The painted churches of Romania are  on the Unesco World Heritage Sight List and they are national treasures.  We saw three of the many in Romania and these 500 year old monasteries are just amazing.  Each are done in a predominate color seen in the backgrounds or clothing of the  Biblical characters.  These churches are surrounded by four walls with a single entrance and on the interior are two story apartments that house the nuns and priests.  The grounds have beautiful gardens with every flower in bloom: roses, four o’clocks, lilies, dahlias, zennias and some I have never seen.  Along the balconies of the apartments are hanging baskets and window boxes full of petunias of every color.  The churches were painted 500 years ago when most people were illiterate and the outside was painted with all the Bible stories in detail to teach the people through pictures.  Each church has all of the Old Testament stories illustrated, going all the way through the Last Judgement.  Each Last Judgement shows the people going to heaven on one side…with halos…reaching toward Jesus.  The ones on the other side are damned and sliding down a river inhabited by Devils and monsters.  Inside the churches, the walls are covered with paintings of major saints and the Apostles and they are large.  There are 365 saints painted and they are divided by phases of the moon and astrological signs so people could tell what day of the month it was and which Saint’s day it is.  The paintings are vibrant with beautiful colors and gold.  Every inch of the inside and outside is completely covered with these beautiful paintings as well as icons.  The icons are framed pictures with painted faces surrounded by clothes and crowns made of silver and gold, often studded with jewels.  When it is time for a service to begin, a nun takes a board that is about 5 feet long and three inches wide and hits it with a wooden mallet.  The sound alerts everyone that the service is starting and it gets faster as it gets closer…hurry, hurry.  All nuns and priests are just Romanian Orthodox clergy, there are no different orders or habits like in the Catholic Church.  In the service at one of the painted churches, a nun was reading the service…with no priest in evidence.  We really enjoyed seeing these beautiful churches and would have loved to see more.