Bisericani Monastery

Bisericani Monastery lies in the village of Bisericani, Alexandru cel Bun commune, Neamț County. Its beginnings are linked to the hermit Iosif and his disciples, who built a wooden church dedicated to the Annunciation in the second half of the fifteenth century. The wooden church was looted and burned by the Ottomans in 1476, after the battle of Războieni, and by the Tatars in 1498. The stone church was built in the early sixteenth century on the site of the wooden one. Its inscription dates it to the year 7020 (1512) and names as founder "Ștefan Vodă, son of Bogdan Vodă", but the dating is disputed: some sources name Bogdan III (1508-1512) as founder, while others hold that the foundations were laid as early as the reign of Stephen the Great. In 1627 Prince Miron Barnovschi and his mother Elisabeta built the first towers at the corners of the precinct, and in 1637, under Vasile Lupu, a block of cells, the refectory and the sacristy were added. The church was rebuilt in 1786 by Abbot Ioil, during the reign of Constantin Dimitrie Moruzi, keeping the pronaos of 1637 and the bell chamber above it. In the early nineteenth century the stone and brick cells around the church, the abbot's house and the chapel of St George were built. In 1998-1999 the chapel of the Protection of the Mother of God was raised and consecrated on 3 October 1999. After the agrarian reform of 1864 the monastery declined; under King Carol I its buildings became a prison, and from 1911 they housed an asylum for tuberculosis patients, which became the TB sanatorium still operating in the former monastic complex. Monastic life resumed in the 1990s. The Church of the Annunciation is a class A historic monument (LMI code NT-II-m-A-10591). Because of its deterioration, access to the church was banned in 2017, and restoration and consolidation work began in 2024.