The Mănăstirea Stavropoleos, or Stavropoleos Monastery, also known simply as Biserica Stavropoleos (Stavropoleos Church) is a beautiful building located in the oldest part of Bucharest. The name of the church comes from the Greek word "Stauropolis", that is "The city of the Cross".
Built in 1724 by archimandrite Ioanichie Stratonikeas in the Brâncovenesc style and dedicated to the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, the church was closed between 1890 and 1940.
Reconsacrated on the feast of St Nicholas in 1940, the church is actually the only part still standing of the original monastery, while the other buildings are the result of a restoration project.
The murals and decorative stone carvings have largely been preserved down to the present day while the interior murals, iconostasis, and furniture have been restored.
Photography is not permitted inside, so I could only take pictures of the outside of the church, but inside, next to the iconostasis, there is a casket containing the relics of saints venerated by the Eastern Orthodox Church, among them also Saint Andrew and Saint Peter, Saint Ignatius Theophorus and Saint Basil the Great.
Stavropoleos is currently an Eastern Orthodox monastery for nuns who live there and work on restoring old books, vestments and icons, but also study, edit books, transcribe ecclesiastical music, paint icons on glass, and take care of the monastery website.
One of the monastery's constant interests is Byzantine music: the monastery is famous for its Stavropoleos Byzantine Choir, that mainly sings neo-Byzantine music, and for its 8,000-volume library (that also preserves rare manuscripts and printed works), considered as the largest collection of Byzantine music books in Romania.
You can usually hear the choir during the offices or buy CDs directly from the church, but I went to the monastery last week in the early morning to hear the 8.00 o'clock prayers and record the nuns singing during the Utrenia, or morning prayers.
ManastireaStavropoleos1_UtreniaObednita_recbyABattista
Apart from being a very moving service (it lasts roughly 1 hour and a half and it consists in prayers and chants with no music), it is also very interesting to learn more about monastic attires (inspiring also from a fashion point of view).
Novices are dressed in the Isorassa, a black inner robe (black being a symbol of repentance and simplicity) and wear the apostolnik or a black scarf tied over the head; those who have finished their novitiate period and have accepted to enter the monastery wear instead the outer robe (Exorassa) and veil (Epanokamelavkion).
I'm embedding in this post a couple of brief videos showing the church (in the second one you can briefly see one of the monastery nuns) and two extracts from a longer recording I did for a personal project. The edit of the recordings is courtesy of Kutmusic.
ManastireaStavropoleos2_UtreniaObednita_recbyABattista
My research trip to Romania was made possible through a journalistic grant from the Institutul Cultural Român (ICR - Romanian Cultural Institute), Bucharest.
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