Church of the Holy Cross, Pătrăuți

The Church of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross stands in the village of Pătrăuți, about 10 km from the city of Suceava. The Slavonic inscription above the entrance records that Stephen the Great, son of Prince Bogdan, began building it on 12 June 1487. It is the oldest church founded by Stephen the Great that survives in its original form. Here the prince established the only convent founded during his reign, endowed with the estates of Pătrăuți and Mihoveni. The convent was plundered and abandoned several times; Bishop Calistru of Rădăuți restored it in 1711, and in 1725 the wooden bell tower that still stands west of the church was built. The Habsburg authorities dissolved the convent in 1783, and the church has remained a parish church. The building, of rough stone, has a triconch plan and a tower over the nave, apses decorated with niches and green glazed ceramic plaques, and Gothic portals and frames. The interior painting dates from the time of Stephen the Great and was restored between 2003 and 2010, when it was cleaned of a layer of soot. On the west wall of the narthex is the Cavalcade of the Holy Cross: Emperor Constantine the Great accompanied by 16 mounted warrior saints, to whom the Archangel Michael points out the cross that has appeared in the sky; in Moldavia the scene appears elsewhere only at Arbore, and the historian André Grabar read it as a call to fight the Ottomans. In the nave, the votive portrait shows Stephen the Great with Princess Maria Voichița, their son Bogdan and the princesses Maria and Ana. On the exterior, painting survives only on the west wall, around the portal, with a Last Judgement discovered in the 1980s and dated to the fifteenth century. The complex is a listed historic monument (LMI code SV-II-a-A-05581), comprising the church of 1487 and the wooden bell tower of 1725. The church has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage site "Churches of Moldavia" since 1993. Across the road, the former nineteenth-century parish house has housed the "Bukovinian Priest's House" museum since 2007.