ștefan is regarded as a representative of painting from south of the Carpathians, trained in the tradition of Curtea de Argeș. The frescoes were whitewashed between 1566 and 1720, a period when the church also served the Reformed congregation, and were uncovered during work in 1961-1962. The wooden iconostasis was painted in 1789 by the priest Simeon the painter.
By the second half of the nineteenth century the church was badly decayed, and the authorities declared it a historic monument in 1870. It has served in turn the Orthodox, Reformed and Greek Catholic faiths, and after 1948 passed to the Romanian Orthodox Church. Today it has two patron saints, St Nicholas and the Prophet Jeremiah. It is a class A historic monument (LMI code HD-II-m-A-03307) and has been on Romania's Tentative List for UNESCO World Heritage since 1991.
Sat Densuș nr. 23, comuna Densuș, județul Hunedoara