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Eugeniu Iordachescu, a Romanian civil engineer who helped save some of Bucharest’s most emblematic churches from destruction in the 1980s by literally rolling them to safety, died on Jan. 4 at his home in Bucharest. He was 89.
[...] In the 1980s, Mr. Iordachescu was working at the Project Institute of Bucharest, a design and engineering center. Around that time Romania’s dictator, Nicolae Ceausescu, set about radically redesigning the center of the city, inspired by the architecture and the style of city planning he had seen on a visit to Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea.
[...] Mr. Iordachescu came up with the idea of digging under the buildings and putting a reinforced concrete support beneath them; the structures could then be placed on tracks. After that, engineers would sever the foundations and use hydraulic levers and mechanical pulleys to move the buildings to their new locations. Foundations would be put in place at the other end to support the relocated structures.
When he had first raised the idea with colleagues, Mr. Iordachescu was told that it wasn’t possible, that the buildings would fall over. He persuaded some engineers to try, and received verbal permission from government officials — though no one was willing to give permission in writing, in case the experiment failed.
“I find what they did extraordinary,” Viorel Speteanu, the editor of the book “Eugeniu Iordachescu: A Savior of Architectural Monuments,” said in an interview. “The ideas flew around. The movements of these buildings, both churches and civil buildings, I think this is an extraordinary achievement, and I will never stop praising him for his accomplishment.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/11/obituaries/eugeniu-iordachescu-dead.html
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @03:27AM (2 children)
The saved churches were orthodox ones.
In the Orthodox Christianity, priests can marry before being ordained [orthodoxanswers.org] and most actually are.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 15 2019, @03:32AM
It wasn't just Churches he saved either. He saved any 'landmark' buildings he could get permission to move that the regime didn't destroy before he could get a crew together to help relocate them. And keep in mind he wasn't apparently a religious man, just an appreciator of 'classical' architecture, the most illustrious of which is usually churches or government buildings due to funding and the import of aesthetic appeal to both groups.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday January 16 2019, @11:16AM
A small correction: Orthodox priests *must* marry before ordination, as a matter fact, bachelor seminary students are formally told that they must get married within the 5 years of study otherwise they won't be ordained. Those who won't might join a monastery and be ordained as monk priests, but that's not easy.
Otherwise, one can graduate from a religious seminary as a layman, but that's uncommon for those who studied for priesthood.