Painted Monastries of Southern Bucovina

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From the Maramures we went over the mountains to Southern Bucovina, where there are a number of painted monastries. Weve read the monastries are a few hundred years old, all on the UNESCO world heritage list and have gorey paintings of stories from the old testament on the inside and outside walls. We´ve been enjoying our time in Romania so much that this was certainly good enough an excuse for us to go to explore another region of the country...

Due to the lack of tourists up here, there are again no campsites in this region. Since weve been told you can stay at the monastires and there are plenty of them, we drove up to one and tried to find a monk. Its seems we hit evening mass time as they were no monks to be found, but we heard murmers of prayer coming from the church, which we didnt want to interupt! Eventually we found one young monk, who must have been skiping mass and enquired about parking up the van for the night. After a lot of hand signals he seemed to say No Problem. He even got the only english speaking monk out of mass, who showed us where the toilets were. We made a small donation to the monastry and had a sound nights sleep.

This was just a ´normal´ monastry, not a painted one, So the next day saw us exploring further into Bucovina and visiting the monastries of Voronet and Humorului. Very impressive. Most of the stories on the paintings didnt mean much to us, but there were plenty of brutal looking ones with swords, heads and limbs being chopped off, etc. This must be the old testament stuff?
There was a particualy interesting one of the final judgement, that reminded us of the Johnny Cash song, "When The Man Comes Around".

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East or West ?
Today brought a tough dilema and couple of hours looking at the map. Up until now we have been travelling east all the time. If head down to Transylvania today as planed this will be our furthest east we will be heading back west on the return leg of the trip. After speaking to some other travellers and really enjoying the eastern feel for Romania, we were tempted to keep heading east to Moldova and espically to Oradea on the Black Sea in the Ukraine..... ....After a few hours of looking at the map, the calandar and realising complications with visas, car insurance(nobody would insurance us in the UK) and health insurance, the only real decision was to head to Transylvania as planned.

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Photos

Teaching Nun
Teaching School Children the bible outside Voronet Monastry.

Fresh Water Spring
The building on the left was the water supply at the monastry.

Last Judgement Fresco at Voronet
Note the angles at the top rolling up the scroll with the signs of the zodiac, to indicate the end of time.

Fishing Nuns
We caught two nuns fishing near the spot where we were free camping.