On the 27th of May 2009, His Grace the Priest Nicodim, the Bishop of Severin and Strehaia, set the foundation stone of the Monastery Jiana. This is the first monastery from the plain area of the county Mehedinți.
The foundation of the monastery has been decided in the meeting of the Metropolitan Assembly of the Metropolitan Church from Oltenia from the 28th of May 2008 as a monastery of monks, under the Bishop of Severin and of Strehaia.
The field on which there was going to be built the future establishment, with a surface of 5 hectares, has been donated by the old family of aristocrats Pleniceanu. During the times of the communist regime, the property of the family Pleniceanu has been confiscated and didn’t seem to exist any path for it to come back to the former owners. The communists executed on the land stables, and in 1990 the city hall auctioned it. Then the family Pleniceanu bided and bought two of the four stables. The mansion was destroyed, after the period in which it was the headquarters of CAP. When it was released by the communists, from the mansion only remained the broken windows.
After the dissolving of the Communist curtain, the family Pleniceanu regained part of the land from Jiana and built on it a farm.
After even the last of the descendants of the family Pleniceanu died, his relatives decided to donate the land in order to be built a church on it.
Since always the monastery signified for the Romanian orthodox Christian a real fireplace of spirituality and a fortress for keeping the identity of the Romanian spirituality. After the falling of the communism, in the times of religious freedom there were re-founded old monasteries, but there were also founded new one, with the purpose of strengthening our community and for the clerical use of all the Romanians.
This situation is also found in Mehedinți, where after 1990 were founded 2 monasteries, and 6 of them where re-founded, therefore throughout the Bishop of Severin and of Strehaia there currently exist 11 monasteries. One of the two new founded monasteries is the monastery Jiana.
Jiana is a commune in the county of Mehedinți, Oltenia, Romania, formed by the villages Ciorobeni, Dânceu, Jiana (the residence), Jiana Mare and Jiana Veche.
According to the census performed in the year 2011, the population of the commune Jiana is up to 4.695 inhabitants, in decrease in comparison with the previous census from 2002, when there were registered 5.091 inhabitants. The majority of the inhabitants are Romanian (76, 04%), with a minority of Gypsies (17, 81%). For 6, 09% of the population, the ethnical affiliation isn’t known. From the confessional point of view, the majority of the inhabitants are orthodox (89, 63%), with a minority of Pentecostals (3, 19%). For 6, 09% of the population, the confessional affiliation isn’t known.
