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Architecture
For the new church, Peter Rares and Grigorie Rosca, the future metropolitan bishop of Moldavia, chose a model used in Moldavia for the great princely monasteries of Putna, Neamt, and St. George's of Suceava: a three-apse longitudinal-plan, with a chancel, a nave, a burial chamber, a narthex with two bays, and a closed porch (exinarthex. This plan involves a high elevation and a complex vault system, varying from one section to another: the chanel apse is covered by a semi-calotte, extending westward with tree arches descending from west to east and increasingly narrower, the narthex is topped by a high tower with Moldavian arches and on its western side two wide arches match those in the chancel. The burial chamber is covered by a transversal semi-cylindrical vault, while the solution chosen for the narthex was the complex one also use din the case of Neamt monastery, with two star-shaped vaults on an east-west axis. The two bays of this room are bordered with triple stone mouldings, shaped as doublings on the vault and as colonattes with carved profiled pedestals along the walls. The most original solution was chosen for the closed porch: a transversal barrel vault with penetrations, most certainly inspired by the Late Renaissance, covers a room lit by eight large, tall windows, with late Gothic moldings.
The lines of the interior architecture are clear, suggesting an upward movement also highlighted by the height of the wall and by the arches overlapping at the level of the vaults.
The porch was built in an altogether different pattern. It consists entirely of blocks of polished stone which were not set in an alternating pattern. The solution seems to have been dictated by the presence of the large Gothic windows, which practically replace the wall and for which practically replace the wall and for which the usual quarry stone structure was not suitable. The use of different materials created a discrepancy between the southern and the northern walls of the narthex and those of the closed porch, even if at the level of the foundation they merge seamlessly.
The eight-sided tower has four windows set along the main axes and which alternate with small decorative buttresses. It rests on two bases, an octogonal lower one and an upper one shaped like an eight-pointed star.
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