Almost every photograph of the painted monasteries of Bucovina is taken on a south wall in the afternoon, and there is a reason for that. The north walls have taken five centuries of wind off the Obcina ridges, and at Humor and Moldovita the north side has worn back to pale plaster with a few outlines still legible in it. Voronet has held better than the rest, but even there the north face is a shadow of the south. A good part of what people travel for is already gone. What remains is still worth nine nights.
The second surprise is size. These are small buildings. The church at Voronet is roughly one hundred feet long and thirty wide, and the nave inside holds about thirty people standing shoulder to shoulder. The Last Judgment that fills the pictures is on the west end of the exterior, not indoors. You look at these churches from a few feet away, walking slowly around the outside of them, in whatever light the day happens to give you.
The third is distance. On a map the painted churches sit in a rough ring and look like one day out. They are not. Voronet to Sucevita is forty miles and takes an hour and forty minutes, because the road climbs the Ciumarna pass in a set of hairpins cut for logging trucks. This plan takes in two churches on most days and three on one of them. Anyone who promises five in a day has counted the driving as nothing.
- What the week is
- Nine nights in three guesthouses, two of them family run with six rooms or fewer, moving by private car with a driver who lifts the bags in and out, so luggage is handled three times in nine days and not once more.
- What sets it apart
- Suceava's airport sits 25 miles from the first guesthouse and takes about an hour, because the last nine miles are a lane and a half wide with hay carts on them. The train up from Bucharest runs seven and a half hours and puts you down before six in the morning. Beds are pensiune beds, firm, clean, thick duvets, tiled bathrooms, no lift anywhere. The season runs from the middle of March to the middle of November, and the figure is $2,310 per person.
- What the figure covers
- Nine nights in three guesthouses on a twin or double room; breakfast every morning and six dinners cooked in the house; a private car and an English speaking driver for every day on the ground; a local guide for four monastery mornings; every entrance fee and every interior photography permit where one can be had; the black pottery workshop at Marginea and an hour at an egg painting bench in Ciocanesti; pickup and drop at the airport or the station at both ends; and a written day by day plan sent before you leave home.
- What it leaves to you
- Flights from the United States, which run $840 to $1,460 return depending on how many connections you will accept; the single room supplement of $610, which is what the guesthouses charge and not a fee of ours; three dinners left free so you can eat where you like, at $12 to $20 a head; drinks with any meal; anything you carry home from Marginea or Ciocanesti; tips for the driver and the guide, which most people set at $8 to $12 a day each; getting yourself to your home airport; and the cost of moving the dates once the three houses are holding rooms.
- Who this one is wrong for
- Do not book this if three hours sitting in a car is a bad day. Two of the nine days run that long, and the leg from Sucevita over the Ciumarna pass is thirty two miles of switchbacks that take ninety minutes with one place to stop. Church doorways have a stone sill nine to fourteen inches high with nothing to hold on to, and the naves are unheated, near forty five degrees inside on an April morning. One guesthouse keeps its two largest rooms up nineteen steps, and the ground floor room there is smaller and faces the yard.
Forty miles of Bucovina takes ninety minutes
The main roads are two lanes of reasonable asphalt with a soft edge and no shoulder. The traffic on them is mixed in a way that American drivers find hard to believe: a horse cart loaded with hay moves at four miles an hour and cannot pull over, a loaded timber truck takes the whole of its lane on a bend, and the village limit is thirty and is enforced by a man with a handheld unit standing beside a bus shelter. None of this is a problem when somebody else is driving, which is the whole argument for putting a driver in the price.
The valley floors sit around 1,300 feet and the pass touches 3,600. In April the days run forty five to fifty eight degrees with nights near freezing, and the churches are colder inside than out. July gives you high seventies to mid eighties with thunderstorms that build after four in the afternoon and clear by seven. October is dry and bright and the low sun does something to the south walls that no summer noon can. Rain is likeliest in June. Snow closes the pass from late November.
A normal day starts at half past eight in the guesthouse yard with the car already turned around. Forty minutes of driving, then an hour and ten at the first church with a guide who has worked these walls for years and will tell you which panel was repainted in 1975 and which was not. Lunch is at somebody's house in a village, two courses, no menu. One more church in the afternoon, back by half past four, dinner at seven. Two days in the nine have no church at all, and that is deliberate.
Who ends up in the back of this car
This week was drawn for a party that does not move at one speed. The car goes to each gate, and from the gate to the church door is between eighty and two hundred and fifty yards of level gravel or flagstone. Every courtyard has a bench in the shade and a wall to sit on, and nobody is asked to walk anywhere to arrive somewhere else. The person who came to walk gets the afternoons instead: a five mile ridge line above Gura Humorului, the four mile track from Sucevita up to the saddle, a flat hour along the Moldova river. Two people can spend the same day in the same place at very different speeds and still eat dinner together, which is not true of most things sold as a tour.
It also suits a party where nobody has done this before and nobody wants to be the one making the calls. Nothing here requires you to read Romanian, negotiate a fare, or work out which of two side roads is the one with the bridge. A local guide meets you on four of the mornings. As for the money: this office takes the request, places it with the guesthouses and the driver who actually own the rooms and the car, and is paid a commission by them after you are home. No card number touches this site. There is no checkout here and there never will be. If a house wants a deposit, you send it to the house.
Six cells, one for each obstacle, filled where this trip answers. Read the words below rather than the strip; the strip is a shorthand.
- Somebody will not fly, or not far
- does not. There is no way to reach Suceava from the United States without a transatlantic flight and at least one connection, usually two, and this office will not dress that up. What does
- The party moves at two speeds
- answers it. Everything else that answers it
- Nobody has done this before
- answers it. Everything else that answers it
- The free weeks are out of season
- answers it. Everything else that answers it
- One person travelling
- does not. The car, the driver and the guide are priced across the whole party, so one traveler carries the entire ground cost and the figure lands near $3,880 before the room supplement is added. What does
March mud, August coaches, October light
- Mid March to mid April
- Snowmelt, brown fields, mud to the axle on the side tracks, and nobody at all in the courtyards. Inside the churches it sits near forty five degrees. This is the $2,310 week.
- Late April to late May
- Green comes up the valleys in about ten days. Storks back on the poles, lilac in every yard, fifty eight to sixty five degrees by day, and rain most weeks. Add $180.
- June to mid July
- Hay cut by scythe on slopes too steep for a machine, light until half past nine at night, warm afternoons in the low eighties. Storms build after four. Add $310.
- Late July and August
- Coaches at Voronet and Moldovita between ten and two, forty to sixty people in a courtyard built for thirty. We start at eight to stay ahead of them. Hot, and add $420.
- September to mid October
- The steadiest weather of the year, dry, sixty to seventy by day, cold at breakfast, and the south walls lit from low down after four. Add $260. Rooms go first in this stretch.
- Late October to mid November
- Plum distilling in the yards and the smell of it along the road, sun off the paintings by three, thirty five to fifty degrees. Back to $2,310. Two houses close on the tenth.
- Mid November to mid March
- Not offered. The Ciumarna pass shuts with snow at a few hours notice, most guesthouses close their kitchens, and standing in an unheated nave at twenty degrees is not a week anyone enjoys.
Dark naves, nine dinners of pork, and eleven hours in the car
The interiors are the thing people are least prepared for. Windows are narrow slits, there is no electric light in most of the naves, and what you can actually see of the interior painting on a gray morning is a patch here and a face there as your eyes adjust over ten or fifteen minutes. Photography inside is not allowed at several of them at all, and where a permit exists it is a few dollars and never includes flash. Dress is shoulders and knees covered; at three of the convents a wrap skirt is handed to women at the gate and you put it on. These are working houses with nuns living in them, and if a service is running you stand at the back or you wait in the yard until it is done. That is the correct order of priorities and it will not be adjusted for a visitor.
Food is the honest complaint. Nine evenings in Bucovina means bean soup, polenta with sheep cheese, sour soup finished with cream, pork three ways, and cabbage rolls, and it is good and there is far too much of it and by the sixth night you have met the entire repertoire. A vegetarian eats well enough on the eggs, the cheese, the beans and the pickles, but must say so when the request goes in, because two of the houses cook one pot for the whole table. The other real cost is the car: about eleven of the hours in your nine days are spent sitting in it, and no version of this trip avoids that, because the churches are where they were built. This office does not advise on entry documents or on insurance of any kind and will not pretend otherwise. The request form below runs 24/7 and never closes. Whatever comes in is read by a person before the end of that working day, and a written figure priced against your actual dates takes two to four working days, because three guesthouses and a driver have to answer first.