Down on the Herăstrău lakeside, right in the middle of Romania’s capital city, the wandering traveller will encounter an authentic Romanian village, rich in monuments and artifacts from the XVIIth century, all the way up to the XXth century, representative constructions originating from important ethnographical regions which have been granted a second life at the …

Hilandar (fig. 1) is a Serbian imperial lavra in the Holy Mountain. It ranks fourth in the athonite hierarchy. Situated in the North-East part of the Athos Peninsula it is surrounded by hills, and cannot be seen from the coast, although it is only ca. two and a half kilometres far from it. There is …

Saint Meletius, Archbishop of Antioch, was Bishop of Sebaste in Armenia (ca. 357), and afterwards he was summoned to Antioch by the emperor Constantius to help combat the Arian heresy, and was appointed to that See. St Meletius struggled zealously against the Arian error, but through the intrigues of the heretics he was thrice deposed …

The story of the monastery’s building goes back a long way in remote, yet vivid legends. They have it that a lone priest lived here who had had advised ruler Lapusneanu to build a monastery on the place where a sycamore maple grew. Thus, the legend has it, was the way the first stone was …