Mirrors

Restoration of Mantuleasa Church

He who works with his hands is a laborer, he who works with his hands and his head is a craftsman. And he who works with hand, head and heart is an artist.

(St. Francis of Assisi)

The historian tells us that this wooden church, being very small and deteriorating, was demolished in 1786, and in its place another was built, this time of stone, by the treasurer Barbu Stirbei together with the tailors' guild and other merchants.

The church underwent a "first trial" in the winter of 1801, when it was burned and looted, but it was repaired and rebuilt. Very shortly afterwards, in 1802, it survived an earthquake without any major problems, but after the earthquake of January 11, 1838, a crack "the size of a knife-edge" appeared above the altar door on the central axis.

In 1891, the church was restored for the first time, and in 1896 it was brick-built with the help of some of the town's wealthy noblemen and citizens.

The form of the building was not preserved, the church completed in 1899 trying to imitate the style of the "Domnița Bălașa" Church in Bucharest, which was clumsy and unsuccessful.

In the earthquake of November 10, 1940, the construction suffered again, showing cracks in the arches of the catapeteasma, in the nave and pronaos, as well as in the cafas and the mosaic floor. The earthquake of March 4, 1977 brought to the edifice pronounced cracks in the areas where the earthquake of '40 had already made its presence felt; it was then decided to repair the monument - works that were carried out in 1979.

Expressed in a plastic form, we can say that this church was born on a "diseased" land, it suffered degradations that even led to multiple reconstructions, all of which led to the current shape of the church. It is in the shape of a cross, with all the specific rooms - altar, nave, pronaos, transept and porch - with an average wall thickness of 1 meter, with mosaic floors, except for the altar, which is covered with parquet flooring, dating from 1937.

The altar is in the form of a semicircular apse with a hemispherical vault inside and a semi-polygonal, 7-sided vault outside. On the E wall, the chancel has two stained-glass windows, to the S an escape door, and to the N the niche-shaped proscender in the thickness of the wall, vaulted. It is separated from the nave by a wooden catapet (by Josef Sicher, from Craiova).

The nave is in the form of a square, flanked on the sides by a semicircular apse on the inside and a semi-polygonal apse with five sides on the outside. The central space of the nave is marked by the spire which rests on 4 arches by means of pendentives; on the outside, the main spire is 10-sided polygonal and rests on a massive base with the same number of sides. There are 10 windows in the upper third of the spire; of these only 5 illuminate the interior and the rest are blind.

The side aisles of the nave are covered by hemispherical vaults, and there are two stained-glass windows flanking a column with a composite capital on the apse axes. The space between the nave and the pronaos is marked and delimited by an arcade supported on cantilevers with composite capitals.

The rectangular rectangular pronaos is arranged transverse to the axis of symmetry of the building. It is vaulted with a spherical cap supported by pendants on 4 arches. The side walls are marked by two stained-glass windows, like the nave. (...)