Schituri dispărute de la Curbura Carpaților. Noi informații
Disappeared monasteries from the Carpathian Curvature. New information

Summary/Abstract: Hardly present today, the monastic activity from the foothills of the Curvature Carpathians represented a social and cultural reality that has shaped the geographical space for centuries. The essence of this phenomenon, however, remained, according to the Orthodox doctrine, known very little to the outside. The very location of places of worship was a difficult task for researchers who, in the absence of reliable evidence, misidentified their sites, or omitted altogether some monasteries and sketes. This paper aims to bring some new information on a number of monasteries from the current Buzău county, integrating them with information from cartographic materials, in the idea of solving problems of historical geography, old and new, thereof. The monasteries and sketes which are discussed are Apșoara, Arseniile, Bîsca, Flămânda, Micșani and Mănăstirea de la Stănicel. Apșoara was a skete which was mentioned in only two documents, from 1813 and 1819, from which we can only deduce that it was older than 1803. Its location couldn’t be identified because the documents lack precise geographical information. Still, the skete’s name can be linked to that of a forest on the upper Nișcov valley, which was documented in 1892, but which can’t be identified anymore, since the place name is no longer known among local people. The skete of Arseniile from Buzău County appeared in a single document from 1714, from which we can deduce that it was functional at the beginning of the seventeenth century. The similarity between its name and that of Arsele, where in 1892, there were some ruins of a church, convinced most researchers that its location wasn’t a mystery anymore. Yet, this identification, today still regarded as correct, cannot be sustained since the Arsele site was at that time (1714) in the County of Saac. We still cannot solve the problem of locating this site, however, we can sharply narrow the search area, since a mountain peak near the village of Goidești bears the name of Arsenie and is well documented on the historical maps of the nineteenth century. Bîsca was a monastery mentioned only in a couple of maps, between 1790 and 1830, in an area which at that time had no other human settlements. Since most of the maps that feature it were not original works, but copies of other materials from earlier times, the existence of this monastery is doubtful until further evidence is found. The sketes of Flămânda and Micșani have not been documented before, since they are only scarcely mentioned in a few documents. Their locations have been identified using a couple of historical maps from the nineteenth century, which also relate them to the estate of a boyar family and to an old settlement, respectively. Mănăstirea de la Stănicel is, similar to Arseniile, featured in a single document, but from the sixteenth century. The document’s main focus, as well as the concise mentioning of the monastery leaves very few clues for finding its former site.

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