ON THE BENEVOLENT INSISTENCE of Bishop Ambrose, I made a pilgrimage to Romania for the festival of Saint Glycherie the New Confessor, which fell this year on a Sunday (15th / 28th June). In telling of their pilgrimage to Greece in last month’s magazine, Fr Stephen Fretwell and his presbytera, Joanna, spoke of spotting “the welcome sight of Bishop Ambrose coming towards us” at the airport. For me, arriving at Bucharest airport, it was another story. Bishop Ambrose had instructed me to “loiter” there until he or someone met me. In the event things went wrong, and no one came. Realizing I had to board the further flight to Suceava, I asked what the latest time I could go through security would be, and continued loitering, and fending off taxi-drivers touting for custom, to the very last minute. Just as I was getting through security, I heard not one but a dozen people calling my name. I turned and looked down the flight of steps ahead of me to see not Bishop Ambrose alone, as I had expected, but three Bishops, two monks, three nuns and six pilgrims from Greece, anxiously wondering where I was, and Greeks can make themselves heard!
More surprises ahead, I had imagined we would simply go and stay at the monastery at Slatioara in Moldavia for their feast, and perhaps visit a couple of local churches during the six days. In fact we visited over a dozen convents and monasteries, travelling quite extensively across the north of Romania. Some of these were ancient foundations, sanctified by the labours of ascetics of past generations; and some were the communities, monastic and parish, under the spiritual guidance of the Traditionalist hierarchy of the Synod of Metropolitan Vlasie. The places that we visited have been described in an excellent account by His Grace Bishop Klemes of Gardikion, which has been posted on the Synod in Resistance website. If some readers still do not have internet access, on request we will print off his account (unfortunately only in black and white), and send it to them. I will not even attempt to re-iterate what His Grace writes there, but perhaps a few personal impressions would be appropriate.
The first and overwhelming impression was that of the warmth, the hospitality and Christian love and, it has to be said, the humour of our hosts. Theirs was not the measured and rather cold hospitality of our own culture, but something quite extraordinary. I owe particular thanks to Archimandrite Chiprian at the Monastery of Slatioara, who spoke such perfect English that he was even able to joke in it, who realized that I had not a word of Romanian and so took me under his wing, and insisted that the exclamations which fell to me were made first in English and then in Slavonic, so that they could have many languages as always rejoices the hearts of the Orthodox. Conversely at one of the convents, an elderly priestmonk serving there, who turned out to be the brother of the Metropolitan, sat next to me at table and chatted contentedly in Romanian with me throughout the meal, without seeming to be at all phased by the fact that I did not understand anything he said.
Perhaps the most striking thing was the greeting that we received at the Convent of the Dormition at Paiseni. Here as we parked we could see Mother Minodora and her sisters, lined up and waiting, each holding massive bunches of flowers - these were for us. As we passed under the entrance arch below a turret, we had to walk through a storm of rose petals, not just a little token basket full, but a literal storm. The path to the church was strewn with rose petals, but this was not enough. On an elevated place near the church, another sister had stationed herself with a massive tub of rose petals to shower us again, and the lawns over which we had to walk to the trapeza were covered with gaily coloured mats! Then and many times again, seeing the unbounded hospitality of these people, I had cause to wonder whether I had yet gone very far at all in my journey into Orthodoxy. Over forty years spent - little progress made.
At the next Convent, St Nicolas in Dombru, the greeting was very different. We were greeted not with showers of petals, but with torrential rain, and had to take shelter under the community’s well canopy. But though the sisters had been denied the opportunity of greeting us, the warmth of their hospitality was equal to that of the sisters at Piaceni, and when we were about to leave, the weather having cleared, we found the windscreens of our vehicles covered with roses!
I could record many more such moving incidents. Abbess Alexandra from Odessa had joined our pilgrimage. She is a Russian who grew up in the States, and she remarked: “The Russians greet you with a kiss symbolically, but these people greet you with love!” It could not be better said.
