Mănăstirea Saharna

A footprint in the stone

On a rock above a wooded gorge stands a small chapel. Inside there is no treasure and no tomb, only a hollow in the stone. Pilgrims kneel there and touch it. According to tradition, it is the footprint of the Virgin Mary. The rock is called Grimidon, and the gorge below belongs to Saharna Monastery, in the Rezina district, close to the Dniester. It is one of Moldova's largest pilgrimage sites.

The cliff monastery

Long before churches stood on the valley floor, monks lived in the cliff face. Their monastery was dedicated to the Annunciation. No one knows when it began. The village of Saharna itself appears in a charter of Ștefan cel Mare from fourteen ninety-five. The cells and the church in the rock are still there. They were restored in the nineteenth century and can be visited again today. A path and steps lead up the cliff from the valley. On the way, you mostly hear water and birds.

The monk Vartolomeu

On the twenty-fifth of March seventeen seventy-six, a monk arrived in the deserted gorge. He was called Vartolomeu, nicknamed Ciungu. After forty days of fasting and prayer, so tradition says, he saw the Virgin Mary on the Grimidon rock. Her footprint remained there. On the flat ground, Vartolomeu founded a new monastery, dedicated to the Holy Trinity. He led it until his death in seventeen ninety-eight.

Churches and silence

Between eighteen eighteen and eighteen twenty-one, the summer church of the Trinity was built. In eighteen eighty-three came a winter church, dedicated to the Nativity of the Mother of God. Then came the twentieth century. In nineteen sixty-four, the Soviet authorities closed the monastery. It became a psychiatric hospital. The summer church became a storehouse, the winter church a house of culture. Where monks had sung for centuries, patients and nurses now walked. For almost three decades, no liturgy was heard in the gorge.

The return

On the nineteenth of April nineteen ninety-one, the monks came back. In the years that followed, the summer church was restored. The old paintings had been lost, so Vladimir Lazăr from Rezina painted new saints on the walls. Pilgrims now come for the relics of Saint Macarie, which are kept in the winter church during the cold months. Walk into the gorge and you will find small waterfalls along the stream. On major feast days, believers gather here from all over Moldova and beyond.

A place that endured

Saharna saw Bessarabia pass from one empire to another, and it survived a Soviet hospital. What remained is the gorge itself: the cliff with its cells, the forest, the stream and that one hollow in the stone. Monks came and went. But for two hundred and fifty years, people have climbed the same steps to Grimidon, to touch a footprint that seems older than the monastery itself.