Navigation

Religious popular architecture

The wood churches distinguish from the others by the wooden joining technique and by the making of the shingle covering. This church also respects the construction rigors met at this fist type of monuments. The church has the plan rectangular and simple, the tower-belfry of 27 meters being placed above the pronaos. This tower has a turret, and on its peak an iron cross is fixed. The church has only the central apse, which prolongs the rectangular shape to the east. The walls are made up of long oak and fir beams (at the base), horizontally disposed, on a rock pedestal of small dimensions, covered in slate. The used wood was previously stratified, which gives the church special resistance (it is the only church of this kind in Romania). A special joining technique of the wood is used, without needles or wooden needles, imposed both by the place and by the joining resistance. The church’s roof has only one body and is made of fir shingle. Each shingle is cut at the inferior part in a swallow shape, and by fixing them with needles, a vast wooden fir lace is made. The roof is built sharply in the superior part, with the sides very abrupt, for the rain and the snow to drop quickly.


The walls are built of beams without any decoration, the only exception being the twined sculpted rope, which surrounds the church (it is considered the border between the sky and the earth/ the symbol of the Holy Trinity). The twined chain is situated under the windows, being the only construction from Romania where the former is not pasted to the wall.
The church porch, found on the west side, is prolonged also to the south and north halves, where the other two secondary entrances are. A rich sculpted ornamentation covers the pillars of the church porch and the beams’ pillars which sustain the roof with popular motifs made by carving, chopping or cutting: geometrical shapes, surrounded stars, branches, the solar symbol.

In the church yard there is the Candler which is overbuilt with a 17 meters high wooden belfry, made in the same style from Maramures.

The church is divided inside, just like all the orthodox churches in pronaos, nave and the altar, the entrance being possible from a church porch. In the interior, the pronaos and the nave are separated by a wooden wall, because, in old times, the pronaos was designated to women, and the nave only to men.

The altar, in a polygonal shape, is separated from the nave by an altar screen sculpted in oak wood, by the popular master Croitoru Constantin from Curechistea village, Grozavesti commune, Neamt county. The altar screen sculpted in wood is adorned with typically Romanian motifs, which can also be found on the tomb of Saint Stefan the Great., at Putna Monastery, Stefan the Great being Moldavia’s ruler (1457-1504).

Saint Mina Church, Mangalia | ©2008