Melania of Durau

Melania, called Mariana at baptism, was a schemanun, founder of the Durău Hermitage, west of Ceahlău, in the first half of the seventeenth century. She is named in the Romanian Paterikon and venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; the sources available to us give no day of commemoration.

According to tradition she was the daughter of a prince of Iași. Desiring to become a bride of Christ, she left her parents' house in secret with two faithful servants and hid below the summit of Ceahlău, above the present Durău Monastery. There she received the schema and lived as a hermit for many years with her disciples, known to no one. When other nuns of the area gathered, they raised a small skete with a wooden church dedicated to the Annunciation, called Melania's Hermitage.

It was the harshest nuns' hermitage on Ceahlău. Around the abbess about thirty nuns gathered from monasteries and hermitages, forming a known hesychast settlement of women in Moldavia. Some struggled in community, others lived in stillness alone in wooden dugouts near the skete; only the church was shared. Two names survive from them: the Nuns' Foot and the Nun's Spring.

Melania was a spiritual mother in the mountain and a practitioner of the Jesus Prayer. She raised many disciples in the love of Christ, comforted them in times of temptation and guided them toward perfection. She gave her disciples the last kiss and fell asleep in peace. After her repose the hermitage was called Durău Hermitage. In 1779-1780 Elder Paisius gathered there all the nuns and women hermits of the area, under the abbacy of the schemanun Nazaria and the hermit Joseph; from 1830 the settlement became a monastery of monks.