Războieni Heroes' Monument

The Războieni Heroes' Monument, also called the "Monument to the Romanian Soldiery", stands in the lime-tree park of Războieni commune, Neamț County, about 1 km from Războieni Monastery. It commemorates the battle of Valea Albă (Războieni) of 26 July 1476, in which the Moldavian army led by Stephen the Great was defeated by the Ottoman army of Sultan Mehmed II, supported by troops of the Wallachian prince Basarab Laiotă. The Moldavians fought from a position fortified with tree trunks in the valley of the Pârâul Alb stream. Although they won the battle, the Ottomans failed to take the fortresses of Suceava and Neamț and withdrew from Moldavia. The initiative to raise the monument came at the end of the nineteenth century from officers of the 15th Dorobanți Regiment, garrisoned at Piatra Neamț. The funds were raised by a committee led by Professor V. A. Urechia. The monument was made by the Alsatian sculptor Visenberger and unveiled at the end of October 1897. The monument is a granite column topped by a bronze eagle tearing a Turkish flag. Below it is an eagle with a cross, and beneath the cross a bas-relief showing the battle of Războieni and Stephen the Great. A plaque on the monument carries a quotation from Mihail Sadoveanu: "Here was fought the fiercest battle in Moldavia's centuries". The first "Războieni Festival" was held in August 1903, at the initiative of Spiru Haret, then Minister of Religious Affairs and Public Instruction. The festival takes place every year on the last Sunday of July, with a military ceremony and wreath-laying at the monument. The church that Stephen the Great built in 1496 over the bones of the fallen stands at Războieni Monastery.