Paper Short Abstract:

Concrete churches encode contradictions between the right to religious freedom and the instrumental political usage of public Orthodoxy. This presentation tackles the tensions between the rampant development of religious infrastructure in Romania and the Christian-Orthodox cosmologies inspiring it.

Paper Abstract:

Since 1990, Romania’s religious buildings industry has produced a brand-new house of worship per day. The Orthodox Church has built one cathedral per year, dozens of monasteries, and over four thousand churches. This industry relies on different materials: marble for pavements and columns, bricks for the walls, wood for the icons and the furniture, glass for mosaics and, obviously, steel and concrete for the structure. Bucharest’s newly built national cathedral, for instance, required up to 100,000 cubic metres of concrete, the same amount as ten ten-storey buildings.

Contemporary Orthodox perspectives on nature and the built environment ultimately rely on the theology of St Maximus the Confessor (580-662), who set the ground for the early Christian understanding of the 'cosmos' (or creation). The latter has an inherent value by virtue of having been created by God but also being subject to the synergetic action of God and man. What happens – this presentation asks – when such synergy leads to widespread anticlerical reactions and scornful contestations, as is the case among an increasingly larger proportion of secular Romanians?

Concrete churches encode contradictions between the right to religious freedom and the instrumental political usage of public Orthodoxy. Materials like wood, stone, and concrete convey distinct ideas of intimacy and spirituality (or the lack thereof). I shall argue that their heuristic potential casts light on the tensions between the development of religious infrastructure in Romania and the Christian-Orthodox cosmologies inspiring it.