Hurezi Monastery

The largest and most complete thing Constantin Brâncoveanu built, and the building that gave an entire Romanian architectural style its name. Founded 1690, finished around 1697, and on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 1993 under reference 597.

What to look at, in the order you will see it. The open colonnaded porch across the west front of the church, with carved stone columns — the single most recognisable Brâncovenesc feature, and a synthesis of Italian Renaissance proportion, Ottoman decorative vocabulary and a Byzantine plan, assembled into something that is none of its sources. The stone carving: vine scrolls, acanthus and rosettes cut shallow and dense into the capitals and the door and window frames, at the highest quality of any surviving ensemble of the period. The painted narthex, which carries portraits of the founder's family and so is a historical document as well as a religious one. And the scale of the whole — this is not a church with buildings around it but a planned complex, laid out at once, with cells, kitchens, a library and a princely residence.

That completeness is why UNESCO took it rather than one of the dozen smaller Brâncovenesc churches. Brâncoveanu was executed in Constantinople in 1714 with his four sons, and the building programme stopped with him — a style that lasted twenty-six years would ordinarily leave fragments.

Entry to the courtyard is free. It is a working monastic community: covered shoulders and knees, enforced rather than suggested, and the liturgical schedule comes first. Go in the morning — the published hours are not reliable, and the monastery's own page has carried a placeholder e-mail address for years. The full guide, and the Horezu potters are the town's second UNESCO entry.