Queering the Văcărești Monastery Frescoes
Introduction
Traditionally, art museums in Romania, with a little but perhaps insufficient exception at the national museum of contemporary art, actively avoid a critical discussion of methodological aspects of a queer perspective in interpreting, exhibiting, and organizing museum collections, preserving museum’s conservatory approaches in supporting “heteronormative” narratives that consolidate heterosexuality as a norm within social and cultural life. There is a need to investigate what non-normative or queer relations exist around art museum displays and collections, rethinking them through and with (de)colonial and other historical entanglements while not simply dwelling in the past but instead making connections to our present and futures. There are no queering strategy to make their collection more representative of queer people, or better represent gender and identity-related diversity. Attention should be give: queer should not be understood merely as a credible practice for museums that are officially labelled “gay” such as the Schwules Museum* in Berlin. This would be just the old practice of demarcation and segregation.
Particularly the church needs a fresh and relevant queering approach of the church and monastery life, a long-running debate for the church, but relevant well beyond the conversation around sexuality. It asks deep questions about gender, power, and who belongs, and the gay and lesbians living hidden or openly within church structures, disrupting traditional, heteronormative institutional narratives to uncover hidden histories, marginalized voices, and alternative spiritualities.
We particularly ask ourselves questions such as:
- Why does the institutional church focus so much on sexual rules instead of core gospel missions?
- Does the Bible's creation of "male and female" mean that God holds both genders or goes beyond gender, and thus there is a fluid array around these extreme points of reference?
- What do we know about the domestic arrangements, romantic partnerships, and gender presentations of the saints portrayed in church related paintings?
- How does the imagery subvert the binary? In what ways do representations of angels, saints, and divine figures trouble or transcend traditional boundaries of male and female, human and divine, spiritual and physical?
- Which non-normative relationships are canonized? How can we read the intense, intimate pairings in church history—such as Saints Sergius and Bacchus, Saints Perpetua and Felicitas, or David and Jonathan—through a lens of queer kinship and chosen family?
- How has archival naming flattened identity? Do institutional cataloging terms, subject headings, and labels rely on heteronormative assumptions (e.g., labeling an intimate same-sex pair as merely "friends" or "companions")?
Funding transparency:
This research has been made possible through an Individual Mobility 2025-2026 funded by the Creative Europe programme of the European Union and implemented by Goethe-Institut. This webpage was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.
Queering the museum
Documentation & Research carried out by Lumi Rațiu and Alex Bodea, Bucharest, MNAR European Art Gallery, July 2026.
The Văcărești Monastery ensemble had a turbulent past, affected by fires and earthquakes, transformed into a penitentiary for revolutionary prisoners in 1848 and during the peasant uprisings of 1864. Since 2017, the Bucharest Municipality Museum has brought to the public's attention, at the Filipescu-Cesianu House, frescoes as part of the exhibition "In the vicinity of the saints. Frescoes of the Văcărești Monastery".
Positive aspects of the visit:
- The labels are bilingual
- The works are in a good conservation and restauration state
- There is a free of charge, welcoming garden to accommodate visitors
Ensaddening findings:
- The room is provided with air-conditioning that serves mainly the needs of the staff members; questionable if their temperature is set according to conservation needs; in fact, despite the air-conditioning, the doors are kept wide open and tree leaves circulates constantly in and out of the exhibition hall.
- There is no room or facility provided for parent-with-child. The toilet is unique and small.
- There are no references to queer issues-aspects, neither in the museum or the museum bookshop.
- The framing is made of brute steel profiles, which seems taken directly from a blacksmith shop; some frames are in a deplorable state (with broken and hanging parts).
Recommended Queer Guide of the Văcărești Monsastery Collection of Frescoes, Bucharest Museum
Saint Mocius / Sfântul Mochie fresco fragment, photo by (c) Lumi Rațiu, 2026; Queered role: chosen celibacy; Queered guidance: Saint Mocius (also known as Mochios of Amphipolis) was a 3rd-century Christian priest and martyr from Amphipolis in Macedonia. Born to wealthy and noble parents, Euphratius and Eustathia, he chose a spiritual path over material wealth and became a priest. Unusual and not mandatory for his time, he has deliberately chosen celibacy. In Roman society of sec. III, marriage was an important social institution, and families, especially wealty ones like that of Mocius, had strong and concrete interests in a man's marriage: offspring, alliances, property, and family continuity. We can relate our questions on his chosen celibacy, unusual for that time, to the fact that Christian asceticism usually offers clerics a real social alternative to marriage. Mandatory celibacy in monachal structures was becoming a norm starting with sec. VII.
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