The Beautiful Curchi Monastery is a “must see” in Moldova, but beyond the colourful walls and glittering icons are at least three myths as to how this monastery came to be founded.
Dumitraşcu Curtiu, the Noble Warrior
The first of the foundation myths tells us that the monastery dates back to the time of medieval Moldavian Prince Stephen The Great (Stefan cel Mare, born. 1433, reigned from 1457, died 1504). There was certainly a lot of monastery founding that went on back in his day. Before television I guess people had to find other things to do with their time and in medieval Moldavia it seems that Monastery Founding was a fairly popular hobby.
But in this first story the courtier and veteran of many battles against the Tatars and Ottomans, Dumitraşcu Curtiu, who has become tired of war tells the Prince that he desired to retire to become a monk and found a monastery. Prince Stephen agreed to let the warrior leave court to pursue the redemption of his soul. Curtiu retuned to the lands of his parents to find that the area had been laid waste by the Tatars and his parents killed, so he travelled onwards to the place where his fiancé, Ileana lived. Here Curtiu also found the place in ruins and Ileana taken into slavery by the Tatars.
Then a convenient hermit emerges from the woods and tells Curtiu that he can tell him where Ileana is held and help him rescue her if Curtiu takes an oath to become a monk and found a monastery at a place where God tells him, just as he had already promised Prince Stephen. Curtiu takes the oath to do so.
The hermit then guides Curtiu to Râșca monastery before leaving him there. The hermit then smuggled himself into the fortress of the Tatars and finds Ileana in the garden. He promises to save her if she will take an oath to become a nun and found a convent after being freed. Ileana accepts and swears her oath. The hermit then dresses her in men’s clothes and rides out of the fortress with her completely unnoticed, which must surely open a whole series of questions for whoever was supposed to be guarding the Tatar fortress.
Once reunited the couple forget their oaths, marry and start a home. Later they are both overcome with moral anguish over the broken oaths (as one would be) and they separate, take holy orders and seek to find the places they should found the religious houses they had undertaken to establish. To do this they take the logical step of each throwing a pear in to a river and wherever the pear should end up would be the place where they would build their monastery. Ileana’s pear washed up at the place that is now Tabăra monastery and Curtiu’s at the place we find Curchi monastery.
There is a slight problem with this legend in the fact that we have no evidence of the existence of the monastery for a few more centuries.
Dumitraş Curcă, the Outlaw
The second legend tells us that Dumitraş Curcă, the son of a clergyman in Orhei county, had become an outlaw and had taken to using his extraordinary physical strength to attack travellers in the forest and rob them.
One day Curcă attacks and kills two travellers who turn out to be his own parents. Overcome with grief and on the advice of another conveniently placed hermit he joins the monastery at Râșca and later returns to the scene of his crime where he leads his former gang of thieves and murderers to found a new monastery which bears his name, Curchi.
Iordachi and Mihai Curcă, the Brothers and the Priest’s Treasure
The third legend is again set against a backdrop of the Tatar raids on the local area. In this story we start in the village of Buzești in Orhei County.
In the village live the brothers Iordachi and Mihai Curcă, the priest Teofan, his wife and two children. They decide to flee the area and the Tatar incursions and cross the river Prut (the modern day border with Romania). A year later the priest dies and Iordachi decides that he needs to return home for some reason to do with bees, which makes no sense to me and is probably a bad translation. The priests widow asks him to take the children with him (again, quite inexplicable if you ask me) and tells Iordachi where the priest had buried some treasure. The widow asks Iordachi to dig up the treasure and use the money to care for her children.
Unfortunately and somewhat unsurprisingly, when Iordachi arrives home in Buzești, he finds there are still Tatars there who take him and the children prisoner. Iordachi escapes but leaves the children behind. Iordachi returns to safety across the Prut where the priests widow soon dies after receiving news of the capture and probable death of her children.
Then both Iordachi and his brother Mihai decide to return to Buzești. They find there are still village a smoking ruin destroyed by the Tatars. They are able to find the priest’s treasure but are then overcome with remorse at the loss of the children whilst they hold the money that was meant for those children that Iordachi had abandoned to the Tatars.
So back across the Prut the brothers go. They head to the city of Iași where they ask the Metropolitan Bishop Iacob for absolution. As penance they both become monks and return to the spot where the treasure was buried and here they founded the Curchi monastery.
There is little evidence for any of these stories and the recorded history of the monastery doesn’t go back far enough for any to be likely. But they are interesting stories nonetheless.
The Monastery Under the Soviets
During the period of Soviet occupation, religious institutions were repressed and in 1958 the Curchi Monastery was closed. Many of the books, icons and works of art were burnt or otherwise destroyed .
The buildings were repurposed, first as offices for the forestry department, and the beautiful church of the Nativity of the Virgin Mary was used as storage for chemicals for the agronomist school.
In 1961, the monastery became a psychiatric hospital which continued on the site until 1999. The monastery reopened in 2005 and has been comprehensively restored and the unfinished Church of St Nicholas (which was started 1936 and abandoned in 1939) was finally completed.
The monastery is now one of Moldova’s top tourist attractions and rightfully so. The monks seem content with the flow of visitors and even operate a very good value souvenir shop (monks working on the tills too), but if Moldova starts to attract more visitors I wonder if this will change as a result of tourists disturbing or disrespecting their contemplative way of life.
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