The church with devils from Arges county Romania

A church in Argeş has death painted on a wall, laughing. "The painting reappeared on the wall. There must be something unclean! ”

Less than 10 km west of the city of Piteşti, in the village of Ciocănăi in the commune of Moşoaia there is a church with a painting totally out of the church canons. Nicknamed the "Church of the Dead", the place of worship is painted on one of the walls with death laughing.

According to history professor Corneliu Vasilescu, “the church really has an out-of-print painting. In 1863, 23 years after the founding of the church, two painters, named Stan Postelnic and Constantin Zugrav, painted an angel between two demons on one of the walls. The demon on the right laughs and holds a scythe above which Death writes. " Why this unusual image? "The tradition of Ciocănăi village preserves the memory according to which, during an Ottoman invasion before 1840, most probably somewhere between 1820-1826, in the old wooden church, which dates back centuries, several dozen of the villagers took refuge. The Ottomans locked them there and set fire to the church, and dozens of villagers burned alive. Impressed by the terrible tragedy, one of the founders of the church in the village thought of reproducing the theme of death on one of the exterior walls of the church, as a sign of remembrance for the hard times and many dramas that the village of Ciocănăi went through ", says Corneliu Vasilescu.

Those who tried to erase the painting died

The people from the village of Ciocănăi also speak of a curse related to those who tried to erase the painting and who died. "In the early 1980s, the county leaders of the Communist Party were deeply disturbed by the painting with laughter dying and asked the parish priest to erase that painting which the nomenclaturists considered very ugly. The priest avoided deleting that painting and had a man from the village call him Tuturel-Bilt to hit the demons on the wall with lime. A few days later, after covering the painting with lime, the villager strangled the pope while playing the chorus at a wedding in Ciocănăi. A few weeks later, the parish priest also died in a way that terrified the villagers. He was at a relative's funeral, and the hearse took her down the valley and ran over him, crushing him. I saw it with my own eyes. After the two died, after a while, the painting reappeared on the wall, a little erased. It must be something unclean ", says Ileana Oproiu (72 years old), a local from Ciocănăi village.

In the 16th and 17th centuries, pottery flourished in the town of Curtea de Argeș, and potters in most neighborhoods created the first guild and built their own church, the Church of the Potters. It was built on the old foundation of a nunnery and first mentioned in 1687. The Olari church in Muntenia is original to the polygonal shape both to the east and to the west.

But the church is distinguished from other places of worship in Romania by a painting on the southern facade, which shows the standing portrait of Death. In the Olari representation, Death is not a furry body like a monster. There, the portrait of Death is a conventional sign, and the stylized wings present on all wrists fit the demonic side. Unfortunately, the painting of the whole church is in an advanced stage of degradation, the exterior paintings, including that of Death being covered with plaster, and the interiors are blackened.

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