Hodoș-Bodrog Monastery, one of Romania’s oldest monastic establishments is resting on Mureș River’s left bank, in Arad County.
The monastery, mentioned for the first time in a written record more the eight hundred years ago with its monastic life uninterrupted all along, is one of the few old Mediaeval monuments still standing in the Lower Mureș Valley, along with church groups in the Hațeg Land and Zarand Land, also being the most important of them.
Hodoș-Bodrog was originally a Roman Catholic monastery, built before 1177 and destroyed before 1293. The present monastery, which is now Orthodox, was built near the ruins of the first monastery in the late 14th or early 15th century.
The monastery has preserved features of the 14th century architecture, murals from the early 17th century, and many Slavic-Romanian manuscripts from the 15th-17th centuries.
Legend has it that the monastery was founded by nearby believers on the site where a herd of cattle would previously pasture and where one day a bull dug out with his horns a golden shining icon of St. Mary. To honour the site of the discovery, the altar of a monastery was built on the scene. The petrified skull of the bull and the icon that is said to work miracles are displayed at the monastery. The icon painted on wood is not that old, probably just from the 16th century, depicting Madonna and Child, both wearing crowns.
The first written recording of the monastery goes back to 1177, but local historians in the early 19th century claimed the monastery had been inhabited by monks of Eastern rite since the times of the voivodeships before the Magyar Conquest.
The current monastic church dating back to the second half of the 14th century, built in a tri-conic Byzantine style of Roman stone and brick, resembles the similar churches at Vodita, Tismana, Cotmeana and Cozia, as historian Nicolae Iorga used to say. It has undergone various changes in time, especially in the 18th century, when the old Byzantine structure was rounded up with Baroque elements, while preserving most of the initial structure.
The monastery was built of carved stone and brick, the same as Wallachian churches, and much later, probably in the time of its restoration in the 18th century, some of its walls were plastered.
The interior was adorned with fresco paintings in 1658 by painter Nicodim Diaconul. In 1938 — 1940, renowned church painter Atanasie Demian cleaned the old mural paintings from the early 17th century and painted the ceiling and the walls of the narthex, which had been damaged in time, in the style of the old paintings.
In the 18th century, young people aspiring to become priests would come for apprenticeship here. Children of the peasants from nearby villages would also come here to learn reading and writing.
The monastery houses a valuable library of old ecclesiastic books that still keeps books and manuscripts from the 16th century, along with a rich archive from the first half of the 18th century that comprises Latin, German, Serbian, Hungarian and Romanian valuable documents.