Ciolanu monastery and Magura, Buzau sclupture camp. 13 photos

Magura sculpture camp, Buzau.
Near the Ciolanu Monastery in Buzau County (i live in Buzau) there is an outdoor stone sculpture exhibition. The exhibition stretches over an area of ​​21 hectares, being the largest exhibition of its kind in the country and one of the largest in the world.

These unique creations express states, feelings, events and are the result of the work of sculptors for 16 years. Between 1970 and 1986, in the month of August and September, 16 sculptors came and stoned the stone in this area. Thus, in the 16 editions that marked 16 centuries of documentary attestation of Buzau (376 - 1976), 256 exceptional sculptures were born.

163 artists worked in this sculpture camp. Each artist chooses the desired theme. At the end, the finished works were donated by artists, in a festive setting, Buzau County.

The exhibition is an open-air museum, there are no fences and is not paid for visiting.

Ciolanu Monastery, located almost 40 km from Buzau, is located in a decor that is broken by the everyday reality. It is surrounded by frequent and almost unspoiled forests, adjacent to the Magura Sculpture Camp.
It impresses through the imposing entrance through the two churches built several hundred years apart.
It is the largest and most important monastery monastery in the Archbishopric of Buzau and Vrancea.

Ciolanu is the only monastery in Buzau County documented since the 16th century. On the site of the present monastery there were certainly monks of monks, perhaps even a hermitage on Hill Ciolanu, in the 14th-15th centuries, as excavations that were made later in the 16th century, revealing the ancient bones of the hermits who lived in this place long before the church was built. From these human remains comes the name of Ciolanu.

The holy savior

In the 17th century, the worship place of Ciolanu was dedicated to the Dusikon Monastery of Rumelia in northern Greece today, a situation that lasted until 1813, when the abbot Paisie finally brought out the monastic settlement under the rule of the Greeks . This worship leads to the desertion of the Ciolanu Monastery. It remains until the first half of the eighteenth century, when some sources attest here the existence of some abbots, Anania (1705) and Mihail (1734). The one who was to reorganize the monastery, to regain the spiritual splendor of the past, is the abbot Vasile from Poiana Marului, who brought here, in 1763, 12 Moldavian and mountain monks. In 2003, he was canonized as a result of the repeated interventions of the Eminence of Epiphany, Archbishop of Buzau and Vrancea. The place is mentioned last time in the Middle Ages, in 1766, in a royal court. After that, Ciolanu disappears almost a century of historical writings. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the monastery began to recover again, through donations, but also through the efforts of capable soldiers, and possessed many properties. Over time, the sanctuary underwent several modifications, especially in the time of the abbot Antonie in 1854, but also under the leadership of Ioanichie in 1857. The painting of the church is particularly beautiful, being made in fresco by the monk Elisha , in the years 1850-1855, and renovated by G. Georgescu in 1885, and in 1980, washed by the Buzoian painter Ion Potlogea.
At Ciolanu, the St. Gregory Palama Orthodox High School Theological Seminary organized two graduate promotions in 2002 and 2003, many of whom are today priests of myrrh and other monks in the Archbishopric of Buzau and Vrancea. The first copy of Coresi's Tetraevanghel.