Borzești Church: Stephen the Great’s Orthodox Foundation in Romania
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- Medieval
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- Medieval
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- Principality of Moldavia
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- Religious
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On this page13 sections
History
Borzești Church is an Orthodox church in Romania, built by Stephen the Great and his eldest son, Alexandru, between July 9, 1493, and October 12, 1494. Dedicated to the Assumption of the Virgin Mary, the Christian feast commemorating the belief that Mary was taken bodily into heaven, it stands at Borzești, a settlement now within the municipality of Onești in Bacău County. Stephen the Great, also known as Stephen III of Moldavia, ruled the late-medieval Principality of Moldavia and was associated with the construction or patronage of numerous churches.
Borzești was connected with Stephen’s birth and childhood, as well as with the property of his parents and ancestors. The foundation inscription states that Stephen and Alexandru erected the church as a prayer for themselves and in memory of their deceased forefathers and parents. It also names the nearby river as the Totruș. The church is regarded as the only foundation of Stephen the Great that was neither intended to commemorate a battle nor established to serve a city. Its foundation is therefore understood as an act of respect for his family and ancestors.
Foundation traditions
Local tradition adds a memorial story involving Stephen’s childhood friend, Gheorghe. In one version, the boy was killed by arrows while children were playing at war beneath an oak tree. Another version says that he was accidentally hanged from a walnut tree when the children were distracted by a hare. The tree was then burned, and the church was built on the site. Tradition further places the altar over the surviving trunk, although that detail remained a matter for investigation rather than an established fact. The story gives the church a second traditional association, alongside its documented connection with Stephen’s family.
Monastic transfer and decline
On March 20, 1694, Constantin Duca transferred Borzești Church to Bogdana Monastery. Irina Ruset, wife of the grand vornic Manolachi Ruset, was buried in the pronaos, the entrance vestibule of an Orthodox church, after her death on February 7, 1716. The building may later have been burned and then weakened by repeated earthquakes. It was said to have remained in ruins for 57 years before repairs in 1879, although accounts differ over whether the large external buttresses were added during that work.
In 1859, Melchisedec Ștefănescu found the vaults and walls cracked and the church without a roof. By 1899, Constantin I. Istrati recorded that services had stopped, the building was closed, its enclosure had disappeared, and the church was in a ruinous state. He photographed it in detail and suggested that renovation might expose foundations belonging to the lost enclosure wall, a bell tower, associated houses, or burials. These possibilities were not established.
Modern repairs and interpretation
Three massive external buttresses were attributed to a local craftsman working in the early nineteenth century. Their poor construction changed the original form of the church, and they were removed during repairs in 1904 and 1905. Those works also repaired the roof and western facade. Repairs undertaken from 1938 to 1940 were compromised by the earthquake of November 1940. Horia Teodoru investigated further general repairs, which were completed by 1945. The church was affected again by the 1977 earthquake and underwent restoration in 1993 and 1994.
Between the summer of 2003 and the summer of 2004, Grigore Popescu painted the interior in a broadly Byzantine-inspired style. The work covered approximately 600 square metres and included scenes from Stephen the Great’s childhood and life. In 2004, the parish replaced the windows with double-glazed units using its own funds to protect the paintings. No physical deterioration caused by the glazing system was known at the time of a related parliamentary inquiry in 2018. Borzești Church is listed as a Class A historical monument in Bacău County under code BC-II-m-A-00797.
Remains
Borzești Church stands on a small rise and has monumental proportions despite the coarse quality of its construction. The building measures 26.20 metres in length and 10.30 metres in width. Its plan combines a rectangular entrance vestibule and nave with a semicircular altar apse internally, while the apse has eleven sides on the exterior. The church brings together Moldavian, Gothic, and Byzantine characteristics and belongs to an early group of simple churches with a straight plan, one central apse, and no tower.
Plan and interior structure
Entrance vestibule and nave
A thick wall separates the pronaos from the nave. Paired stone pilasters and a transverse double arch divide the pronaos into two rectangular compartments. The passage into the nave is narrow and framed by a rectangular Gothic design. The nave itself has three unequal bays. Its central bay carries a spherical cap, while transverse and stepped arches successively reduce the width of the central vaults and form small compartments to the east and west.
Vaulting and altar
The vaulting contains four spherical caps supported by Moldavian arches, pendentives, small drums, pilasters, and stepped consoles. Pendentives are curved structural elements that transfer the weight of a dome or vault onto its supporting walls or arches. One interpretation sees the succession of arches as an imitation of the stepped beam ceilings of wooden churches. The internal supports also helped counter the outward pressure produced by the vaults. The altar has no separate proskomide or diaconicon chambers. These Orthodox service spaces are represented by small niches in the altar walls.
Exterior construction and decoration
Stone walls and apse
The walls are built mainly from rough local stone, including river stone, with a smaller amount of brick. This relatively weak material deteriorated particularly around the door pillars. A slightly moulded gray-stone base runs around the church, with larger dressed stones at the corners. Regularly cut stone also appears at the upper corners, while the eaves have a simple stone cornice. The walls remain straight along the pronaos and nave before a slight setback leads to the polygonal apse. The original roof was covered with shingles.
Tall brick pilasters mark the apse, using a type of brick thought to have come partly from the construction site of Hârlău Church, completed in the summer of 1492. Beneath the cornice are two horizontal rows of large and small niches, with two small niches above each large one. They were probably first painted with church images, then plastered and partly blocked. Thirteen long brick niches decorate the lower apse. Their piers and arches are irregularly arranged, with fourteen arch supports that do not exactly match the niches. In the upper row, two niches appear above each lower niche.
Brick belts and glazed disks
The rough-stone lower walls are interrupted by a dressed-stone band and two further bands of exposed and glazed brick. The lower brick bands form groups of three rows in green tones, while another line of glazed bricks runs above the large niches. Glazed-brick disks appear above the niches, three over the supports of the large niches and one over the small niches. These shallow, dish-like forms have a central projection and raised ring, with small three-cornered pieces filling the surrounding spaces. Their colors include green, yellow, light brown, and orange. Borzești is noted as the first church of Stephen the Great’s period in which these disks no longer carried animal or human motifs.
Western entrance and windows
The western entrance is centered on the facade, where Gothic mouldings form a pointed arch and a niche is set directly above it. The interior doorway between the pronaos and nave has a rectangular frame with intersecting mouldings. Its rough execution has been attributed to a local Moldavian craftsman adapting a Gothic model.
The pronaos originally contained four unusually large two-part windows with central mullions, tracery, and recessed mouldings resembling pointed arches. Surviving fragments include trefoils and quatrefoils in a Gothic Rayonnant manner, a phase of Gothic design known for elaborate tracery and radiating window patterns. The openings were later damaged and partly blocked. Their scale and Gothic profiles contrast with the Byzantine-influenced vaulting inside. The nave and altar have smaller, narrow, elongated windows, including one on the apse axis and two in the nave’s side walls. One retains part of a frame with crossed rods. The frames are rectangular outside and slightly pointed inside.
Paintings, inscriptions, and burials
Earlier painted decoration survives only in limited form. By 1925, two painted icons beside the nave door and remnants on the masonry iconostasis remained. An iconostasis is the screen of icons separating the nave from the sanctuary. Some icons date from 1776, while others are older and were painted in water-based colors. A small oil icon of the Annunciation stands to the left of the altar and bears a Romanian inscription. The eyes of saints in the interior icons were damaged in vandalism attributed uncertainly to Tatars, Turks, Hungarians, or Poles.
Burial stones bearing Slavonic epitaphs were seen near the church in 1879. Some were later incorporated into the nineteenth-century buttresses, while other stones were too damaged to decipher. The surviving stones recorded by Istrati were photographed. By 1925, the church retained its old masonry, glazed disks, glazed-brick bands, exterior niches, carved Gothic windows, and foundation inscription, with several windows partly blocked. The exposed-brick niches and glazed disks of the apse also survived.
