The Voivode's Mosque

The Sunday Pilgrimage #12

Curtea de Argeș Cathedral, Wallachia, Romania

We’re moving on. Since February, we Sunday Pilgrims have been wandering the ancient sacred sites of Britain, and we have barely scratched the surface of that country’s astonishing Christian heritage. We’ll be back there, I’m sure, but for now we are heading further afield. For the next couple of months we’ll be at the opposite end of the European continent, in Romania. I’m an Englishman who has joined the Romanian Orthodox Church, so this is a way of bringing it all together.

I may be in the Church, of course, but I’m not in the culture. Romania is a remarkable country, with a fascinating folk heritage and a Christian faith which - unlike in much of England, alas - still seems to pulse with a living energy. I enjoy it every time I visit, but I can’t pretend to really understand it. Western Europeans and Eastern Europeans in some ways view each other over a great divide. Our histories and cultures are very different - and so, too, is our Christianity.

Perhaps some of you may be wondering what this ‘Orthodox’ Church is, and how it differs from the ‘Catholic’ church that dominated the West until the sixteenth century, and which is still the biggest Christian denomination in the world. I don’t have a hundred thousand words here to lay out the reasons why the Eastern and Western Christians went their separate ways (though many have done so, from Philip Sherrard to John Strickland.) Suffice it to say that the (Latin-speaking) Church of Rome - which these days tends to be called the ‘Catholic Church’ - broke away from the the rest of the (mostly Greek-speaking) Christian family - which these days tends to be called the ‘Orthodox Church’ - in the 11th century. Both sides had arguments over theology and practice that had been simmering for centuries, but the main rift was over the power of the Bishop of Rome, who had come to claim personal executive authority over the entire Church. This claim was - and still is - rejected by the non-Roman branches of the Church, as it would later come to be rejected by Martin Luther and the ‘Reformers’ of the 16th century West, who broke away from Rome over the same issue.

That’s the politics, anyway. The result, over the last thousand years, has been Western and Eastern Christian Churches which, while they share the same fundamental theology, are quite different in many ways in their practice, approach and traditions. Orthodoxy, to my mind, has best preserved the Christian tradition as it was before the ‘Great Schism’ of 1054, which is what I’m doing in the Romanian Church, trying to follow along with the language of the liturgy, and sometimes being bamboozled by aspects of the country’s culture that have not yet revealed themselves to me.

But this is all fine. The differences between cultures are one of the things that make life on this strange planet interesting, and a visit to Romania will certainly put some of them on display. Our first Romanian pilgrimage, though, is going to put some other cultural divisions - or at least, distinctions - on display too, and they may be more unexpected.

Take a look at this building. What could it be?

That’s a mosque! I hear some of you cry. Surely that’s an Indian temple! respond others. Nonsense, says a third faction, that’s clearly a Middle Eastern building: look at the Arabesque architecture!

Well, you’re all wrong, my fictional friends. This is, in fact, the Orthodox Christian cathedral in the town of Argeș, in the heart of Wallachia, the Romanian province which once boasted the kindly Vlad the Impaler as its king. Still, I can see why you said what I said that you said (!) It does look, doesn’t it, very Arabic?

I mean: take a gander at this beautiful doorway. It could be from the Alhambra:

And how about this curious structure, which sits in front of the main door of the cathedral? Nobody would bat an eyelid if they saw this in Agra:

This building is designed to hold the semantron, a curious instrument unique to Orthodox Christianity, which is used to summon the faithful to prayer. It’s an extremely elaborate building for such a simple purpose, though, and its design, again, is inescapably Middle Eastern:

In fact, as a UNESCO architectural survey points out, this building seems to occupy the position which, in a mosque, would be taken up by the fountain in which worshippers wash their feet before entering. So what is going on here? The answer seems to be that this church is, indeed, deeply influenced by Middle Eastern Islamic architecture. More than that, in fact: it may even be partly constructed from Arabic cast-offs.

Argeș cathedral was constructed in the 16th century by this man:

This is the Voivode - or king - of Wallachia, Neagoe Basarab. Note the dreadlocks, which Romanian kings of this period seemed to really go in for. Basarab was the builder of, or at least the man who commissioned, this cathedral, and the period of his reign is significant. He was Voivode just seventy years after Constantinople, formerly the capital of the Orthodox Empire of Byzantium, was finally conquered by the Muslim Ottomans. Islam, and its Arabesque architectural style, was both rampant and spreading, and Wallachia was a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire. Basarab was said to have spent time in Ottoman lands during his youth. All of this adds up to the obvious cultural influence which can be seen in the cathedral that Basarab built:

Or did he build it? This is where the plot thickens. According to legend, Basarab in fact employed an architect, one Meșterul Manole, to design his masterpiece. The project was a struggle for him, though. In fact, nothing seemed to be going right at all. It went so badly, in fact, that Manole came to believe that only a sacrifice - in the literal sense of the word - could bring it to fruition, so he bricked up his own living wife in the walls of the cathedral. Attitudes towards gender equality were not as advanced in medieval Wallachia as most of us would probably like today. It seemed to work, though: the cathedral still stands. There is even a marker on one of the walls where Manole’s wife is said to be entombed.

Whether or not there is any truth to this fruity story, what is undeniably true is that Islamic influence on this Cathedral was more than just theoretical. The building was restored in the 19th century from a half-ruined state, and during the restoration it is said that some of the bricks in the Cathedral’s dome were found to be inscribed with the word Allah. Certainly Lecomte du Noüy, the architect who led the restoration, discovered what he said were ‘skilfully drawn’ Arabic inscriptions beneath some of the plasterwork. It seems that actual Arabic stonework, perhaps from an earlier Ottoman mosque, was repurposed to build this most Orthodox of buildings.

Inside, though, things are a lot more Christian. Christ Pantocrator looks down from on high, as he does in every Orthodox cathedral:

The internal architecture is a curious and beautiful mixture of Byzantine Christian tradition and that Arabic influence:

To the right of the door as you walk in are two grave slabs. This is the last resting place of Neagoe Basarab, and his queen. This time around, at least as far as we know, they were dead when they were entombed.

There’s a final twist, though, to the story of Basarab and his architect. It’s said that when this cathedral was finished, the Voivode set Manole a challenge. Could he build another, adjoining cathedral, equally beautiful, whilst standing on the roof of this one? Manole accepted the challenge and climbed onto the roof, whereupon Basarab destroyed the scaffolding, ensuring that his architect could never come down and build anyone else a building as beautiful as his.

The story didn’t end well for Manole. They say he tried to construct a pair of wings from scraps of wood left on the roof and fly to safety, but they failed and he plummeted to his death, perhaps with his poor wife’s ghost looking on. If there’s a moral to this story, it’s probably the oldest one of all, at least for a royal architect: put not thy trust in princes. They always get their way in the end.