Florian Bichir: "Where are you going for Easter, for Christmas? Is a question that entered the Romanian life after December 1989."
Visiting more exotic, and more distant places - not to say - at the world's end - became a new fashion. The thirst for knowledge after 50 years of communism is natural. We haven't dreamt for years how in democracy we will walk on the Seine's banks, how we will stare at the eternal Rome, how our neck will go numb when looking at the Sixtine Chapel? Or how we will get a tan in sirtaki rhytms on the shores of the Aegean Sea? As greedy as I am greedy of knowing wonderfull places, as stubborn I am to spend the Christian Holydays nowhere else than at home. Why will I go for Easter - in the most beautiful day of the year - in supermarkets, looking for discounts? To stay in a fourth rate hotel and eat in petrol stations, on the edge of the highway? I can do this in every other day of the year.
An so, for my unhappiness, I ended up to agree with an old securist from the passport agency, that refused you politely with patriotic lines: "Where do you want to go my child? Have you seen Moldoviţa, Suceviţa, Putna? You don't know your own country and you want to go abroad? This can't be right".
This year God made it possible for me to reach the Sfinţilor Martiri Brâncoveni Monestry from Sambata de Sus. The beauty is hard to describe. Hidden under the eave of the Fagaras Mountains, the holy place is a corner of Heaven. White and smelling of pure spirit, the church rules the landscape, seems a gate to eternity. And when the people started to sing the Resurrection chant, I tought that I was in a chatedral, that the entire forrest is rejoicing. One of the most skilled confessor lives here - ather Teofil Orbul -, and the monestry is led by an able and hard working priest, father Ilarion Urs. The monestry, built in the brancovenesc style has a library of over 60.000 books, most of them donated by the founder, the metropolitan Antonie Plamadeala. Like in the christianity of the first centuries, after the Resurrection sevice, under the priest's cautios sight, all the participants had the traditional meal on the church's trapeze. Together, like in a genuine community. Add to this the sound of the springs, the hard, rarefied air of faith and the peace of the Transylvanians for a wonderful scenery. What other places can overpass this dream landscape, this heavenly rood screen? What beauty of the seen world, that we forget in our haste for vanities...
I don't know how was the return of the people that choosed to spend their few Easter days abroad. If they were lucky or not at their shopping, but I felt a special spiritual drunkenness. An inner undescribable joy, like peace was pouring slowly into my soul. With my batteries charged, maybe I will be allowed by the Creator to visit other meridians of the world. Like a witty man used to say: for discount shoppings we have time. Soon it will be Christmas, no?
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