Socialist regimes in Eastern Europe carried out harsh repression on religious institutions, but in Romania, the regime was flexible compared with Soviet Union, where Orthodox monasteries were closed by force and torn down. Romanian way of “carrot-and-stick” tactics to the Orthodox Church watered down the resistance of certain clergies and believers while the religious monuments were acknowledged as the tool for the national identity. This paper focuses on the formation of the heritage policy and its implementation by the socialist government vis-à-vis the monastic tradition in Romania.

 Three parties should be analysed in terms of the intervention for conservation: State, Orthodox Church and the experts of historical monuments. The official competent body for heritage conservation was formed under the state committees for culture and national planning, but as long as this section was not adequately evaluated by the regime tops, this became nearly an asylum of the experts who continued their identity from the kingdom period and kept liberal attitude by working with local church communities.

 The Direcţie a Monumentelor Istorice (DMI), started in 1959, played a key role for implementing the restoration works for the Church. This direction kept taking the initiative until the middle of 1970’s. According to the budgetary table of their operations during the 1960’s, three among 39 counties and Bucharest received the benefit of high ratio of the budget: Suceava in Moldavia (15.7% of national budget for conservation), Braşov in Transylvania (12.7%) and Constanţa in Wallachia (10.4%). Since the first is the cradle of Romanian Orthodox Church, the conservation works for such monasteries as Voroneţ and Dragomirna were considered crucial. In the second, it was fortification rather than Protestant Church. The third signifies the sites of Roman antiquities. In the monasteries like Voroneţ, closed by the secularization policy in the late 19th century, DMI paradoxically accelerated the pace of conservation due to the absence of the church intervention.

 In the cases of Suceaviţa, Doragomirna and Vorneţ, the restoration works should be underlined by the contemporary spirit. This was played by an architect Ioana Grigorescu. These three projects occupied more than 70% of the total budget in Suceava County (11% of the national budget). The analysis of her preserved documents reveals that, besides the restoration of the authentic church buildings, nuns’ cells, dining halls and even exhibition halls were specially designed with dynamic forms inspired by the Romanian tradition.

 In Romania special terminology for urban planning “systematization” had been employed since 1920’s but during the socialist period, Marxist connotation with scientific and top-down approach was added so as to form a nation-wide planning conception, which obliged urbanization by migration of rural population. Conservation of historical monuments was so seriously affected by this planning policy that the church communities on comună (village) level suffered enormously. The rehabilitation of historical cities such as Craiova and Constanţa were recognized important in the early 1970’s responding to the trend of the West, but Vrancea Earthquake of 1977 suspended this movement and squeezed DMI to a much smaller section.

 In this sense, the balance among the triangle State – Church – Professional was barely stabilized, despite its sensitiveness, in the early period of Ceauşescu Regime. Input to the conservation policy by timely contact with UNESCO played the role of counter-balance against the pressure of systematization by the leaders of the socialist hierarchy.