Mănăstirea Moldovița
Part of Bucovina
A painted monastery whose exterior fresco of the 1453 Siege of Constantinople still survives.
History
Moldavian prince Petru Rareș, Stephen the Great's son, built Moldovița in 1532 after an earlier 15th-century monastery on a nearby site had been destroyed by a landslide, and had its exterior walls covered in frescoes a few years later. Its best-known scene depicts the 1453 Siege of Constantinople — reimagined with the attacking Ottomans given Moldavian dress, a subtle piece of political messaging aimed at Moldavia's own struggle against Ottoman power at the time. Enclosed within fortified walls with a defensive tower, the monastery also holds Petru Rareș's carved wooden throne and an original portrait of the founder and his family painted on the church's outer wall. UNESCO listed it in 1993 alongside its sister sites as part of the Painted Churches of Moldavia, prized collectively for frescoes that have survived open to the elements for close to five centuries.