Rătești Monastery

Rătești Monastery is an Orthodox monastic settlement located in the village of Rătești, Berca commune, Buzău County, in the contact zone between the subcarpathian plain and the curvature hills of the Carpathians. It was founded at the end of the 16th century by boyar Dragomir and his wife, initially as a monks' hermitage with a small wooden church dedicated to the Holy Trinity. Its earliest reliable documentary record dates from 6 May 1634, through a donation deed by monk Sofronie of Gomoiești. The hermitage was abandoned in 1752, and re-established in 1760, this time as a convent, through a donation from boyars Scarlat and Alexandru Hrisoscobu. On the site of a wooden church from 1784, the current great church was built between 1843 and 1844, with a double dedication — "Holy Trinity" and "Saint Great Martyr Demetrius" — commissioned by Bishop Chesarie of Buzău. The church, with a triconch plan, measured 30 m long, 15 m wide, and 10 m tall, with a large octagonal dome and two small hexagonal domes, all made of wood. The interior was painted in fresco by Nicolae Teodorescu Pitarul, head of the school of painters at the Diocese of Buzău, assisted by his nephew, Gheorghe Tattarescu. In 1867, the "Resurrection of Lazarus" church was also built in the monastery's cemetery. At its peak, the community numbered about 120 nuns, and from 1861 the monastery ran a school for nuns and poor girls from neighboring villages. From 1975, a church art museum operated here, with icons, embroidery, silver liturgical objects, and rare old books — a 1780 Tetraevangelion and a Polyglot Bible printed in Paris in 1629. The earthquakes of 1940, 1977, and 1986 repeatedly damaged the buildings, requiring several restorations of the painting. The major disaster struck on the night of 14-15 May 2014, when a landslide nearly destroyed the entire complex. Recent research by specialists from the UNESCO "Buzău Land" Geopark explained the cause: an earthquake coinciding with a week of heavy rain saturated the soil and caused deep sand liquefaction, which eroded the ground beneath the buildings, leading to their collapse and sinking. The monastic community was evacuated to the nearby former Orthodox theological seminary building, where it still lives today — about 20-30 nuns, led by abbess nun Ghelasia. Fundraising efforts for rehabilitation proved insufficient, and in 2020 the great church's tower collapsed for good, inward. The complex — the Holy Trinity Church, the Saint Lazarus Church, the abbey residence, the bell tower, the museum collection, and the monastic houses — was only listed among Buzău County's historic monuments in 2015, a year after the disaster. The original historic site currently remains an ongoing ruin at risk of collapse, and close-up visits are not recommended. It is reached via national road DN10 from Sătuc, then county road DJ203L toward Rătești village. Rătești Monastery is worth documenting for its exceptional historical value and its dramatic recent story, as evidence of the fragility of built heritage in the face of extreme natural events.