Avatars of a Destroyed Monument: The Văcărești Monastery. 1985-2022

Abstract

From its demolishing until today, in an unending suffering, the amplest monastic ensemble from the last great chapter of Romanian medieval art attempts to recompose its dismembered image. The reconstruction à l’identique and the resuming of life in the monastic space, the pious reunion of the dismembered elements of the church in a memorial with partial anastyloses and suggestions of the sacred space, the integration of the recovered fragments in the museal circuit of Bucharest, the virtual reconstruction, represent at the same time the subject of unending discussions, controversies, or resigned solutions. Beyond the unhonoured promises, the obstinate, decades long efforts, to sensitise the public conscience and to awaken the will of the authorities, the issue with the Văcărești Monastery remains symptomatically unsolved: firstly, the recoupment of the foundation place. The restitution of the eighty fragments of mural painting that had been extracted, the anastylosis of the magnificent columns in the narthex of the church and the conservation of that which had been saved from the stonework of the ecclesial space, are until today the only signs of a long and hesitant process of recovery.