Iași: the Monastery of the Holy Three Hierarchs

From the Palace of Culture to the main boulevard of Iași 

After visiting the Palace of Culture with mostly all of its museums, galleries and special halls, as well as the Clock Tower, I get out of this enourmous building, the landmark of the city of Iași, and walk towards my next destination which also happens to be the last one I get to see during my 2 days city break, more precisely, the Boulevard of Stephan the Great and Holy. I am passing by the equstrian statueof this romanian ruler too, its image being represented and placed in front of the Palace of Culture.

The Boulevard of "Ștefan cel Mare și Sfânt" 

At the beginning of the Pedestrian Boulevard there are people with small stores selling different kind of things from traditional foods such as „turte” or „placinte” (moldovian pastry) to pieces of clothing, souvenirs, mulled wine and so on.

The Boulevard seems like a market and I guess if the weather have been better than today there would have been many people selling things and more tourists and citizens too. But it’s a working day, so most of the humans are just rushing through the pedestrian boulevard.

As I am strolling, I keep turning back because the cityscape, having in center the long building of the Palace of Culture stands there, in front of me, to be photographed and draw my attention continuously. It’s architectural elements and style look very good from this angle too and I think that its position at the end of or in the beginning of – depending from where are you coming – is creating an attractive and beautiful appearance, highlighting very well this particular part of the city of Iași.

Discovering the elegant church of the Holy Three Hierarchs 

Although the destination I am looking for on this street is the Metropolitan cathedral of Moldova, on the left side of the boulevard I first came across another church that seriously gets my attention due to its impressive walls, thus, because I still have same time, I decide to find out more about it.

The building I am talking about is named the Monastery of the Holy Three Hierarchs and is dating back to the 17th century, when it was erected by the Moldavian voivode Vasile Lupu as a princely necropolis, thus the tomb of founder family Lupu is found in the church narthex.

The wonderful exterior walls of the monastery: what I am seeing?

As I already said, what attracts me toward this building are the exterior walls which are having so many small and beautiful sculpted decorations that I haven’t seen before being placed like so on a church. The entire surface of the four facades is fully decorated with this little ornamentations that give the building an authentic and catchy aspect.

I enter the garden of the monastery and I keep staring at the exterior walls, wondering about the technique, is this a bas-relief, are the decorations carved or applied or I am looking at a very good trompe l’oeil painting?

How were the decorations made and what influences can be observe here?

I discover that the wonderful stone embroidery had been carved out of stone blocks, one by one with a lot of meticulousness and welded together with molten lead. The motifs are inspired by various cultural styles among which Turkish, Arabic, Georgian, Armenian, Persian and, of course, Romanian.

I notice Persian vases, solar disks, exotic floral motifs or Russian columns and maybe many more that I don’t know how to describe. All of these are harmonically combining with elements inspired by traditional Romanian sculpturefrom popular embroidery and woodwork.

From the bottom to the top of the church there are not a few registers of such decorative motifs, but non of it gets repeated and I think this particular fact really impresses me a lot and makes me to appreciate even more the historical building I am looking at and, of course, the behind hard work of the construction process.

Not being able to visit the interior of the church. Why? 

I want to enter inside the monastery to explore what’s inside too, but unfortunately, I find a sign on which is written that in a certain time range, the church cannot be visited, thus I don’t have the opportunity to see the interior of this so amazing on outside construction. Maybe next time. Who knows?

For now, I am just glad that I got to admire it from the outside and surely this particular view didn’t disappointed me at all. Is time to move on to the next historical building that I was actually searching for when I entered the main boulevard. By the way, did you know that this street is called by the citizens “ulița mare”, translated into English as “the great street”?

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