Neamt Monastery
Painted in fresco, 1994

It was 1994 when Petru first returned to Romania after his dramatic flee in 1987.
The so called revolution in 1989 had overturned the Romanian communist dictator of terrible memory and, by that time, the gruesome images of Ceausescu and his wife, killed as two mad dogs outside a military barrack , had long made the news and shocked people all over the world.
He was still apprehensive and unsure about the newly self installed regime, which he considered rather a different communist recipe, another experiment in office, meant to replace - at least temporary - what the psychotic Romanian people had created and nourished in the deceased paranoiac absolutist rulers...
After a short stop in Bucharest, he went to see his old friend Dr. Irineu Chiorbeja the former chairman of what used to be The Commission for Sacred/Religious painting in Romania, functioning under the auspices and the rigorous rules of the Romanian Patriarchy.
A doctor by profession, who chose the monastical life after graduating from the Medical School, due to an inescapable spiritual call, Father I. Chiorbeja, chaired the institution for over a decade, implementing his exceptionally strong principles and believes that the sacred painting of the Romanian Orthodox Churches should be uniquely entrusted to professional artists authorized to paint churches and cathedrals only after completing all the required extensive years of academic art studies and managed to make proof under severe scrutiny through the Patriarchy examinations and testing of a thorough knowledge of all of the techniques of traditional painting as well as of any dogmatic and canonical concepts governing this type of painting.
After strongly declining.... to be appointed bishop, he had chosen in meantime to retire as the abbot of the Neamt Monastery - the largest and most important monk monastery in Moldova, (Eastern Province of Romania) which was soon to celebrate 5oo years of existence from the time it was founded.
It was an emotional meeting.
Mostly because it was there, in the atmosphere of that monastery at Nemtu, so close to the region where Petru spent his extraordinary childhood on the Bistrita River in the city of Piatra Neamt, that he had been given THE KEY to his escape from the communism in 1987.
The place is saturated until our days with history and culture, with beauty and outwardly tranquility...
Neamt Monastery is a historical monument of medieval architecture, actually considered a culminating point, a model of Moldavian style, one of the most interesting architectural monuments from the epoch of Steven the Great, one of the greatest rulers ever of Romanian people. A testimony until today of a flourishing civilization in the 15th and 17th centuries, a headquarter of great cultural and monastic and ecclesiastical activities.
A fortified citadel in older times with a bell tower incorporated in its structure that forms the entrance to the monastery courtyard, inside which one can still see fragments of frescoes on the tower ceiling, dating from the end of the 15th century....

The monks and the abbot were celebrating the liturgy :
It was early spring and the lent before The Orthodox Easter had started... When he first arrived, he entered the church inside of the monastery surrounded until today by the fortification walls. The monks and the abbot were celebrating the evening divine service....at the light of the candles, in the dark, austere church occupied partially by scaffolding, a proof that there were some official intentions to try to restore the frescoes dating from the 15th century....
The Gregorian hymns coming from the monks choir seemed to emanate miraculously from an invisible space making the words and the music of God so fluid, that the entire liturgy seemed celebrated in a different sphere, as if a celestial church was hanging above the real, physical one.... From the famous tomb chamber of the church, a cold air was reaching out opposing resonance and resignation...

Next morning Father Irineu took Petru and his wife in a tour throughout the monastery domain. They went up the wooden staircase towards the monks chambers enclosed in the old fortification walls surrounding the monastery, and walked the large porch with a carved wooden balustrade and vines climbing the pillars supporting it, listening as they were slowly progressing to the ancestral dales squeaking under their feet ...
To their surprise after a door was mysteriously open by a monk - who first performed the ceremonial of submissively kissing the abbot’s hand - they have been taken to what they did never know to have existed inside those massive walls: a tiny chapel, a miniature replica of a church, dating there since centuries, incorporated in the walls and designed to serve as a small prayer chapel for the monks or higher ranked ecclesiastical visitors, a chapel which was never along so many years, painted .
Looking out through the narrow windows one could see the monastery sheep grazing in the blooming apple orchards around the monastery....their bells sounding in the cadence of their moving rhythm , instilling the feeling that somehow that world - at least there, in that spot - had a superb uninterrupted continuity, never changed since it was originated...
So, when the old friend asked Petru to paint the frescoes in the little chapel inside the fortification walls of the monastery, among the monks cells, dating probably from the 17th or 8th century.... after so many years of estrangement in Europe and Canada, it felt as if he was presented with an incredible, essential offering....
The rest is history....
From early spring till early October he spent there inside the reclusive walls of the Neamt Monastery, closer than ever to that a monastic life as he felt completely removed from everyday life...
There was never a frescoes painting process so clearly abstracted from the everyday life, remembers Petru It was a solemn ritual about painting that Chapel...
“There was never any kind of indulgement that summer... in anything else but the mystic of creation which took some kind of preeminence , and separated from me, living through me , and reducing me at the strange state of instrument... It was a perpetual religious ceremony from which the secular life was excluded, a continuous meditation on the intentional materialization of the images - progressing from the higher plans - pervading with their beauty and significance the prayer role and purpose of this tiny monastical church....
I was not articulating any prayers, I did not utter them in my mind, I was just painting them, as they were developing in my mind, becoming adoration and glorification, as if in that in the hermitic milieu, my artistic gestures would became part of an absorbing sanctification process”.