| Through the prayers of Sf. Pious Daniil the Hermit and the zeal of the good and faithful Voievode (Prince) Stephen the Great, the Voronet Monastery was raised up, between the 26th of May and the 14th of September in the year 1488, with St. George the Martyr as its patron saint.
In 1547, under the supervision of the Metropolitan bishop Grigore Rosca (whose tomb can now be found here), the porch was added and all the exterior paintings were carried out. From the very beginning of its history, the monastery was blessed with monks of extremely high spiritual caliber, and in the time of St. Pious Daniil the Hermit it was a true example of Romanian hermitage. Monastic life at Voronet was interrupted in 1785 due to the annexation of Bucovina to the Hapsburg Empire, and it became a working monastery again only in 1991, with the arrival of a community of nuns.
Under the abbacy of their Mother Superior Irina Pantescu, this new community strives to harmoniously combine a religious life of prayer and workshop with housekeeping and farm work, running a painting workshop and providing guided tours of the monastery for visitors.
The paintings in the porch represent the Christian Orthodox Calendar. Many of the icons here bear graffiti-names and scratches- the scars that remain after the 206 years of the monastery’s disuse. Above the entrance, in the narthex, lies a superb icon - "Dulcea Imbratisare" (“the Sweet Embrace") and directly above it, an inscription in stone names the monastery’s founded and the date it was raised. |