Coats of arms

The coat of arms is the distinctive sign or symbol of a state, town, dynasty, noble title, guild, a.s.o. Depending on the material of which they are made and the skill of the craftsman, the coats of arms sometimes become real works of art, be it sculpture, painting, engraving, metal, drawing or embroidery. Each coat of arms is made up of figurative symbolic repesentations - crosses, stars, flowers, fantastic creatures, antropomorphic or zoomorphic, plants, weapons, buildings, tools, bells, among others, following very strict rules.

In the Romanian Principalities, together with the Wallachian eagle on its coat of arms, the Moldavian aurochs’s head pertains to the Dacian and Roman origin of the Romanian people. In Moldavia, the fully developed coat of arms appeared in the time of Stephen the Great, being attested, first as an epigraphic monument, on a votive inscription written on the walls of Cetatea Alba in 1476. Moldavia’s fully developed coat of arms is made up of a shield, cleft or sectioned, stamped with a helmet on one corner, above which is arched the aurochs’ turned head, with the frontal presentation of the head, and with a star between its curved horns. The number of the points of the star differs from one coat of arms to the other. The positions of the sun and the moon are variable, as are the motives of the shield. In the background, are double crosses, roses and lilies, whose origin or significance are not entirely known.

A few outstanding coats of arms are preserved at Putna Monastery. Thus, the coat of arms on the tombstone of Bogdan and Petru is definitely from the time of Stephen the Great; the coat of arms on the votive inscription on the eastern façade of the gate tower is also attributed to the same voivode, though with some reserve; the third coat of arms, now embedded on the eastern façade of the St. Apostles Peter and Paul’s Chapel, comes from the time of Alexandru Lapusneanu, while the last one, not a fully developed version, is the re-united coat of arms of Moldavia and Wallachia, dating from 1757, from Constantin Racovita, set on the inner façade of the gate tower.


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