Sibiel Village and the "Father Zosim Oancea" Glass Icon Museum

Sibiel is a component village of the town of Săliște, in Mărginimea Sibiului, with 427 inhabitants at the 2021 census. The whole village is a historic monument as an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century rural site (LMI code SB-II-s-B-12546), and the list also includes several wooden houses from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and two wayside crosses from 1803 and 1814. From 16 July 1973 Sibiel was one of 14 villages declared, experimentally, "tourist villages". About 2 km south-west of the village lies the Salgo fortress site, dated to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (SB-I-s-B-11991). The Holy Trinity church with its bell tower, a class A historic monument (SB-II-m-A-12551), was built of stone boulders bound with brick and mortar in the second half of the eighteenth century as a Greek Catholic church. It was painted in 1774-1775 by the painters Stan and Iacob, sons of the priest Radu of Rășinari. The painting, covered by layers of whitewash, was restored between 1965 and 1969 on the initiative of the priest Zosim Oancea; among the scenes are depictions of popes, a rare subject in Byzantine-tradition art. Father Zosim Oancea came to Sibiel in January 1964, after fifteen years of prison and forced labour. In 1969 he asked the villagers to donate the glass icons kept in their homes for a museum, and the first collection, of 150 to 200 icons, was housed in an old storehouse behind the church, rebuilt in 1970-1971. The second building, now the main venue, was built between 1976 and 1983 with international donations, chiefly from the World Council of Churches in Geneva. The parish museum holds about 600 glass icons from the main Transylvanian centres: Nicula, the Mureș Valley, the Făgăraș area, Șcheii Brașovului, the Sebeș Valley (Laz, Lancrăm) and Mărginimea Sibiului, as well as a few from Bukovina and the Banat. Among them are works by Savu Moga, Matei Țâmforea and Ion Morar. The museum occupies two buildings between the church and the cemetery at the entrance to the village.