Bârsana Monastery

The Convent of the Holy Apostles, the largest and most impressive in northwest Romania, stands on a plateau looking down on the Iza River. It was rebuilt starting in 1993 on the site of an old monastery abandoned during the 1790s and is now home to an Orthodox community of nuns.

The church, designed by the architect Dorel Cordoș and built by a team of local carpenters (Ioan Știopei Buga, Petru Boris, Vasile Rus, Toader Bârsan, Ioan Bârsan, and Petru Iura), is probably the finest example of contemporary Romanian religious architecture in wood.

The 57-story wooden church (currently the fourth-tallest in the world) is on two levels. The lower is built in masonry, and the upper, built of oak wood in the Maramureș style, is adorned with a luminous fresco bearing Romanian Cyrillic inscriptions, painted in the traditional local manner by the artist Octavian Ciocşan. 

The amphitheater-like enclosure of the spectacular monastic complex also includes an interesting ecclesiastical museum (with old icons on wood, rare books, and various ethnographic items), a summer altar, and other buildings erected during the last 30 years under the guidance of Abess Filofteia Oltean.

The result is so attractive that it has convinced many Maramureș folk to return to the wood style that made the region famous. All of the buildings are connected by a network of paths lined by the most beautiful flowers in Maramureș.