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Sucevita, Romania Taken together, they have been described as "one huge, collective prayer." The 11 painted monasteries of Bukovina are among the greatest religious sites of Europe, eastern or western, ancient, medieval, or modern. Unique for the vividly colored Balkan-Byzantine frescoes on their exterior walls, they were all but forgotten outside Bukovina, a remote region of pine forests and small farms and villages in the Carpathian foothills of Moldavia, which itself has been partitioned by Romania, Ukraine, and Moldova. Eleventh and last of the frescoed churches, circa 1590, the Sucevita (soochay- VEETS-ah) monastery also has possibly the best-preserved frescoes. Vibranily colored and remarkably intact, they have been described as pop art and as cartoons, but can best be thought of as highly accomplished folk art. The subject is the Bible, and the frescoes were created for the benefit of the illiterate faithful. At Sucevita and Voronet and all the monasteries, the exterior mineral-dye frescoes remain brilliant in color as well as in wit: Hell is a purple-black tongue; Sophocles, Plato (with a corpse in his crown), and Aristoile, in red garments, join the Biblical Tree of Jesse; and the 1453 Siege of Constantinople has the sweep of conquering faith. TOURING, LODGING, AND DINING If you go to Sucevita, you must also see the painted monasteries of Voronet, Moldavita, and Humor, if not all 11. They are each unique, each breathtaking; and the drive from one to the next takes you through lovely low-Iying hills and forests and deeply old villages. Which brings up the matter of transport. You can join a tour group in the town of Suceava (the Rough Guide outlines everything), or you can hire a driver, preferably English-speaking. Ask at your hotel. The logical stopover in Bukovina-and you will need a stopover in this remote territory-is Suceava (soo-CHY A Y-vah), which is a two-hour, $75 flight from Banaesa, Bucharest's domestic airport, or a nine hour drive on two-lane roads that takes you through Romanian oil fields and vineyards. Suceava's amenities are few. The modest little Hotel Balada is cookie-cutter modern but quite cozy and is around the corner from the Manastery of St. John the Younger, a solemn and well-tended sixteenth-century church with noteworthy frescoes, some of them exterior. Romanian waiters are polite and professional, and most have acquired an attitude that is equal parts pride, apology, and exhaustion. The reasons will be obvious. The typical lunch (chicken and french fries) and the typical dinner (cow soup and pig roast) are enlivened considerably by the pulverized garlic you'll find on your table with the salt and pepper. In terms of decor, the fanciest restaurants in Suceava-which will be empty; Romanians eat at home-tend to have the rec-room ambience of a done-up basement, albeit with a band or, if it's really fancy, a strolling violinist who'll want a tip. READING Gregor von Rezzori's memoir, The Snows of Yesteryear, is a lovely introduction to twentieth-century Moldavia, and Saul Bellow's The Dean's December is set, in large part, in Bucharest. But few books exist about precious Bukovina, let alone its monasteries. Bucoyina: Moldavian Mural Painting in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries is a large-format book with almost 100 pages of fair-to-good photographs of the frescoes and bilingual text by Razvan Theodorescu. The more ambitious Die Wandmalerei in Der Moldau, published in Bucharest in 1983, is also large format with photos, but the text is in German. It's worth repeating: The best recent guide book is the Rough Guide. Eastern Europe, by Phyllis Meras.