Războieni Monastery

Războieni Monastery stands in the village of Războieni, Războieni commune, about 26 km from Piatra Neamț, in the area where on 26 July 1476 the army of Stephen the Great was defeated by the forces of Sultan Mehmed II in the battle of Valea Albă. According to the chronicler Grigore Ureche, after the Ottomans withdrew the prince gathered the bodies of the fallen, raised a mound and built a church over their bones. The Slavonic inscription on the south wall, dated 8 November 1496, recounts the battle and states that Stephen the Great built the church "in the name of the Archangel Michael" and "in memory of all the Orthodox Christians who perished here". The church is dedicated to the Holy Archangels Michael and Gabriel. It is built of stone on a rectangular plan, with no side apses and no tower, similar to Stephen the Great's churches in Piatra Neamț and Borzești. The altar apse is polygonal inside and semicircular outside, and the façades have two rows of niches and decoration of glazed bricks and coloured ceramic discs. The soldiers' bones lie beneath the floor of the church, from the nave to the altar; excavations during the 1975-1977 restoration found pits with bones buried in no particular order. The present interior painting dates from the nineteenth century. The church served as a parish church until 1734, when a monastery of monks was founded here. In 1803 Metropolitan Veniamin Costachi turned it into a convent. In the nineteenth century two towers and a porch were added to the church, and in 1862 the gate bell tower was built. Under Decree 410/1959 the monastery was dissolved and most of the cells were demolished. During the 1975-1977 restoration the towers and other additions were removed, returning the church to its original form. The monastery reopened in 1990 with nuns from Văratec Monastery. The complex is a class A historic monument (LMI code NT-II-a-A-10647), comprising the church of 1496, the bell tower of 1862, the abbess's house and the nineteenth- and twentieth-century monastic houses. Every year, on the last Sunday of July, the "Războieni Festival" is held here in memory of those who fell in 1476.