TRADITIONAL CHURCHES AND THE TRANSLATION OF CHURCH BOOKS AS IDENTITY RESOURCES
TRADITIONAL CHURCHES AND THE TRANSLATION OF CHURCH BOOKS AS IDENTITY RESOURCES

Summary/Abstract: Although he was in an almost permanent state of war, Stephen the Great was aware that the survival of the Romanian people in the province of Moldova is linked not only to defending the country's borders and independence, but also to preserving the Orthodox faith, the ancestral law of the specific rite and culture formed within the framework of this Church, which in time proved to be, in its turn, the mother of the Romanian nation, as the national poet Mihai Eminescu said. Historians believe that there is a double political purpose of the cultural achievements of Moldova obtained during the reign of Stephen the Great. On the one hand, as an expression of the voivode's faith, the church's architectural creations aimed to symbolize divine protection over his person and country. On the other hand, his cultural acts aimed at affirming a tradition, by linking his deeds to those of his predecessors and passing them on to his successors. Then came the first translation of the entire Bible into Romanian, the Bucharest Bible of 1688, also known as the Serban Cantacuzino Bible. It is a culmination and reference point and a synthesis of the language spoken in all Romanian provinces. We are in front of a full synthesis in the proper sense of the term, because we have, here, Moldovan and Transylvanian variants, whose final form was established in Bucharest by speakers of the language with particularities from Wallachia.

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