Easter in Brasov

Easter is a very special time of year in Romania, maybe even more important than Christmas.  The first weekend of the month is Catholic Easter and it falls on the same calendar as Canada or America.  The next weekend is Eastern European Orthodox Easter.  They begin their celebration six-weeks leading up to Easter which is called Lent and they "fast" or refrain from eating certain foods as a preparation - prayer, abstaining,& repenting to heightening the commemoration for the Holy Week.

On Holy Saturday evening, the Resurrection mass takes place. At midnight the ceremony of lighting of candles is the most significant moment of the year. People, carefully, take home their lighted candles with the holy light of the Resurrection. Before entering their houses they make a cross with the smoke of the candle on top of the door, they light the oil candle before their icon-stand, and try to keep this light burning throughout the year.

This is a typical icon, and they pray to these and cross themselves at every passing of the orthodox church. 

There are many festivities in the main Piata. 

Since we didn't have a big Easter dinner we had a delicious treat in Centru and enjoyed watching all the goings on. 

Sunday was very nice church and we enjoyed the talks and spirit of our meeting.  We watched the new Bible Videos and invited one member and her daughter over for a small lunch.  Our friend who came for lunch lives out in the country and must hire a special cab to get back and forth to church.  She didn't know if she'd get home as the cabbie may be celebrating and too drunk to drive.  She is a great member and has a daughter serving a mission right now in Spain.  She is humble and hard working and a special lady in the church in Brasov.

I finally was able to attend the Black Church.  This is a main tourist attraction here in Brasov.  Brasov was founded by the Transylvanian Saxons and was one of the major urban settlements in the 1300's.

This is quite a site.  This is the largest hall church east of Vienna and the largest eccesiastical building in Romania.  It was begun building 1385 and received it's name after the great fire in 1689, which left the entire town in ashes and blackened the church walls.

It took 100yrs to build and then after the fire they spent the next hundred years renovating. it.  This church was built before Columbus sailed for America.  It's OLD.

Today we climbed about 100 stairs to the top of the highest point here called the Citidel.  The old fortress that looks out over the whole surrounding area.  Here are a few shots from the top at the Citidel.

Hope you enjoyed our history lesson today.  It's fun to learn so many new things about places we've never been before.  We are anxious to attend our Seniors Conference and District Conference at the end of the month.

Very busy month

We have had a very busy month with wonderful memories and special experiences.  This is Elder Heninger as he awaits to leave from the train gara in Brasov for our exciting trip to America for our daughters wedding.  It was a whirl wind of a week but we crammed as much as we could into our 7 days.  I will have pictures to show on my next posting.

MaryAnn's wedding was amazing and considering the many places people were coming from we had a large number of family and friends there to support them.  Thank you to all those who were able to join us.  Thank you to MaryAnn and Adam who took care of everything so we simply had to drop in and literally drop out again.
The temple is really what everything in the church is about.  It felt like heaven to me and we were so thankful for the blessing of being there.

This was a special treat.  You can just imagine how much we enjoyed these two cuties.  It was a little tough to say goodbye but we knew we had to get back and we were anxious to return to some exciting work here in Romania.

The day after we landed we had meetings for the public affairs in Romania.  Elder Heninger and I are on the committee for public affairs and are hoping to bring awareness to the church.  We left the next day for training branch leaders and saw some beautiful parts of the country.
Driving through the Romanian countryside was beautiful and I took some photos of Sighisoara-Transilvania.

This Gospel offers opportunities that can't be found anywhere else.  It is a wonderful thing to focus on helping people come unto Christ and realize the blessings of the Atonement.  That they can live free from guilt and burdens by repenting and changing and live with faith in Jesus Christ.  I love it!!