When they were painted on wet plaster five centuries ago, a time when Turks attacked from the south, the murals on this and other churches nearby were meant to teach tales of Christian saints and soldiers to illiterate masses. In the centuries since, they have weathered not only sleet and snow, heat and sunlight, but also the strong hand of Austro-Hungarian rule, the chaos of World War II battles, and a forced silence that ended with the fall of Nicolae Ceausescu's conspiratorial communist regime in 1989.
During this winter of change, the open-air frescoes, unique in Europe, witness not the struggle of empires, but the uncertainty of individual lives.
Only a few dozen feet from Voronet's painted Church of St. George, breath blew hot as a white-haired man stooped in a cemetery to turn chunks of black earth, spade by spade, shovel by shovel.
A passing woman, her gray hair wrapped in a rust-colored scarf, sang out: "Watch the bones!"
"What will we find?" the grave-digger sang back. "There was a 5 -month-old baby. So what bones will we find here?"
Vasile Lucaci , a soft-skinned man with short whiskers on his chin and few teeth in his mouth, climbed from the shallow pit to smoke a Saint George cigarette. When he is not digging graves, Lucaci, 60, butchers pigs, scythes hay in the fields, and chops timber in the hills.
"Whatever somebody asks me to do," he said, "for money."
He mocked the coming of the European Union and the busy bureaucrats he feared would dictate how much hay to harvest, how much milk to draw from a cow.
"In the old times, you could wash the udder a bit, drink, and not get sick," Lucaci said, describing a method his neighbors still use.
"Now, in Europe, you need a machine. And next year," he joked, "they will have regulations about how to drink the milk."
But what is a man like Lucaci to do?
He watched a concrete bridge replace the wooden one that connected his village to the world beyond the Voronet River. He has looked across a new chasm between poor and rich in capitalist Romania; how likely is it that billions of dollars in EU investment will trickle down to him?
