St Elijah Church in Sfântu Ilie

The Church of St Elijah stands in the village of Sfântu Ilie, Șcheia commune, about 1.5 km north-west of the city of Suceava. The inscription above the narthex door records that Stephen the Great began it on 1 May 1488 and finished it on 15 October of the same year. Excavations in 1997-1999 found beneath it the remains of a timber building on stone foundations, which archaeologists link to a monastery of St Elijah mentioned before 1443. The village took its name from the church's dedication. The foundation was a monastery for monks, with a school for theological training. Metropolitan Varlaam repaired and repainted the church in the seventeenth century, and in 1702 the monastery was abandoned amid unrest in the country. After the Austrian annexation of Bukovina, the monastery was dissolved on 29 April 1785, the church became a parish church and the cells were demolished; the church, the bell tower and the enclosure wall survive. The church has a trefoil plan with a tower over the nave, similar to the churches of Pătrăuți and Voroneț, and is 18 m long. The apses have tall niches and blind arcades, with bands of bricks glazed in green, turquoise, yellow and violet. The original painting from Stephen the Great's time has not survived; the present interior painting, redone in the seventeenth century, includes the votive portrait of Stephen the Great holding the church, followed by his sons Bogdan and Ștefăniță and Lady Maria Voichița. On the south façade there are traces of seventeenth-century exterior painting, including a portrait of Metropolitan Varlaam. The church keeps an altar cloth given in 1507 by Bogdan III, and its iconostasis icons were painted in Moscow in 1708. The complex is a class A historic monument (LMI code SV-II-a-A-05638), comprising the church, the bell tower and the enclosure wall, and serves as an Orthodox parish church.