The Painted Cave Of Bucharest

An experience of the deep primitive in a candlelit Byzantine temple

Last evening, not too long after I arrived in Bucharest, I went with my friend Ninel to a service at the parish church of St. Gregory Palamas. There they were chanting the Great Canon of St. Andrew of Crete, which most Orthodox churches do the first week of Lent. In Romania, they do it a second time before Pascha. St. Andrew was a Cretan bishop at the e…