Probota Monastery

Probota Monastery (Pobrata in old documents) lies in the village of Probota, part of the town of Dolhasca, on a plateau above the Siret valley. The site has an older history: the wooden church of St Nicholas at Poiana Siretului is recorded in 1391, under Prince Petru Mușat, and a later stone church, where Stephen the Great buried his mother, Lady Oltea, was destroyed by a landslide. Petru Rareș built a new church with the same dedication, to St Nicholas, about 300 m west of the old site; the inscription on the south wall of the porch records its completion in 1530, when the abbot was Grigorie Roșca, the prince's cousin and later metropolitan. The church, of stone with courses of brick, has a triconch plan, an octagonal tower over the nave and five rooms: porch, narthex, burial chamber, nave and sanctuary. It was painted inside and out in 1532 by painters whose names are unknown. The original painting survives in the porch and narthex, with the Last Judgement on the porch vault and the seven Ecumenical Councils in the narthex; in the nave and sanctuary it was covered in 1844 by crude repainting. On the exterior most of the painting has faded, leaving only fragments on the south wall from the Akathist Hymn and the Tree of Jesse. Petru Rareș chose Probota as his burial place. The burial chamber holds the tombs of Petru Rareș (died 1546), Lady Elena and their son, Prince Ștefan Rareș, and in 1904 the tombstone of Lady Oltea was brought here. In 1550 Lady Elena and her sons enclosed the church within a nearly square precinct with sides of about 90 m and walls 6 m high, with three towers on the east side, the central one serving as the entrance tower. The monastery was dedicated to the Holy Sepulchre in 1677, dissolved in 1863 under the secularisation of monastic estates and re-established as a convent in 1993. Between 1996 and 2001 the complex was restored through a UNESCO programme funded by Japan, which uncovered the interior painting of 1532. The complex is a listed historic monument (LMI code SV-II-a-A-05592), comprising the church, the clisiarniță, the ruins of the princely houses, the corner towers and the enclosure wall, and the church has been part of the UNESCO World Heritage site "Churches of Moldavia" since 1993.