30 April 2021

Praying in Lent and Easter 2021:
73, Stavropoleos Monastery, Bucharest

The courtyard in Stavropoleos Monastery … a quiet and prayerful corner of Bucharest (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

During the Season of Easter this year, I am continuing my theme from Lent, taking some time each morning to reflect in these ways:

1, photographs of a church or place of worship that has been significant in my spiritual life;

2, the day’s Gospel reading;

3, a prayer from the prayer diary of the Anglican mission agency USPG (United Society Partners in the Gospel).

This week is Holy Week in the Orthodox Church, and today is Good Friday in the Orthodox Calendar. My photographs this morning (30 April 2021) are from the Monastery of Stavropoleos (Mănăstirea Stavropoleos), or Holy Cross Monastery, in the centre of Bucharest.

Stavropoleos Monastery is on the corner of Stavropoleos Street and Postei Street, is close to the central area of Lipscani, and is one of the oldest buildings in the Romanian capital.

From the street outside, this picturesque monastery and its church capture the imagination with their carvings, frescoes, paintings and atrium, in a harmonious combination of Western influences and Byzantine and Ottoman traditions from the Easter. The richly-decorated church has beautiful stone and wood carvings, and the finest carvings can be seen on the main doors.

Inside, on entering the courtyard, with its candles and cloistered style, there is an atmosphere of prayer and meditation. The small courtyard, with its many columns and gravestones, was built in 1899 by Ion Mincu, one of the most important Romanian architects.

The courtyard is enclosed by three stoas, on the east, west and south sides. Scattered around are plaques and crosses from graves, and surviving pieces from the monastery’s earlier building phases and from churches in Bucharest that have been demolished. Some tombstones, dating from the 18th century, are being restored by skilled craftsmen.

The monastery today is home to a community of six nuns, and their priest confessor, Father Iustin Marchiş. Life in the monastery is divided between prayer, work and study. The work includes restoring old books, icons and vestments, writing and publishing, and major projects on Byzantine and Orthodox church music.

The church is dedicated to the archangels Saint Michael and Saint Gabriel. However, the name Stavropoleos is a Romanian version of the Greek Σταυρούπολις (Stavroúpolis), ‘The City of the Cross.’

The church was built in 1724, during the reign of Nickolaos Mavrocordatos (Nicolae Mavrocordat), the Phanariot or Greek-speaking Prince of Wallachia (1715-1730). Mavrocordatos came from an old Byzantine royal family, and introduced Greek manners, the Greek language and Greek culture to Bucharest, where he set up a splendid court modelled on the Byzantine court.

The founder of the monastery was a Greek monk, Archimandrite Ioannikios Stratonikea, known in Romanian as Ioanichie Stratonikeas, who came from Ostanitsa, in the area of Pogoni – now known as Aedonohori Konitsas – 66 km north of Ioannina, in Epirus.

Father Ioannikios became a monk in the Monastery of the Archangels at Goura near Ostanitsa and was sent to the Epirote monastery in Romania to collect funds for the restoration of his home monastery. By 1722, he was running a han or inn in Bucharest, a lucrative business in a crossroads city in the 18th century. Two years later, in 1724, he founded the monastery that would become known as Stavropoleos. The link between the han and the monastery was designed to provide financial support from the inn for the new monastery.

In 1726, Father Ioannikios was appointed by the Ecumenical Patriarch as Metropolitan of Stavropoleos and Exarch of Caria. This is ancient Aphrodisias (Ἀφροδισιάς) in western Anatolia, east of Kusadasi and north of Fethiye. The classical city was renamed Stavropolis in the early seventh century.

Bishop Ioannikios died on 7 February 1743 at the age of 61, and was buried in the narthex of the church. Ever since, the main church of the monastery he founded in Bucharest has been known as the Stavropoleos.

The monastery church is built in the Brâncovenesc style, also known as Wallachian Renaissance or Romanian Renaissance, a style that evolved in the late 17th and early 18th centuries, during the reign of Prince Constantin Brâncoveanu. One of his best known churches in this style in central Bucharest is Cretulescu Church (Biserica Crețulescu) on Calea Victoriei, on the corner of Revolution Square, beside the former Royal Palace.

The inn and the monastery’s annexes were demolished in the late 19th century, and in the decades that followed the church was damaged further by earthquakes and the dome collapsed.

The dome and its frescoes were restored at the beginning of the 20th century. But all that remains of the original monastery today is the church, alongside an early 20th century building that houses a library, a conference room and a collection of early 18th century icons and liturgical items, as well as pieces of frescoes recovered from churches demolished under the communist regime.

The dome and its frescoes were restored at the beginning of the 20th century. But all that remains of the original monastery today is the church, alongside an early 20th century building that houses a library, a conference room and a collection of early 18th century icons and liturgical items, as well as pieces of frescoes recovered from churches demolished under the communist regime.

The monastery is engaged in a virtual library project, digitalising its old books. The monastery library has over 10,000 books of theology, Byzantine music, arts and history. Some of the books are from the personal library of the Romanian art historian Vasile Drăguț, former rector of the Bucharest University of Arts.

There are patristic, biblical, dogmatic, liturgical, historical, homiletic, catechetical books, dictionaries of classic languages and textbooks, studies on Byzantine art and Orthodox iconography, and works on 18th century Romanian history and culture. There are old books in Romanian, Greek, and Church Slavonic, and the collection of books on Byzantine music, which is the largest in Romania, includes books donated by two Romanian Byzantine scholars, Sebastian Barbu-Bucur, and Titus Moisescu. The monastery is engaged in a virtual library project, digitalising its old books.

Stavropoleos is known throughout the Orthodox world and beyond for its conservation of Byzantine music. The choir has an international reputation, with many recordings, and the monastery also has the largest collection of Byzantine music books in Romania.

The Stavropoleos Byzantine Choir was created in 1994, and is led by Archdeacon Gabriel Constantin Oprea, chants at the Stavropoleos Church and teaches Byzantine music at the National University of Music in Bucharest. The group has performed in Romania and abroad, and is recording on CDs.

The church choir sings Byzantine and neo-Byzantine music, much of it based on the works of 19th century Romanian psalmodists – Macarie the Hieromonk, Nectarie the Hermit, Anton Pann and Dimitrie Suceveanu – and Greek chants translated into Romanian, or modern compositions.

A cross in the courtyard in Stavropoleos with the inscription: ‘Remember Lord your servant Themelis Zaphyris from Ioannina, 2 November 1743’ (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

John 14: 1-6 (NRSVA):

[Jesus said:] 1 ‘Do not let your hearts be troubled. Believe in God, believe also in me. 2 In my Father’s house there are many dwelling-places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? 3 And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also. 4 And you know the way to the place where I am going.’ 5 Thomas said to him, ‘Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way?’ 6 Jesus said to him, ‘I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.’

The church and the monastery of Stavropoleos are richly decorated (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary:

The Prayer in the USPG Prayer Diary today (30 April 2021) invites us to pray:

We pray for the work of the Tanzania Nursing and Midwifery Council, which regulates and trains nurses and midwives in Tanzania.

Yesterday’s reflection

Continued tomorrow

Stavropoleos Monastery in Bucharest is known throughout the Orthodox world for its Byzantine library and music (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Scripture quotations are from the New Revised Standard Version Bible: Anglicised Edition copyright © 1989, 1995, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved worldwide. http://nrsvbibles.org

The courtyard in Stavropoleos, with its columns and cloisters, has an atmosphere of prayer (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Poetry Day Ireland and
a poem that brings me
from Cappoquin to Athens

Melina Mercouri – ‘a singer of genius, a genius of phrases, beautiful and nonchalant’ (Thomas McCarthy) … the statue of Melina Mercouri near the Acropolis (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

Patrick Comerford

Today is Poetry Day Ireland 2021 (29 April), and – as with last year – all events are online. This year’s theme is ‘New Directions: Maps and Journeys’.

Individuals, organisations and schools are being invited to join in and celebrate online and virtually for Poetry Day Ireland. This may include organising an online event, reading a poetry book at home, writing a poem or sharing some poetic lines, and people are invited to share details and photos, using the hashtag #PoetryDayIRL .

For my choice of poem today to mark Poetry Day Ireland, I have chose ‘Athens 2005’ by the Cappoquin-born poet Thomas McCarthy, which brings together in one poem memories of my childhood and hopes for the future, and highlights this year’s theme, ‘New Directions: Maps and Journeys’.

During my ‘Road Trip’ last summer, I recalled how some of the happiest days in my childhood were spent in Cappoquin, Co Waterford, and on my grandparents’ former home and farm near Mount Melleray.

I grew up thinking of Cappoquin as a town of writers, poets and journalists, and believing it was the literary centre of West Waterford, if not of the Province of Munster. This was the home of Molly Keane, the poet Michael Cavanagh, and the birthplace of the travel writer Dervla Murphy, and the Victorian clergy in the parish included the future Bishop John Frederick MacNeice (1866-1942), father of poet Louis MacNeice (1907-1963).

We grew up hearing of the exploits of Sir Richard Keane (1909-2010), Diplomatic Correspondent of The Irish Times, who also fought at El Alamein, captured one of Rommel’s senior generals, and helped organise allied support for the resistance and partisans in war-time Yugoslavia.

Early writers associated with Cappoquin include the Irish scholar and poet Padraig Denn (1756-1828), commemorated in a plaque on the Main Street, the poet Michael Cavanagh (1822-1900), whose statue stands in the Square opposite the Market House. Cavanagh wrote:

God guard the hearts that those grey roofs cover,
Whose fervent pulses respond to mine,
When in raptured visions I fondly hover
Leath Sli idir Eochaill is Ceapach Choinn.


No 6 Mill Street is the ancestral home of the Browne family, including Monsignor Pádraig de Brún (1899-1960), poet, classical scholar and president of UCG; and Monsignor Maurice Browne (1892-1979), for whom the family story provided the basis of The Big Sycamore (1958), under the pen name Joseph Brady. They were uncles of the poet Máire Mac an tSaoi, who married Conor Cruise O’Brien.

Belleville House was the early home of poet John Walsh and the early childhood home of the director from the era of silent movies, William Desmond Taylor. Belleville Park was the home of Molly Keane (1904-1996), author of Good Behaviour. She was married to Bobby Keane from Cappoquin House, and it is said she took her pseudonym, MJ Farrell, from the name above a shop near the Square in Cappoquin.

The poet Thomas McCarthy was born in Cappoquin in 1954. The Cappoquin he recalls in his poetry is the small town I remember from the 1950s and 1960s: the Glenshelane woodland walk; the boathouse – used for dances and plays as well as rowing; summer cricket; the railway station that closed in 1967; and the Desmond Cinema, which closed in 2005.

His novel Asya and Christine (1992), set in the Cappoquin of 1943, includes an account of a boat race on a bracing March day, involving the local rowing club and Irish Army officers who were stationed in the town.

Dennis O’Driscoll regards Thomas McCarthy and Paul Muldoon as the most important Irish poets of this generation. Eavan Boland says he is the first poet born in the Republic of Ireland to write about it critically. Politics, family, love, history and memory are the main themes of his poetry.

For Poetry Day Ireland today, I have a chosen Thomas McCarthy’s poem ‘Athens 2005.’ This poem resonates, in oh so many ways, with my wistful thoughts of being able to return to Greece later this year, following today’s decision on easing on easing some of the pandemic lockdown restrictions.

‘Melina Mercouri’s dream, her idealised place / Where a child might grow tall with European-ness’ … the Odeon or Theatre of Herodes Atticus on the southern slopes of the Acropolis (Photograph: Patrick Comerford)

ATHENS, 2005
(for Joe Gavin)


Emblems of the Hellenic world of trade, Ionian, Olympic, a Byronic BA,
Cruise past the waiting windows; touch down, gate or disengage.

Each European driven to Ithaca, each creaking console turning to complain
Of its burden of suitcases, each with a Mediterranean assignment;

Each bag falls like an exhausted marathon runner at the gate of Athens:
The flight attendants in smart uniforms tell us to be alert and wait.

This is the Europe our fathers could never have imagined as they fled
Westward, across the ocean, leaving Queenstown and Geneva tear-stained.

Behind them as they fled entire civilisations were waking from a sleep,
An exhausted sleep of wars, a long nightmare of occupations. Europe was

Never as alert as this, not in our lifetimes nor in the lives of our fathers,
Alert with untaken journeys of pleasure, as full of its own trade

As the quaysides of Boston or the blue furnaces of Philadelphia.
I think of those journeys out of something. A flight out of Europe:

The spars creak and the sea folds and unfolds to remonstrate with time,
To show its wrists to the wind; to show its broken chains to the sky

As now the young Europeans show their passports and IDs with such
Nonchalance, and lack of interest. The whole of Europe’s on the move

Again, but this time into itself: the idle moves to the working part,
The cold North seeks the hot islands as if Greece could hold enough light

To satisfy our darkness. I’ve just said farewell to the companionship
Of the great, to Dora Bakoyannis in Athens Town Hall,

To a beloved Spyros Mercouris speaking at the Pnyx, making a promise
To support the work of poets, Spyros who brought Greek sunlight

To the Big Screen, who watched Melina become a singer of genius,
A genius of phrases, beautiful and nonchalant as a Greek cigarette –

So that we wonder what it is we are looking for
And we wonder what the fuss was about, and the budgets that wounded cities,

And wonder too as we sink into the grace and ease of an Hellenic life
Where it was our plane journeys began, what politics and foul weather

Made us board our plane of exile, this sun charter called Capital of Culture,
And I think of the Hellenic canvas of James Barry, and how it all began;

Not to mention, in passing, the Hellenic ideal of Europe in our scholars,
WB Stanford's book, the songs of Father Prout, etc., etc.,

Or whether our plane took flight much later than that; in our father’s time:
The Berlin Airlift, the harrowing films of the Holocaust and the vileness

Europe is capable of; or Melina Mercouri’s dream, her idealised place
Where a child might grow tall with European-ness, at home and in love

From the Shannon river to the Danube Volga, or Vistula; consoled
By culture for all the horrors of war and exile … Until quite suddenly

I see, clear as a glass of water from the Nagle Mountains, a ragged
Child, a little gypsy boy or a child coming home from a Talmudic lesson,

I see that child grab his one precious suitcase, a cardboard case marked ‘Europe’,
And all my hopes go with him, all the cut-stones and the sunken treasure.

The Cappoquin Thomas McCarthy recalls in his poetry is the town I remember from the 1950s and 1960s (Photograph: Patrick Comerford, 2020)