Mihai Vodă Monastery

Michael the Brave founded the monastery and dedicated it to St Nicholas. Sources date the founding to 1589, 1591 or 1594. It stood on Dealul Spirii, above the Dâmbovița, on the site of an older church, inside stone walls built like a fortress. The hill was lived on long before the monastery: excavations around it, published by the archaeologist Gheorghe Cantea in 1959, found pottery and other remains of settlements going back more than 3,000 years, from the Bronze Age to the Iron Age of the Dacians.

In August 1595 Sinan Pasha’s army entered Bucharest. In October, after the battle of Giurgiu, it withdrew across the Danube and left much of the city destroyed. The accounts that survive do not say what happened to the monastery itself.

Over the following centuries it served as a princely residence, a military hospital and a medical school, and from 1864 it housed the State Archives. In 1984–1985, to clear the ground for the Civic Centre, the cells and outbuildings were demolished. The engineer Eugeniu Iordăchescu moved the church, about 9,000 tonnes of it, 289 metres on rails, and the bell tower after it.