Humor Monastery

Humor Monastery stands in the village of Mănăstirea Humorului, about 5 km north of the town of Gura Humorului. An earlier monastery, founded by the boyar Ivan, is recorded in a charter of Alexander the Good dated 13 April 1415; its church collapsed in the early sixteenth century, and its ruins can still be seen next to the present enclosure. In 1530 the grand chancellor (mare logofăt) Toader Bubuiog, an official of Prince Petru Rareș, built a new church. The inscription on the south wall of the narthex states that the work was done "by order and with the help" of Petru Rareș, at the expense of Toader and his wife Anastasia, on 15 August 1530. The church, dedicated to the Dormition of the Mother of God and to St George, has a triconch plan and no tower. It is the first Moldavian church with an open porch and with a tainiță, a hidden room above the burial chamber where the treasury was kept. The burial chamber holds the tombs of the founders: Toader Bubuiog, who died in 1539, and Anastasia. In 1641 Prince Vasile Lupu surrounded the church with stone walls and built the defensive tower with a ground floor and three storeys that still stands north-east of the church. The interior and exterior painting was executed in 1535 by a team of four painters; sources indicate that it very probably included Toma of Suceava, court painter to Petru Rareș. The whole ensemble is dominated by shades of red. The south façade and the apses, the best preserved, show the 24 scenes of the Akathist Hymn, the Siege of Constantinople (with the Persian besiegers depicted as Turks), the life of St Nicholas and the Parable of the Prodigal Son; the painting on the north wall is largely lost. The Last Judgement is depicted on the west side, and the nave and burial chamber hold the votive portraits of Petru Rareș with his family and of the founders. The Habsburg authorities dissolved the monastery in 1783, and the church became a parish church. The painting of the narthex and burial chamber was restored in 1971-1972 with UNESCO support, and in July 1991 the monastery was re-established as a convent. The complex is a listed historic monument (LMI code SV-II-a-A-05570), comprising the church, the ruins of the monastic buildings, the nineteenth-century bell tower and the tower of Vasile Lupu. The church has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage site "Churches of Moldavia" since 1993.