The place, the name, and the calling

Berivoi: a village, a river, and a remembered monastery

Berivoi’s documented history reaches back to 1486, when a local leader named Radol de Berowu appears in the historical record. For centuries, the river divided two neighboring settlements, Berivoii Mari and Berivoii Mici, which were united administratively in 1964 to form today’s village.⁵

By the middle of the eighteenth century, an Orthodox monastery stood near the river between wooded hills. Its destruction in 1761, during the Habsburg-era suppression of monastic establishments, interrupted an existing community of Christian worship. Yet the place remained known locally as La Mănăstiri—“at the monasteries.”¹

That name carried the memory beyond the life of the buildings.

In 1992, local believers began the work of re-establishing the monastery. On 29 June 1993, the foundation stone was laid for the renewed church dedicated to the Apostle Andrew. More than two centuries after the destruction, a remembered place again became a place of gathered worship.¹

The monastery’s story gives Berivoi a particular depth. Alongside the village’s written record is a history preserved in the name of a place and in the determination of later generations to rebuild.

Dejani and Bucium: faith along the forest edge

The neighboring valley of Dejani preserves another chapter of this monastic heritage. Inscriptions and notes in old church books attest to a monastery there in the seventeenth century. Its earlier buildings were modest: a wooden church on stone foundations and small dwellings set among the trees. The municipal history describes a secluded establishment reached by a mountain path.²

In June 1761, troops under General Buccow burned the church and destroyed the monastery buildings. The same account remembers local people rescuing some of its religious objects and carrying them to the parish church. Even after the establishment had disappeared, its ruins remained a place to which believers returned.²

Farther east, Bucium carries a related history. Its monastery is recorded by 1737 and was also destroyed in 1761. After 1989, people from Bucium, Șercăița, and surrounding villages were finally able to pursue its reconstruction, which began in 1990.³

These places show how religious memory can be held by an entire community. A church book, an object brought to safety, a surviving ruin, or the recollection of grandparents could help carry an interrupted history forward.

Lisa: faith woven into village life

At Lisa, religious heritage is closely connected with education, household life, and the passing of traditions from one generation to the next. The village’s municipal history records Radul de Lisza in 1527 and the establishment of a school in 1765.⁶

Its winter customs include children’s caroling, the organized youth groups known as cete de feciori, and Irozi, a dramatization of the biblical Nativity story. These brought religious language and biblical scenes into the shared life of the village, beyond the church building itself.^{7 8}

For our community, Lisa has a present significance too. Attending church there brings us into fellowship with people whose lives are rooted in this same foothill landscape. Our relationship with the area grows through worship, conversation, friendship, and the ordinary experience of being neighbors.

That makes its history personal. We encounter this inheritance not only through old buildings, but through people who continue to make faith part of their lives.

The Sâmbăta villages: worship, learning, and religious change

The villages bearing the name Sâmbăta open another part of the region’s religious story.

Sâmbăta de Jos became connected with the early Greek-Catholic episcopate through an estate granted to support the bishopric. Its history links this countryside with the development of the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church and the movement of its institutional center toward Blaj.⁹

At Sâmbăta de Sus, the Brâncoveanu family established a different and enduring religious landmark. A wooden church preceded the stone church and monastery built under Constantin Brâncoveanu in the late seventeenth century. The foundation was intended to strengthen Orthodox religious life, and its history also includes teaching, religious art, and the transmission of books and learning.⁴

The monastery was destroyed in 1785. Restoration began under Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan in 1926, and the restored historic church was consecrated in 1946. Its collections of old books, manuscripts, icons, and religious objects preserve further traces of the world from which it emerged.⁴

Together, these neighboring places reveal how deeply religion became connected with education, patronage, identity, and belonging. They also preserve the consequences of religious divisions that reached into village life.

Făgăraș: many communities within one region

The religious heritage broadens again in Făgăraș itself. Alongside its Orthodox churches and Greek-Catholic history, the town preserves Lutheran, Reformed, and Roman Catholic places of worship. Its Evangelical church, Reformed church, and Franciscan complex give visible expression to different Christian communities that helped shape the town.^{10 9}

The surviving synagogue adds the history of Făgăraș’s Jewish community. Built in the nineteenth century, it remains a physical witness to Jewish religious life within this same regional center.¹¹

Each building carries a particular story: a congregation that gathered, a form of worship, a community’s understanding of Scripture, and the effort required to sustain its life across generations.

Together, they make the region’s religious diversity visible. The countryside around Berivoi belongs to a larger history in which people of different languages and confessions lived, worked, worshipped, and sought to preserve what they believed.

Older beliefs within the village calendar

Some of the region’s religious inheritance survives through customs rather than buildings.

The summer observance of Sânziene, associated with 24 June and the Christian feast of John the Baptist’s birth, preserves a particularly clear meeting of Christian observance and older folk belief. Regional accounts describe flower crowns made for members of the household and placed on roofs, together with expectations that supernatural beings would leave signs concerning the future. National ethnographic accounts also record beliefs connected with marriage, healing, and the fertility of the land.^{8 12}

Here, the Christian calendar and an inherited supernatural world occupied the same occasion. The feast carried both a Christian name and beliefs about spiritual powers, protection, and foreknowledge.

This is part of the religious history of the area too: the ways communities sought reassurance about illness, harvests, marriage, and an uncertain future, and the ways those concerns became attached to religious observances.

For us, such traditions invite a careful return to Scripture. The question reaches beyond the age or familiarity of a custom to the source of spiritual authority it teaches people to trust.

Șinca Veche: worship carved into the hillside

At Șinca Veche, religious heritage takes a distinctive physical form. The rock monastery at Dealul Pleșu preserves spaces cut into the hillside itself. Romania’s National Archaeological Record identifies the remains as a monastic establishment and dates its listed component to the eighteenth century.¹³

Its chambers offer a striking contrast to the built churches and monastery courtyards elsewhere in the region. Here, the place of worship is encountered within the hill.

Together with the forest monasteries of the neighboring valleys, Șinca Veche gives the landscape a tangible history of religious retreat: places set apart from ordinary activity, where people made room for prayer.

Arsenie Boca and the memory of persecution

The twentieth century brought another influential religious figure into the Sâmbăta story: Arsenie Boca, the Orthodox monk, priest, and painter whose ministry became closely associated with the Brâncoveanu monastery.¹⁴

He entered monastic life at Sâmbăta in 1940, was ordained a priest in 1942, and remained associated with the community until his transfer to Prislop in 1948. His life later included arrest, imprisonment, and investigation under the Communist authorities, including detention in 1951–1952.¹⁴

His ministry and the later devotion surrounding his memory became part of the religious inheritance of the region.¹⁴

His experience also belongs to a wider history of pressure on Christian communities under Communism. Orthodox, Greek-Catholic, Catholic, and Protestant believers and institutions experienced forms of repression; the Greek-Catholic Church was suppressed in 1948, and measures against monastic life followed in 1959.¹⁵

These events bring the history closer to living memory. The questions once faced by earlier generations—how to preserve faith, how to respond to imposed religious control, and what obedience to God requires—returned in another political setting.

The history we enter

We understand this inheritance through the Great Controversy: the conflict between Christ and Satan over truth, worship, allegiance, and the character of God.

Seen through that lens, the history around Berivoi brings two concerns into focus. One is the pressure placed on conscience by religious and political power. The other is the gradual blending of revealed truth with inherited beliefs and human traditions. Ellen White addresses both the accommodation of pagan ideas within Christianity and the use of force to secure religious allegiance. The Great Controversy (GC 49.2; GC 591.2).^{16 17}

“God never forces the will or the conscience”

This principle matters deeply to us. This history calls us to value sincere devotion, to remember those who suffered, and to examine what we ourselves have inherited. It directs us toward a faith grounded in Scripture, centered on Christ, and expressed through willing obedience and love.

That is the responsibility we bring to life at Berivoi.

We want study to produce understanding, practical work to become service, and shared responsibility to develop character. We want our life together to help prepare a people for Christ’s return—people through whom His love, faithfulness, and government can be seen in everyday conduct.

The history of this region gives us roots. The life we build together is our contribution to its continuing story.