Adrian Tirca on the Serbian roots of Wallachian architecture

'The roots of the Wallachian style of architecture are Serbian. In Romania it is generally regarded as Byzantine, but Byzantine architecture had many flavours and adaptations. The one that made it to the Principality of Wallachia was the Serbo-Byzantine variant, imported probably also along with several Serbian monks and craftsmen after the fall of the Serbian Empire (the most famous of whom is Nicodemus of Tismana).

'The earliest Orthodox church in the Principality of Wallachia, which is still extant, is St Nicholas of the Princely Court in Curtea de Argeș, built in the 1350s. It is built in the Serbo-Byzantine style and it set the standard from which the subsequent Wallachian style developed, with the added veranda and the steeples stylized in Armenian-Georgian fashion.


'It is perhaps natural that the locus of prestige for Wallachian architecture was the Serbian Empire, since it started in the 1350s when the Byzantine Empire had been reduced to a small territory around Constantinople and the Bulgarian Empire was just being broken into fiefdoms by the Ottoman advance. It was in that brief period that the Orthodox hegemon was Serbia, since the Russian principalities were under the Golden Horde and the Byzantine and Bulgarian empires were crumbling to the Ottomans.'