Throughout the Balkans and Southeastern Europe there is a popular folktale that describes the tragic, sacrificial immurement of a woman to ensure the successful construction of a building. From Albania to Georgia, around 700 variations of the myth exist, including  “The Bridge of Arta” in Greece, “The Building of Skadar” in Serbia, “Clement Mason” in Hungary, and “Master Builder Manole” in Romania. Though the constructions in these tales vary from bridges, to fortresses, to monasteries, they share the same basic narrative: a man sacrifices a woman against her will in order to create the foundation upon which a structure can be built. Romanian-born artist and filmmaker monica maria moraru recently explored the Master Builder Manole myth in her exhibition The Foundation Pit. In the exhibition, moraru not only revisits the myth and its cultural influence but also considers the intertextual links between the sacrifice-for-construction myth and the literary work from which the exhibition derived its title: Soviet writer Andrei Platonov’s novel The Foundation Pit.