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Lengthy article about Garry Trudeau, in the Washington Post. Thank you, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
desperance, for the link.
desperance, for the link.Oct. 25th, 2006
During our few days in Bucovina, we visited several of the painted monasteries: they are wonderful, and not the least extraordinary thing about them is that despite strong similarities between them (the themes of the painting, for example, and the positioning of these around the building), each one is fresh and distinct in my mind. Dragomirna, for example, is where we saw the woodpecker on the scaffolding which impeded our view of the church itself. Probota, on the other hand...
At Probota, the young nun (one of the disconcerting things about Romania being that the nuns are young, and rather stylish in their black robes and pillbox hats) who took our admission fee, spotted that we were foreigners and went and fetched the even younger nun who spoke foreign: French, as it turned out.
She guided us round the church, pointing out the Last Judgement in the porch, and the calendar which decorated the interior: that is, she explained that the row upon row of saints, most of them depicted in the process of dying a martyr's death, were arranged as a calendar, one for each day of the year (starting, as the year does, in March). Here were the tombs of Petru Rares and his family, carved with texts in old Slavonic script, and here was the votive painting, in which Petru Rares hand the church up to Christ.
Exceptionally, it was light enough and unencumbered enough that we were able to see the painting up the interior of the tower; above was Christ Pantocrator, and the hierarchies of angels rose in tiers between him and the mortals below. We had a slight linguistic breakdown at this point: our guide tried to identify the nine orders of angels for us, but knew the names only in Romanian, not in French. I knew most of them in English, and could produce a literal translation into French, to the delight of our guide, who produced a piece of paper for me to write them down, but rack our brains as we might, we couldn't put together more than eight (Googling suggests that the missing rank was Virtues, does not feel at all familiar. I draw no inference from this).
So we were feeling very pleased with ourselves as we set off in search of the vineyards.
At Probota, the young nun (one of the disconcerting things about Romania being that the nuns are young, and rather stylish in their black robes and pillbox hats) who took our admission fee, spotted that we were foreigners and went and fetched the even younger nun who spoke foreign: French, as it turned out.
She guided us round the church, pointing out the Last Judgement in the porch, and the calendar which decorated the interior: that is, she explained that the row upon row of saints, most of them depicted in the process of dying a martyr's death, were arranged as a calendar, one for each day of the year (starting, as the year does, in March). Here were the tombs of Petru Rares and his family, carved with texts in old Slavonic script, and here was the votive painting, in which Petru Rares hand the church up to Christ.
Exceptionally, it was light enough and unencumbered enough that we were able to see the painting up the interior of the tower; above was Christ Pantocrator, and the hierarchies of angels rose in tiers between him and the mortals below. We had a slight linguistic breakdown at this point: our guide tried to identify the nine orders of angels for us, but knew the names only in Romanian, not in French. I knew most of them in English, and could produce a literal translation into French, to the delight of our guide, who produced a piece of paper for me to write them down, but rack our brains as we might, we couldn't put together more than eight (Googling suggests that the missing rank was Virtues, does not feel at all familiar. I draw no inference from this).
So we were feeling very pleased with ourselves as we set off in search of the vineyards.