Byzantine Culture

History · Article

The Byzantine Legacy in Romania and Moldavia

Wallachia and Moldavia took their church, script, law and court culture from Byzantium, and the Phanariot princes governed them for a century. The painted monasteries and Byzance après Byzance.

The phrase Byzance après Byzance — “Byzantium after Byzantium” — was coined by the Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga as the title of a book published in 1935, and it was about his own country. His argument was that Byzantine civilisation did not end in 1453 but continued for another three and a half centuries in the Orthodox world under Ottoman rule, and that the Danubian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia were where it continued most fully.

The claim is partisan and largely correct.

The Inheritance

Wallachia and Moldavia emerged as principalities in the fourteenth century, on the far side of the Danube from Byzantium, at exactly the moment the empire was collapsing. They took their institutional and cultural equipment from it anyway.

The church. Both principalities established metropolitan sees under the Ecumenical Patriarchate — Wallachia in 1359, Moldavia in 1401 — and the Byzantine rite, calendar and canon law came with them.

The script and liturgical language. Church Slavonic, in Cyrillic, was the language of church, chancery and law until the seventeenth century, despite the population speaking a Romance language. Romanian was written in Cyrillic characters until the mid-nineteenth century.

Law. Byzantine legal collections in Slavonic and then Romanian translation formed the basis of the principalities’ law. The Pravila of Vasile Lupu (1646) and the Îndreptarea legii (1652) are substantially Byzantine canon and civil law, transmitted through the tradition described in Orthodox canon law.

Court culture. Titles, ceremonial, chancery formulas and dress followed Byzantine models, transmitted via Bulgaria and Serbia.

Patrons of Orthodoxy

Once Constantinople fell, the Romanian princes became the principal financial patrons of Orthodox Christianity under Ottoman rule — a role that gives the Byzance après Byzance thesis most of its substance.

They endowed Mount Athos on a very large scale, funding building, repairs and the upkeep of monasteries; several Athonite houses depended on Romanian revenues for centuries. They supported the patriarchates of Constantinople, Jerusalem, Antioch and Alexandria, the monastery of St Catherine on Sinai, and Orthodox communities across the Ottoman lands.

The mechanism was the “dedicated monastery” (închinare): a Romanian monastery and its estates were assigned to a foreign Orthodox house, whose income they became. By the nineteenth century a substantial share of Moldavian and Wallachian land was held this way, and the secularisation of these estates in 1863 was one of the formative acts of the modern Romanian state.

Romanian presses also printed Greek, Slavonic, Arabic and Georgian liturgical books for churches that could not print their own — Antim the Iberian, a Georgian who became metropolitan of Wallachia, ran a printing operation that supplied much of the Orthodox east in the early eighteenth century.

The Painted Monasteries

The most spectacular survival is architectural. The monasteries of northern Moldavia, built and decorated under Stephen the Great (1457–1504) and his successor Petru Rareș, carry fresco cycles on their exterior walls — complete programmes covering every outside surface.

Voroneț, Sucevița, Moldovița, Humor, Arbore and Pătrăuți are the principal sites, and they are UNESCO world heritage listed. The blue of Voroneț, a deep and unusually stable pigment, is locally famous.

The painting is Byzantine in its iconography and its technique — the fresco tradition transmitted through Serbian and Athonite intermediaries — and entirely original in its application. Exterior painting on this scale exists nowhere in the Byzantine world proper. The programmes include a Tree of Jesse, a Last Judgement, hymn illustrations, ranks of philosophers, and — repeatedly — the Siege of Constantinople, depicted with the besiegers in Turkish dress: a fifth-century Persian assault repainted as a contemporary Ottoman one, in a principality paying tribute to the sultan.

The buildings themselves combine a Byzantine plan with a distinctive Moldavian profile — high stepped gables, elongated naves, a burial chamber between narthex and nave — and gothic detail borrowed from Transylvania and Poland.

The Phanariots

From 1711 in Moldavia and 1716 in Wallachia, the Ottoman government appointed Greek Orthodox notables from the Phanar district of Constantinople as princes of the two principalities.

The Phanariot families — Mavrocordat, Ghica, Ypsilantis, Soutzos, Rosetti and others — were the Ottoman Empire’s Orthodox governing class, supplying dragomans, interpreters and diplomats, and several claimed Byzantine descent. Their century in the principalities has a mixed reputation: the appointments were bought and the tenures short, which encouraged extraction, and Romanian national historiography has treated the Phanariot period as an era of foreign exploitation.

It was also a period of genuine reform and of intense cultural activity. Constantin Mavrocordat abolished serfdom in both principalities in the 1740s. Greek academies in Bucharest and Iași taught philosophy, science and classics at a level unavailable elsewhere in the Ottoman world, and it was through them that Enlightenment ideas entered the Balkans.

The Phanariot era ended with the Greek revolt of 1821, which began, significantly, in Moldavia, led by Alexander Ypsilantis — a Phanariot and a Russian general, attempting to raise the Balkans in the name of a Byzantine restoration. It failed immediately, and the Porte stopped appointing Greeks.

Iorga’s Thesis

Iorga’s Byzance après Byzance argued that the Byzantine political and cultural order survived 1453 through the Patriarchate, the Phanariot class, the Romanian princes and the Orthodox monasteries, and that its final extinction came only with the national revolutions of the nineteenth century.

The thesis has been criticised for stretching the definition of Byzantium and for the nationalist purpose it served — Iorga was writing a Romanian claim to a share in a prestigious inheritance. It has also proved durable, because the continuities it identifies are real, and because it asks a genuinely useful question: what exactly ended in 1453, and what did not. The historiography is discussed in Byzantine studies.

Reading a Painted Monastery

The exterior programmes of the Moldavian churches follow a consistent scheme, and knowing it turns a wall of colour into a readable text.

The east wall (the apses): the Prayer of All Saints — ranks of saints in concentric registers curving around the apses toward the Trinity at the top. Hundreds of figures, arranged by category: prophets, apostles, martyrs, bishops, monks, women saints.

The south wall: the Tree of Jesse, the genealogy of Christ as a vine springing from the sleeping Jesse, with prophets and — a striking local feature — ancient philosophers and sibyls included among the witnesses. Aristotle and Plato appear on the walls of Moldavian monasteries.

The west wall: the Last Judgement, filling the entire façade, with the river of fire descending toward the damned, who are frequently identifiable by dress as Turks, Tatars, Jews and Latins.

The north wall: generally the most weathered, since the prevailing weather comes from that side; often the Genesis cycle or a saint’s life.

Recurring in several churches: the Siege of Constantinople — nominally the Persian and Avar attack of 626, painted with the attackers in Ottoman dress and equipment, including cannon.

That last is the interpretive key to the whole programme. These are frescoes commissioned in the 1530s and 1540s by a principality paying tribute to the sultan, depicting the deliverance of Constantinople from a besieging army in contemporary Ottoman uniform, on the outside wall where everyone could see it.

Why Exterior Frescoes?

The Moldavian exterior painting is unique in the Orthodox world, and the explanations offered are worth weighing.

The practical explanation: the churches are small, the congregations at major feasts were large, and the crowd stood outside. Painting the exterior gave the people who could not get in something to look at — which is the explanation the local tradition gives.

The catechetical explanation: a largely illiterate population learned doctrine from images, and an exterior programme reaches everyone, including those who never enter.

The political explanation: the Last Judgement with Turks among the damned, and the Siege of Constantinople with Ottoman besiegers repelled, constitute a statement directed at a specific audience in a specific situation.

The technical question is separate and unresolved: how the frescoes have survived five centuries of Moldavian winters on north-facing walls. The plaster formulation, the pigments — particularly the celebrated Voroneț blue — and the deep protective eaves have all been credited, and conservation science has studied the mortar composition without fully explaining it.

All the explanations are probably partly right, and the political one is the most often overlooked.

The Dedicated Monasteries and 1863

The secularisation of monastic estates in 1863 is a significant episode and shows how the Byzantine inheritance became a modern political problem.

By the mid-nineteenth century, monasteries “dedicated” to foreign Orthodox houses — Athos, Sinai, the eastern patriarchates — held something in the region of a quarter of the arable land of the two principalities. Their revenues left the country, and the dedicated houses were generally administered by Greek clergy.

For the newly united Romanian state under Alexandru Ioan Cuza, this was intolerable: a quarter of the national territory producing income for institutions abroad, exempt from the government’s authority, at a moment when land reform was the central political question.

The law of December 1863 secularised all monastic estates without compensation, over the protests of the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the affected monasteries, and an offer of partial compensation was subsequently refused by the Greek side and withdrawn.

The measure roughly doubled the land available for the peasant reform that followed, and it permanently damaged relations between the Romanian church and the Greek hierarchy.

It is a precise instance of the pattern described in the Byzantine legacy in the Balkans: an inherited Byzantine arrangement, which had worked as piety for four centuries, colliding with a nineteenth-century nation-state and being abolished.

Continue exploring