‘Mihail Sadoveanu’ Memorial Museum and ‘Visarion Puiu’ Memorial House

The ‘Mihail Sadoveanu’ Memorial Museum of the ‘Visarion Puiu’ Memorial House was first dedicated to the novelist and is part of the Vovidenia Hermitage – Neamț Monastery Monastic Complex. When Metropolitan Visarion, the one who built this house in 1938, went into exile because of the totalitarian regime, the communist authorities ordered this place to be turned into the agricultural cooperative of the locality. Only the intervention of the writer Mihail Sadoveanu (1880-1961) stopped this initiative that could have destroyed the house, as the writer asked the political authorities to use this building as a creation house.

Mihail Sadoveanu acted like that in remembrance of his fellow, Visarion Puiu. He was his colleague in their first year of school and their teacher was Mihai Busuioc (aka Domnul Trandafir). Sadoveanu was coming to the hermitage in summer or during winter holidays and after 1955 he finally settled down here until he passed away (in 1961). In this house there are now two museums: eight rooms are dedicated to Mihail Sadoveanu and one is dedicated to the Metropolitan Visarion Puiu. One can visit the lounge where the writer used to hold poetry evenings every autumn, his workroom where he wrote eight novels, his bedroom or the exhibition with all his 104 writings. The room dedicated to Metropolitan Visarion Puiu reveals in detail his life, his professional evolution and the exile activity he had. In 1949, in Paris, he set up the first Romanian diocese in the diaspora.