O pagină din istoria unui monument celebru: Bălineşti
A page in the history of a famous monument: Bălineşti

Summary/Abstract: Recently, the church of Bălinești (Suceava County)—the famous foundation of Ioan Tăutu, Grand Chancellor of Moldavia between 1475 and 1511 during the reigns of Stephen the Great and Bogdan III—became the center of a convent for women (a transformation decided in the fall of 2021 and materialized in the summer of the following year). Before and after this particularly important and beneficial event for the future of the monument, "information" circulated in the virtual space claiming the existence of an older convent, allegedly organized by Calistru, Bishop of Rădăuți (1708–1728), as a dependency of Văratec Monastery, which supposedly ceased to exist in 1864 following the secularization of monastic properties. In a lecture presented in Suceava in November 2022 (subsequently published), the author argued against the existence of such a convent at Bălinești during the 18th–19th centuries: it is not attested by any known documents nor by works dedicated to this church. However, it cannot be ruled out that in the 18th century, an attempt to establish a skete at Bălinești may have emerged, given the challenges of maintaining the church. Continuing his research, the author identified documents that confirm this hypothesis. Furthermore, he clarified that Văratec Monastery owned half of the village of Bălinești due to a donation made in 1813–1814 by the widow of the last owner, Logothete Constantin Paladi, who had died on December 22, 1798. This ownership, which lasted only half a century (until the 1864 secularization), led some contemporary "researchers" to speculate about the existence of a skete subordinate to Văratec. However, no such skete ever existed. The "mystery" of the Bălinești skete has now been solved.

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