Village Priest on a Wooden Church

This morning we paid a wonderful, extended visit to the National Village Museum in Bucharest., Romania.It's a large outdoor ethnographic museum with at least 270 authentic rural buildings and other objects moved from elsewhere in the country. Marylee vividly remembered it from her first trip to Romania in the 1970's and found it not greatly changed, though numerous things have been added.

This striking painting of a priest is on the outer wall of a modest wooden church from Timisemi, Gorj County, moved to the Museum in 2002. The church dates from 1773 and its paintings date from the 1800s; it is one of a handful of wooden churches with exterior as well as interior images. The priest is probably holding an incense burner. This is an image of the church--I could find nothing else of interest on the web

In the afternoon we took a tour of the Palace of Parliament, a monumental structure housing both of Romania's parliamentary chambers. Conceived by the dictator Ceausescu, although not completed until well after his execution in 1989, it is called the second largest administrative building in the world (after the Pentagon). In my view it is a and utterly soulless monument to Ceausescu's megalomania; our personal guide told us a story of cruelties committed during its construction which I would not repeat to anyone.