The border between Transylvania and Moldovia is the most
striking place I have seen in Eastern Europe. I could almost see us living in the village of Piatra
Fantanele, a poor man’s Switzerland.
It even has a small ski resort.
The farther we drove into Moldovia the farther back in time we
seemed to travel. Haying season is
in full swing and horses plod up steep roads pulling wagons piled high with
freshly cut hay. Double horse
teams sweat behind them with wagons loaded with logs. And in the villages dairy farmers load milk cans into their
carts.
When Steven the Great, the protector of Moldovia, successfully
defended his princedom from the Ottomans, he commissioned a church for each of
his many victories. Several of these
“painted churches,” now World Heritage sites, are actually illustrated Bibles,
complete with biblical stories and scenes of various saints being gruesomely
martyred. We watched as a nun perched
high on a scaffold restored a scene at the Mondovita Monastery. The walled Monastery of Sucevita was the
last one built before the Ottoman invasion. Its fortress-like walls gave us an idea of what the English
monasteries would have looked like before Henry VIII ordered them to be slighted.
