Sturdza Castle at Miclăușeni

The castle stands in the village of Miclăușeni, Butea commune, about 20 km from Roman and 65 km from Iași, in a park beside Miclăușeni Monastery. The estate, granted around 1410 by Prince Alexandru cel Bun to the boyar Miclăuș, was sold in 1591 to the treasurer Simion Stroici and passed in 1697 to the brothers Ioan and Sandu Sturdza. In 1752 the boyar Ioan Sturdza rebuilt the manor house, and in the nineteenth century Alecu Sturdza laid out a 42-hectare English-style park around it. Between 1880 and 1904 George Sturdza and his wife Maria, daughter of Ion Ghica, built the present Neo-Gothic castle on the site of the old manor, to plans by the architects Iulius Reinecke and I. Grigsberg. The family library held about 60,000 volumes. During the First World War the castle served as a military hospital. In 1947 Ecaterina Cantacuzino, George Sturdza's daughter, donated it to the Bishopric of Roman for a convent, which was dissolved in 1953; after the family left in 1944, most of the collections and the library had been destroyed or dispersed. The building was later used as a depot and, from 1960 to 2001, as a children's care home; fires in 1968 and 1985 destroyed the attic and the roof. The castle has an upper floor and an attic, turrets, an entrance tower and façades with high-relief decoration, including coats of arms based on the Sturdza blazon, a lion holding a sword and an olive branch. The interiors keep their carved oak and lime woodwork, restored in 2003-2005, and a ground-floor room has stones set into the walls with inscriptions in Latin, Slavonic, Arabic and Romanian. The castle operates as a museum run by Miclăușeni Monastery and is open to visitors. The Miclăușeni Monastery complex, with the church, the castle and the park, is a historic monument; the castle's LMI code is IS-II-m-B-04199.02. The property was returned in 2001 to the Metropolis of Moldavia and Bukovina, which began restoration in 2004 with World Bank funding. In 2025 Miclăușeni Monastery launched a tender for work on the castle's attic floor and roof structure, funded through the National Heritage Institute's Historic Monuments Stamp programme.