Anastasie Crimca

Anastasie Crimca, great Bishop of Moldavia, distinguished pundit and art lover, was born in Suceava at the middle of the16th century and was baptized under the name Elijah , being the son of a wealthy chapman Ioan Crimca and Cristina, daughter of some well-known gentry, Storici.

There are few facts known about this hierarch because many of the manuscripts and monastery’s documents had been destroyed in invasions. All we can do is piece out the dates, personality features, select elements in his work so as to create an image, though uncertain.

There are not many details about Crimca’s childhood, but as the young man is being taken under the protection of Luca Storici, the erutide nobleman, who knew several languages, he began to enter the mysterious land of knowledge.

During the reign of Petru Şchiopu, the young Elijah Crimca had been a scribe at the common room and a soldier, because having faith in God and fighting under the protection of Jesus’ cross he managed to easily defeat the enemies. For his just and faithfull service, the ruler offered him an extended piece of land near Suceava, where he later built the Dragomirna Monastery.

Aspiring to greater goods, the young Elijah Crimca leaves behind all the earthly pleasures and his social posture and enters the Putna Monastery as a monk. Having changed his life, unconceited, he began to search the Holy books and learn from the lives’ of the Saints, eager for knowledge and deciding to follow their holy example. He began to copy the texts he read, books which are nowadays considered national treasures. There, inside the cell, he passed uncountable hours, being extremely humble, copying books and painting in miniature. At Putna he learned to battle spiritually and to be kind. For these virtues, he was made priest shortly after his entrance into the monastery, and, at the request of the ruler, he was named abbot of Galata Monastery, where he succeeded into putting together a humble collectivity of apprentices, who looked up at him as their spiritual father.

The union of the three regions was in Crimca’s eyes a great accomplishment of the Romanian people and, even if it soon fell through, Anastasie maintained hope and introduced the stranded belt on the Dragomirna wall, as a spiritual testament for his followers to keep the union through the faith in the Holy Trinity. Once the union had been disjuncted and Ieremia Movila returned to the throne of Moldavia, Anastasie Crimca became a hermit and retired for about six years on his land at Dragomirna.here he built a small, stone church, named, acoording to the documents of the time the Church of the Hermitage, known today as the Church from the cemetery.

In the spring of 1606, the former Bishop of Rădăuţi returns and is made Bishop of Roman, and after two more years, in 1608 he is made great Bishop of Moldavia and Suceava, becoming the Shepard of Jesus’ Church for almost twenty years, with a short break during Radu Mihnea’s command. Having become a spiritual Shepard, his first worry was assuring there existed a strong faith inside the monasteries and in the villages. In all of the monasteries he placed spiritually improved, kind and humble abbots. In towns and villages he introduced wise, educated priests so as to lead the people towards Jesus’ Gospel. Hence, under the great Bishop’s command, the monasteries and the hermitages bloomed spiritually.

In the year 1626, the Bishop Anastasie Crimca gathered all of the Bishops and abbots in Suceava for a synod to decide the building of a new sanctuary. Through this he sought to eliminate all trace of disobeyment inside the Moldavian Church and to strengthen the Orthodox Church. The set of rules from the 20th of September 1620, kept in the Negoian manuscripts, is one of the oldest documents ever written in our country regarding the behavoiur inside a monastery and the church rights.