Romanian church fresco- riding a plane to Hell, said reports monitored by BosNewsLife Sunday July 7.
The artist, Ion Badila, said he was working on the painting when planes were flown deliberately into buildings in New York and Washington, killing more than 3,000 people.
He saw the television coverage and decided to depict Bin Laden as Satan for the fresco in the Defence Ministry’s Orthodox chapel in the western city of Timisoara, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) reported.
Timisoara is a crucial city in the Romanian region of Transylvania, where about 2 million ethnic Hungarians live. "I was working on the images for ‘Descent into Hell’, when I saw the terrorist attacks on America, and people were saying it was the apocalypse and Hell on earth," the newspaper Evenimentul Zilei quoted him as saying.
The BBC, which broke the story internationally, said Bin Laden carries the Devil’s fork, aimed at the World Trade Center. In the painting, he carries the Devil’s fork and is riding an airplane through the flames of Hell towards the World Trade Center -the main target of the 11 September hijackers.
Frescoes – where pictures are painted on fresh plaster – are common in European churches, depicting Bible scenes and images from Heaven and Hell.
Many of them can be seen in the buildings of Romania’s Orthodox Church, the former Communist country’s largest denomination. Several centuries ago, church painters in what is now Romania often showed the Turks as Satan, from the times when the area was under Turkish rule, the BBC added.
