Sturdza Palace

In about 1410 Alexander the Good, ruler of Moldavia from 1400 to 1432, granted a wide estate near the meadows of the Siret to the vornic Miclăuș, a member of the Prince's Council. After his death the land took his name, Miclăușeni. On 25 April 1591 his descendants sold it to the treasurer Simion Stroici (1550–1623), and the village was confirmed to him in 1598. Stroici raised a manor here in the early years of the seventeenth century, and its ruins could still be made out at the beginning of the twentieth. By a testament of 5 June 1622 he left the village of Miclăușeni to Lupu Prăjescu, to his niece Safta and to his son Gligorie, with the fishponds, the beehives and all the income, "because I have taken them to be children of my soul".

In 1697 the heirs of Lupu Prăjescu, having no survivors of their own, passed the domain to their kinsmen, the brothers Ioan and Sandu Sturdza, and on 19 April 1699 the brothers divided the family property, Miclăușeni falling to Ioan. The land was worked by clăcași bound to labour service and by Roma held in servitude about the household, whose descendants still carry the names of the trades they were set to: Bucătaru the cook, Muraru the miller, Pitaru the baker, Curelaru the leather worker, Mindirigiu the mattress maker, Bivolaru the herdsman, Surugiu the coachman. The villagers themselves lived in poor huts on the boyar's land and along the stream beside the park. In 1752 the vornic Ioan Sturdza rebuilt the boyar manor with a semi-basement and a ground floor laid out in the form of a cross, twenty rooms in all, ten to a floor, with pedigree horses kept in the stables for the riding ground on the domain. A stone set into the wall records the sequence: the house raised here by the ancestor Ioan in 1752 under Prince Matei Ghica, the church and stables added by Dimitrie under Prince Ioan Sandu Sturza, the place enlarged and surrounded with gardens by the parents Alexandru and Ecaterina under Prince Mihail Grigore Sturza, and the manège added afterwards.

Dimitrie Sturdza (1756–1846), son of Ioan, built a court church close to the manor between 1821 and 1823, fitting it with a baroque iconostasis and a quantity of valuable plate, and put up stables beside it. His son Alecu Sturdza (1803–1848) laid out 42 hectares around the house as an English park, with ornamental trees and long flower walks, and set about buying rare books and manuscripts that enriched the collections of the house. In the preface to the second edition of the chronicles of Moldavia and Wallachia, Mihail Kogălniceanu recorded that Dimitrie A. Sturdza had put the original of Alexandru Beldiman's Tragedy at his disposal and held at Miclăușeni a great number of manuscript annals of his own. Though a cousin of the reigning prince Mihail Sturdza (1834–1849), Alecu took up the ideas of the revolutionaries of 1848. He died of cholera that year, with suspicion that he had been poisoned on the prince's orders, and was buried in the manor church. His widow Ecaterina Sturdza, known as Catinca, took over the running of the estate, and in 1863 she made it over to her son George Sturdza.

In 1869 George Sturdza (1841–1909) married Maria Ghica, daughter of the writer Ion Ghica, and the couple moved out to the estate. Eager to remake the manor, he sold several of its forests and borrowed 100,000 lei from the Romanian Land Credit Society, pledging Miclăușeni itself as security and undertaking to repay the debt in gold coin. Between 1880 and 1904 he built on the site of the old manor a palace in late Neo-Gothic style, to plans by the architects Iulius Reinecke and I. Grigsberg, copying the feudal castles of the West and recalling both the Palace of Culture in Iași and the princely palace at Ruginoasa. Part of the eighteenth-century house was kept inside the new work, in the eastern wing.

The blazons taken from the Sturdza arms, a lion with a sword and an olive branch, were made in 1898 by Reinecke with the help of Maria Sturdza, a painter who had illustrated many of the poems of Vasile Alecsandri, a neighbour and close friend of the family. The rooms held a library of some 60,000 volumes, many of them first or very rare editions, together with medieval costume, arms, jewellery, paintings, busts in Carrara marble, silver, and archaeological, numismatic and epigraphic pieces. Inscribed stones were set into the wall of a ground-floor room in the eastern wing, among them the founding inscription of the older church built by Ioan Sturza in 1782 and a Latin inscription of 1908 declaring that old lineages are carried on not in carved walls but at altars and hearths.

In 1907, under the influence of the peasant risings of that year, the peasants of Miclăușeni and Butea gathered in groups and came to the eastern gate of the castle, asking to speak with the boyar. He heard their grievances out, ordered a clerk to write down how much land each man wanted, and told them to go home and they would have it.

George Sturdza and Maria Ghica had a single child, a daughter, Ecaterina, who married Șerban Cantacuzino in 1897 and was left a childless widow when he died in 1918. She adopted her cousin Matei Ghica Cantacuzino, who proved to have no interest in the estate and emigrated to the West during the Second World War, and for a long stretch of years she administered the castle herself. During the First World War the palace housed a military hospital, with Maria Ghica and Ecaterina Cantacuzino nursing the wounded, and George Enescu came to the castle and gave a concert among the beds. Under the agrarian law of 1921 the peasants of the Miclăușeni estate were granted nearly 1,700 hectares of its land, parcelled into 810 lots.

In 1944, with the front drawing close, Ecaterina Cantacuzino left the palace, taking with her the treasures of the church built by the grand logothete Dimitrie Sturdza in 1823. She refused at first to evacuate the library, and later handed two of its inventories to the Bishopric of Roman. German prisoners were quartered in the castle in the winter of 1944. Russian soldiers stripped it, burning valuable books as fuel in the stoves and selling other volumes to shops in Târgu Frumos, where they were used to wrap goods; furniture and the greater part of the Sturdza collections went with them. Some of what survived was gathered up by Jacob Popper and Jean Ackerman, who loaded the books onto a Patriotic Defence lorry to get them out: part was deposited at the ARLUS offices in Iași, part was sold to the Central University Library, and part left the country altogether. The volumes Ecaterina Cantacuzino had saved and handed over were later given outright to the Bishopric of Roman.

Widowed and childless, Ecaterina Cantacuzino took monastic vows towards the end of her life under the name Mother Macrina. On 21 April 1947 she gave the castle to the Bishopric of Roman, along with the 30 hectares of wooded park around it, the church founded by her parents and all the outbuildings, so a convent of nuns might be established there. In 1953 the communist authorities dissolved the monastic settlement and moved the nuns to the Cozancea skete in Botoșani County, the domain passing to the state. Ecaterina Cantacuzino died at Cozancea, and her remains were brought back in 1970 for burial in the Sturdza family plot beside the church at Miclăușeni.

In the period that followed the castle served as a military explosives depot and passed through the hands of the Ministry of Metallurgy, the Iași Regional People's Council and the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, the authorities occasionally holding parties in its attic. Furniture from the rooms found its way into houses at Miclăușeni and Butea, where pieces standing over three metres had their legs shortened or their pediments cut away to fit under village ceilings. In 1960 the castle became the seat of a placement centre for children with severe mental disabilities, with a special school attached, and the building decayed under a use it was never fitted for and was no longer maintained; doors and windows were hacked about, the parquet lifted and the fireplaces broken. On the night of 23 December 1968 fire broke out in the attic, apparently from a cigarette left burning, and took the last of the original furniture, which had been stored up there. In 1985 a second fire destroyed the attic and the roof, and the water used to put it out soaked into the walls and drove the decay on.

The convent Mother Macrina had intended was finally established in 1990. In 2001 the castle was returned to the Metropolitanate of Moldavia and Bukovina, and on 13 October that year the placement centre moved out to the village of Cozmești in the commune of Stolniceni-Prăjescu; in 2003 the director Sergiu Nicolaescu shot several scenes of Orient Express at Miclăușeni. A government decision of 2 October 2003 ordered emergency repairs to the palace and landscaping work around it, and in 2004, with a World Bank grant of about 2.4 million lei (685,700 euros), the Metropolitanate began restoring the castle and its outbuildings. Consolidation came first, then works against groundwater infiltration; lost decorative elements were rebuilt from photographs, and the surviving joinery and original parquet were restored and conserved in 2003–2005.

The restoration has not been carried through to the end. The palace has been listed among the historic monuments of Iași County since 2015, under the code IS-II-m-B-04199.02, as part of the Miclăușeni monastery ensemble together with the church of the Holy Princes and the Annunciation of 1787 and the park. The Metropolitanate of Moldavia and Bukovina holds the site and intends a museum complex and a conference centre here, with a day centre for the elderly and a pilgrimage centre in the other buildings, one of which is already a painting studio turning out icons and decorated eggs.