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Constructing Fascist Hagiographies: The Genealogy of the Prison Saints Movement in Contemporary Romania

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 November 2021

Ionuț BiliuțăOpen the ORCID record for Ionuț Biliuță[Opens in a new window]
Ionuț Biliuță*
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Gh. Șincai Institute/Romanian Academy, 10A Al. Papiu Ilarian Street, Târgu Mureș, 540074, Romania
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ionut.biliuta@academia-cj.ro
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Abstract

The paper focuses on the ideological roots of the prison saints movement in contemporary Romania. The text uncovers the interwar and communist conceptual premises upon which the biographies of fascist martyrs for canonisation as saints by the Romanian Orthodox Church were shaped. As martyrs for the Christian faith, those deceased were depicted as respectable figures, showcasing their martyrdom on the same moral footing as the dissidents of former democratic parties opposing communism. Furthermore, the narrative strategies in shaping a fascist hagiography from the interwar up to the post-communist years stand as another critical issue for the present article.

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Contemporary European History , Volume 31 , Issue 3 , August 2022, pp. 435 - 455
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Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Introduction

In post-communist Romania, sympathisers of the Legion of Archangel Michael (the interwar fascist movement) took advantage of their newly found freedom and militated for the public rehabilitation of several members of the fascist movement who died in communist prisons. The several prisoners they selected to rehabilitate were termed ‘prison saints’ for their professed belief in God during their prison terms. The institution called in to legitimise their public recuperation was the Romanian Orthodox Church.Footnote 1

Such advocacy was made possible by the anti-communist stance of Romanian society, which also encouraged collective amnesia regarding its fascist past. This facilitated public visibility for some political prisoners from the Iron Guard. As Muriel Blaive showed, ‘while under communism, being a former prisoner could lead to social and professional ostracism, in the post-communist years, the same identity was potentially empowering’.Footnote 2 Through publicly embracing well-known figures with former fascist allegiances, including clergymen, monks and laymen the Orthodox Church, the surviving legionaries encouraged the public reassesment of Iron Guard members. The Orthodox Church included in its ranks well-known Iron Guard members (legionaries), including bishops, priests, monks and laymen.Footnote 3

Advocates for official canonisation of legionary martyrs could use both the Church's ambivalence towards its fascist past and public amnesia towards fascism, to further their ambitions. To galvanise public opinion in support of canonisation of legionary martyrs by the Orthodox Church, these groups of fascist sympathisers engaged in a wide range of activities, such as publicising their ‘miracles’, asking the Holy Synod in 1994 and 1999 for official acknowledgement of their sainthood or organising public displays of their relics.Footnote 4

Launched in 2007 by several Orthodox intellectuals such as Danion Vasile (born in 1975), Claudiu Târziu (born in 1973) and Răzvan Codrescu (1959–2021) from Rost Association, the campaign for the canonisation of ‘the saints of the communist prisons’ chose three names, those of Valeriu Gafencu (1921–52), Fr. Ilarion Felea (1903–61), and Hieroschemamonk Daniil (Sandu) Tudor (1896–1962), to be forwarded to the Holy Synod for canonisation as martyr-saints of the Orthodox Church.Footnote 5 Besides these names, the members of the campaign collected testimonies necessary to draft proposals of canonisation for other former political prisoners, such as Mircea Vulcănescu (1904–52), Hieromonk Gherasim Iscu (1912–51), the abbot of Tismana monastery, Nun Mihaela Iordache from Vladimirești monastery (1914–63), Costache Oprișan (1921–58), the national leader of the Brotherhoods of the Cross during the 1940s, Fr. Ilie Lăcătușu (1909–83) and Archimandrite Benedict Ghiuș (1904–90).Footnote 6 Except for Hieroschemamonk Daniil (Sandu) Tudor and Mircea Vulcănescu, all these persons were, during the interwar and the post-war years, active members or outspoken sympathisers of the Legionary Movement.Footnote 7 Moreover, the post-1989 hagiographers, with the support of former fascists such as Hieromonk Iustin Pârvu (1919–2013), the abbot of Petru-Vodă monastery, Hieromonk Arsenie Papacioc (1914–2011) from Techirghiol Nunery and Fr. Constantin Calciu-Dumitreasa (1925–2006), denied any legionary allegiance of both the martyrs and themselves, depicting the Iron Guard as an initiative of spiritual renewal in the Orthodox Church rather than a political movement.Footnote 8

The present article offers an overview of the historical roots of the devotion towards fascist martyrs in Orthodox and nationalist milieu. It argues that the post-1989 quasi-fascist devotion towards ‘the saints of the communist prison’ has its origins in Romania's interwar fascist past and enjoyed a continuity during the communist regime with noticeable contextual differences.Footnote 9 This article also underlines the permutations of various conceptual categories like ‘white martyrdom’ and prisons as ‘communities of feeling’ where the new fascist saints were created in shaping a legionary hagiography. Furthermore, it offers a reinterpretation of history with a focus on persecution perceived as creating a chain of legionary martyrs. It examines the various narrative strategies employed by legionary survivors from the interwar period and across the communist years in order to shape a quasi-religious hagiography, as well as exploring the religious experiences lived and recounted by the legionaries behind bars, the legionary rituals, and the persistence of anti-Semitism under the guise of Christian love.

While many studies have explored the idea of saints in communist prisons as a form of ‘resurrection’ of fascist ideas in the post-communist period, the present article addresses the origins of this phenomenon and traces its evolution through to the mid-1990s.Footnote 10 It also discusses at length the legionary perceptions of carceral religiosity, the hagiographic obsession with martyrs and saints, the relevance of communism as an anti-religion, the change towards non-violence in legionary activism occurring from the mid-1930s, and the narrative strategies used by post-communist survivors to transform their hagiography from a celebratory exhibition of heroic martyrs into an encomiastic panegyric for martyr-saints that respected all the canonical requirements of Orthodox hagiography.Footnote 11

How was it possible for a generation growing up after the 1941 suppression of the Iron Guard to preserve the relevance of prison religiosity? In doing so, they continued the fascist hagiography by adding new names, remaining faithful to tenets developed in the late 1930s, extolling the virtues of a Christian, non-violent legionary activism, and implementing the legionary literary strategies of transforming biographies into hagiographies. In explaining the continuity between the interwar period, the 1941 suppression, and the post-1948 generations, the concept of ‘vicarious memory’ (Jacob Climo) can provide a useful heuristic tool.Footnote 12 As ‘a memory that an individual holds with great personal and emotional commitment, yet it is a memory of an event or experience that the individual has not experienced directly’, vicarious memory helps explain how several generations succeeded in re-enacting a legionary spirituality at different moments in time without actually meeting each other.Footnote 13 Keeping faith with both the oral testimonies and written teachings of the fascist educators ensured that Brotherhoods of the Cross/ Frățiile de Cruce (FDC) members during the early years of communism and those of more recent post-1989 generations could envisage themselves as bearers of the same legionary truths as those of the generation of the Legion's founder, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu (1899–1938).Footnote 14

The Legionary Hagiography in the Interwar Years

Death, martyrdom, sainthood, and hagiography surrounding fascist martyrs represented cornerstone concepts of the political religions instrumentalised by the fascist and Nazi states.Footnote 15 As Simonetta Falasca Zamponi stated in the Italian fascist case:

Since the dead belonged to fascism, the sacrality of the dead transferred to the movement for which they fought, turning the history of fascism into a hagiography [emphasis added]. Fascism … was saintly and moral. It had sacrificed itself for the Nation; its martyrs were now the whole country's martyrs. This chain of meaning construction that linked blood to martyrs and youth ultimately referred back to fascism as the Nation's saviour.Footnote 16

Similarly to the Italian and German cases, the fascist secular hagiography of the Legionary Movement associated the sacred tropes of Orthodox hagiography with the interwar perceptions of legionary martyrdom, understood as the self-sacrifice of someone's life for the Fatherland.Footnote 17 The fascist leaders’ understanding of martyrdom shifted from a militarist and heroic approach inspired by the self-sacrificing example of fallen soldiers in the First World War towards incorporating Christian hagiography of holy martyrs into the legionary martyrology.Footnote 18

Following the funerals of legionary leaders Ion I. Moța (1902–37) and Vasile Marin (1904–37), who died on the Spanish front (13 Feb. 1937), the hagiographical turn in the Iron Guard became prominent, with numerous Orthodox clergymen, including the Metropolitan Bishop of Transylvania, Nicolae Bălan (1882–1955), advocating for official acknowledgement of the two legionary leaders as saints by the Orthodox Church.Footnote 19 Some of the Orthodox priests who took part in the funeral wore white clerical garments usually displayed during the public canonisation of saints and not the black used in funerary rituals.Footnote 20 The Legion's leadership especially inculcated in the ranks of the FDC the Christian defiance of death and the eternal glory awaiting legionary martyrs.Footnote 21 This period marked the starting point of the association between legionary martyrdom and Christian sanctity, that is, of the creation of legionary hagiography, with all the other names of previous martyrs subsumed and their biographies refashioned according to the Moța-Marin pattern.Footnote 22

During the ‘National Legionary State’ (September 1940–January 1941) the legionaries constructed the hagiography of their departed Captain, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, as the martyr-saint of the Orthodox Church and Nation.Footnote 23 The exhumation of Codreanu's remains (late November 1940) led to requests from legionaries to Patriarch Nicodim Munteanu (1864–1948), the leader of the Romanian Orthodox Church, for the official canonisation of Codreanu as a martyr-saint of the Orthodox Church.Footnote 24 The head of the Holy Synod rebuffed this proposal because the legionary elite had a political rather than a religious agenda.Footnote 25

In 1942, those legionaries, led by Ion Găvănescu (1859–1949) and Nichifor Crainic (1889–1972), approached Patriarch Nicodim Munteanu again, asking for the official canonisation of Codreanu and the assassinated legionary elite as martyr saints, to legitimise their hagiography with the official seal of the Church.Footnote 26 Because of his anti-legionary views, Patriarch Nicodim turned them down, pointing out that legionary martyrs should attract more popular devotion before the Holy Synod embarked on any procedure of canonisation.Footnote 27 The narrative of sainthood remained alive in the legionaries ranks even after the end of the National Legionary State and continued into the post-communist years.

The Legionary ‘White Martyrdom’: Self-Sacrifice in a Monastic Key

The post-1936 gradual insertion of Christian religious tropes into the framework of the legionary hagiography led to a change in the perception of what legionary self-sacrifice meant.Footnote 28 In the early 1930s, the representation of their martyrdom for the movement hardly displayed religious tropes, the main accent falling on the Romanian state's cruel treatment during imprisonment.Footnote 29 Moreover, as early as 1933, the sacrifice of blood equalled the bloodless sacrifice through work in favour of the Legion.Footnote 30 The legionary ideologues depicted the constant effort to re-build churches or houses for the poor as expressions of the ‘ascetic’ and self-sacrificial spirit of the legionaries.Footnote 31

In 1936 one can witness a transition from these two types of martyrdoms to silent acceptance of the eventuality of death, of any violence or injustice inflicted upon the legionaries by the state. According to Gheorghe Furdui (1910–39), after the National Student Congress in Târgu-Mureș, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu told him: ‘until now, we have proven heroism, but from now on, we have to accept Christian martyrdom, the last stage of legionary experience.’Footnote 32

The 1937 oath of allegiance in front of the coffins of the two legionary martyrs preached the need for a legionary ‘ascetic elite’, ready at any moment to sacrifice their lives without questions or reprimand. This idea fell on the open ears of some of the legionary ideologues such as Ernest Bernea (1905–90), and it was popularised among legionary inmates during the communist period.Footnote 33

In 1940, Fr. Ilie I. Imbrescu (1909–49), a reputed Orthodox priest and legionary commander, spoke extensively about the legionary self-sacrifice ‘without shedding blood’ as ‘white martyrdom’. He defined it as ‘the non-violent acceptance of all moral and physical hardships by responding to the weapons of the Satanic hatred of our oppressors with the weapons of the gracious love of our Saviour Jesus Christ’.Footnote 34

The motivation to abstain from violence echoed the leader's ‘mystic’ personality and fanatical belief that God would eventually make the Iron Guard triumphant over the forces of Evil.

In his views about life and death, [for Codreanu] the Principle of Good has always triumphed against the principle of Evil. One day the prison's gates will open by themselves and the Fatherland will call upon us to fulfil our historical mission. We have to pray and believe in God [that this will happen] because we are Christians.Footnote 35

In the wake of the gruesome killings of political adversaries in Jilava prison on 27 November 1940 and the exhumation of Codreanu's remains, Marieta Iordache (one of the leaders of the legionary women's organisation) felt she could no longer condone the legionary ideal of retaliatory violence and joined Vladimirești monastery.Footnote 36 Her objective here was to redeem the sins of the Nation (moral decadence, atheism, the primacy of materialism over the spiritual) through incessant prayer and various privations, to engender a new spiritual legionary man through monastic asceticism.Footnote 37 While some left active service in the movement for the walls of Orthodox monasteries and nunneries, others, like Anastasia ‘Sica’ Popescu (one of the few women with the rank of legionary commander), lived their everyday lives according to the tenets of Orthodox monasticism without taking the vows.Footnote 38 The narrative of legionary self-sacrifice imbued with Christian rhetoric had a particularly strong influence on the legionary education of youth during the short-lived National Legionary State.Footnote 39

The legionaries opposed the establishment of a communist government in Romania in 1947 either by retreating from public life and joining monastic orders (monastic ‘white martyrdom’) or by preaching a non-violent form of spiritual resistance in prison (carceral ‘white martyrdom’).Footnote 40 Both imprisoned and free legionaries – including Ernest Bernea and Mihaela Iordache – reflected upon Codreanu's commandments of forging a new ascetic man and his previous statements that the Orthodox Church's moral line stood above legionary moral principles.Footnote 41 Thus they believed that only by embracing Orthodox spirituality and monasticism were legionaries able to fulfil Codreanu's ambition of engendering a new, ascetic elite.Footnote 42

Former legionaries who became Orthodox monks or nuns re-interpreted the legionary commandment of self-sacrifice for the Fatherland in an ascetic key as a non-violent acceptance of any future persecution coming from the communist authorities and as a spiritual war against the forces of Evil.Footnote 43 These included Fr. Arsenie Boca (1910–89) from Sâmbăta monastery in southern Transylvania, Fr. Ioan Iovan (1922–2008) and Mihaela Iordache (1914–63) from Vladimirești monastery, the legionary monks from Slatina monastery in northern Moldavia headed by Hieromonk Ilie Cleopa (1912–98), or those grouped in the spiritual circle named Rugul Aprins (the Burning Bush) in Antim monastery in Bucharest, such as Hieromonk Benedict Ghiuș (1904–90) and Fr. Arsenie Papacioc. Furthermore, these monks and nuns appropriated Corneliu Zelea Codreanu's six commandments of discipline, work, silence, honour, mutual assistance and heroism as official monastic guidelines, regulating the spiritual lives of the monks and nuns living in those monasteries.Footnote 44

They also believed that their ultimate legionary mission was to create, through their prayers, a spiritual bulwark against godless communism.Footnote 45 Fortified spiritually by ascetic practices, these monks and nuns welcomed death – had communist persecution been unleashed against them – as a stepping stone for a future resurrection of the Nation.Footnote 46 The sermons of these former legionaries, now Orthodox hieromonks and priests, warned their monastic communities and audiences about the imperative of redeeming the sins of the Nation. They believed that martyrdom at the hands of the communists would lead to harmonious unity among the members of monastic communities and the Romanian Orthodox citizens.Footnote 47 The fascist religiosity based on the Orthodox ascetic tenets of the monastic renunciation of the world and the voluntary acceptance of any maltreatment informed their sermons and printed works.Footnote 48 Fr. Arsenie Papacioc indicated the monastic, non-confrontational adjustment of the violent activism by stating that ‘the Legion made a huge mistake to manipulate the Church [in acquiescing to its purposes]’ and added that ‘it cannot go on as in the past with the cross and the pistol’.Footnote 49

While extolling the virtues of pacifism and political prudence, anti-Semitic tropes continued to flourish among the representatives of ‘white martyrdom’ outside the communist prisons. Fr. Ioan Iovan preached incessantly to the Orthodox Christians gathered on Sundays at Vladimirești monastery (Galați County) in eastern Romania the need to disown the communists as well as the Jews and to abstain from eating Jewish bread (azimă) leavened with the blood of Christ.Footnote 50

This type of fascist religiosity exalting the silent acceptance of privation, suffering and torture at the hands of ideological enemies and the ideal of forging a new legionary man according to ascetic principles went hand-in-hand with ‘abundant events’, i.e., apparitions of Christ, the Virgin, various saints and legionary martyrs.Footnote 51 Similar to Western Catholicism, such events included the Marian apparitions experienced by the Vladmirești's abbess, Veronica Gurău, alleged miracles (healing of different sicknesses, physical or mental illnesses) and apocalyptic visions predicting a global war between God and the armies of Satan.Footnote 52

Alongside the attribution of divine apparitions, former legionary monks promoted several heterodox rituals into an elaborate and heretical monastic liturgy.Footnote 53 Such rituals included the confession of sins in public, experiencing premonitory dreams and omens, sending chain letters to spread prophecies, taking the Eucharist without proper preparation or prior fasting and the public advertisement of legionary martyrs as saints.Footnote 54 Quasi-Orthodox practices coexisted with legionary rituals such as nest reunions with legionaries from inside or from outside the monasteries, the cult of the legionary martyrs through regular memorial services (parastase) and guarding a burning candle in front of the icon of Archangel Michael.Footnote 55

The development of a fascist ascetic religiosity based on the passive acceptance of suffering had a tremendous impact on the imprisoned mystic legionary milieu. Meetings with Fr. Arsenie Boca and receiving from him the first volumes of the Romanian edition of the Philokalia ensured that mystical legionaries imprisoned after 1941 enriched their knowledge about non-violence both from Orthodox monks outside the prisons and the Patristic thought.Footnote 56 While at Târgu Ocna sanatorium, Valeriu Gafencu (1921–53) asked Constantin Voicescu (1924–97) about the Burning Bush's spirituality taught at Antim monastery in Bucharest.Footnote 57 On a more profound level, as preaching missionaries of non-aggression towards Jews and political enemies, the legionaries ensured that the moral responsibility for their past acts of violence faded away.

Prisons as ‘Communities of Feeling’

Another essential trait duly incorporated by the legionary hagiographers was the religious experience of imprisonment as the means to shape a new fascist type of subjectivity. As a place of spiritual renewal the prison became an integral part of legionary martyrdom, a place where a new identity was shaped: that of the new, spiritualised person transfigured through silent submission to persecution.Footnote 58 No wonder that most of the legionary leadership concluded that prison time was necessary for transforming the legionary into the legionary new man.Footnote 59 As Mabel Berezin notes, speaking about ‘communities of feeling’:

Italian men and women did not become fascist in the public piazzas. They became fascist to the extent that they assumed a fascist identity in schools, Fascist Party organisations, and labour corporations. The public spectacle was an arena of political emotion, a community of feeling, in which Italians of all ages were meant to feel as fascist.Footnote 60

Archival documents and post-communist memoirs claim that legionary carceral experience equalled self-sacrifice for the movement, with most returning legionaries enjoying a triumphal welcoming upon their release and being already considered fascist martyrs.Footnote 61

Across the legionary history in interwar and post-war years, one of these spaces where young adherents ‘felt fascist’ or became one was the prison cell.Footnote 62 The hagiographical narratives from the interwar period onwards envisaged the prison cage as a monastic cell or even a church, a space of spiritual trials where, through persecution and spiritual renewal, the prisoner became a new, fascist man.Footnote 63

In the process of ‘living through space’, a prisoner determined the contours of his psyche. By taming a cell and turning it into something familiar, a prisoner reworked herself, not only adapting the cell to her own needs but also adapting herself to the circumstances and conditions of the cell. These offstage practices – behaviours different from what the regulations stipulated – created a sense of privacy in a world where every act, word, and behaviour was controlled, supervised, and eavesdropped by authorities, guards, and even cellmates. Elements of this private realm were hidden in the familiarity of the cell space and the spatial arrangements of the prison.Footnote 64

As Ana Müller shows above, the legionaries transformed the prison cell into a place of personal initiation into the practices of legionary religiosity that led to spiritual renewal. Youth from the legionary FDC thought that by experiencing the life behind bars with other legionaries, they became true legionaries in their term.Footnote 65 From the mid-1920s, prison memoirs and carceral novels became literary landmarks of the legionary experiences in prisons.Footnote 66 The literary memorialisation of unwavering legionary faith among those behind bars – narratives of legionary spiritual purification through suffering and the development of a battle-hardened legionary – struck a chord especially in the imaginary of the young members of the FDC.Footnote 67

As a rite of passage, from 1933 legionaries frequently associated detention with a different religious experience entailing visions, miracles, premonitory dreams and quasi-religious rituals such as collective prayers or sessions of spiritism to summon the dead.Footnote 68 Time spent in prison cells presented an opportunity for legionaries to familiarise themselves with legionary religious practices.Footnote 69 The terrible pressure exerted by the state's authorities upon the imprisoned legionaries made them experience ‘dreams of terror’.Footnote 70 The nightmares during various periods of persecution or imprisonment only reinforced the legionaries' belief in the righteousness of their cause and their proximity to God.Footnote 71

During the period of the great purge from 1938–39, a report of the Romanian police painted a clear picture of how the imprisoned legionaries organised themselves into two main concentration camps, Vaslui and Ciuc.Footnote 72 Legionary inmates elected a legionary commander (comandant legionar) whose authority was acknowledged and respected by all the legionaries.Footnote 73 One of the legionary commander's most important roles was to supervise the legionary prayers for the Captain headed by legionary priests and inspire the ideal of self-sacrifice in the legionary ranks.Footnote 74

In Ciuc concentration camp where numerous collective prayers took place, a priest [Fr. Nicolae Georgescu-Edineț] reduced to the state of a breathing corpse performed all his pastoral duties. His prayers were only a murmur, and some would say his last. Nevertheless, he held on. This murmur kept him resisting until the end of his imprisonment.Footnote 75

After the great persecution from 1938–39, periods of imprisonment were associated in the legionary prison memoirs with alleged miracles performed by God or the Archangel Michael, both in and out prison.Footnote 76 According to Fr. Nicolae Grebenea (1905–2006), one of the legionary clergymen imprisoned in Vaslui camp, during the Great Holy Friday in 1939 the dried petunias from a vase in the chapel bloomed in just four hours under the eyes of stunned legionaries, a miraculous sign that God was on their side.Footnote 77 As Vasile Scutăreanu attempted suicide by crossing the no-man's-land separating the Vaslui concentration camp from the rest of the world, he was dissuaded by a voice from above advising him to prostrate in front of an icon of Christ present in a small chapel at the camp's main entrance.Footnote 78 During her imprisonment at Suzana monastery camp for legionary women, Ana Maria Marin supposedly healed the kidney pains of one of the inmates in the absence of medical supplies through incessant prayer.Footnote 79 The legionary fascination with the 1938–39 persecution has several explanations. It was during their time spent in concentration camps and at the height of their religious experiences lived in communion with other legionaries that the founding fathers of the legionary mysticism Traian Trifan (1899–1990) and Ernest Bernea were able to create their vision about the importance of prison religiosity in shaping a new legionary man. They also discovered here the futility of their political activism.

The interwar carceral experiences of some legionaries, the importance of hagiography, and the spiritual appeal of non-aggression experienced by some members of the Legion were passed down to younger generations of FDC members who, during their prolonged detention, had the opportunity to re-enact the experiences of some of their legionary predecessors vicariously.

Legionary ‘Mystics’ Behind Communist Bars: Fascist Martyrs in the Legionary (Post-)carceral Imagination

In the post-war period, with the advent of the communist regime in Romania, legionaries became targets of the secret police (known from 30 August 1948 onwards as the Securitate).Footnote 80 Following the prohibition of democratic parties and the imprisonment of their leadership, authorities increasingly targeted legionaries. On the night of 14–15 May 1948 the vast majority of legionary leadership and most of their active members – except those who took refuge in the mountains or went into hiding – were arrested. Once imprisoned, ‘therapeutic violence’ was systematically unleashed upon legionaries and FDC members by the Securitate.Footnote 81

The prison saints hagiography is mostly a post-communist project of the generation of FDC members imprisoned before or in 1948. Thus, their support for the canonisation of former members tended to be shaped by competition between the old Legion – who abjured legionary faith – and the former members of the FDC who preserved the legionary orthodoxy with their lives.Footnote 82 The process of legionary canonisation of fascist saints can be interpreted as the work of former FDC members, who escaped the terror from Pitești prison, with biographies suggested for canonisation (those of Valeriu Gafencu, Costache Oprișan, Ioan Ianolide, Virgil Maxim, etc.) belonging foremost to the 1941 and 1948 generation of FDC members who perished in prisons.Footnote 83 Candidates for canonisation were advertised in religious language as the antithesis of their jailors and Securitate interrogators, depicted as Satanic impersonations of the communist repression.Footnote 84

While during the late 1930s the model of the legionary martyr was represented by Ion I. Moța and Vasile Marin, after 1940 the two legionaries (who died in 1937) were subsumed to the dominant figure of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu as the new ideal-type model of legionary martyr-saint. The FDC members arrested in 1941 and 1948 who never met Codreanu knew him through the pages of his prison diary where he advocated for the peaceful acceptance of death for the Nation.Footnote 85 They built their ‘vicarious memory’ of Codreanu's martyrdom through a hagiographical lens deprived of contentious biographic details and invested with a sacred aura of a Christian martyr.

Most FDC hagiographers engaged in legionary activity after the demise of the legionary elite in the 1938–39 purges.Footnote 86 Therefore, they learned about the bedrock of fascist religiosity in communist prisons from oral testimonies delivered by Traian Trifan, who experienced previously the 1934 and 1938 terms of imprisonment with the legionary elite, and literary accounts of the interwar and post-1941 generation, never fully experiencing the nest, the working camp, the Legion or the prison personally.Footnote 87 By contrast to the interwar legionary old-timers who retracted their legionary allegiance and collaborated with the communists in the early post-war years, those imprisoned in May 1948 saw themselves as the authentic legionary movement.Footnote 88

As a point of continuity with the interwar years, the spiritual religiosity of imprisoned legionaries and FDC members went hand-in-hand with the persistence of legionary rituals derived from the prior carceral imaginary of the Iron Guard. Hagiographers preserved this in their narratives as identity markers of ideological continuity between the generation of Codreanu, Moța and Marin and the young 1948 generation. As in the interwar period, mystics detained in 1946 in the Aiud and Galda legionary camps established a community of common prayer and confessed their sins and daily trespasses to one another.Footnote 89 The FDC manual substituted the sacrament of confession to a priest with the ‘legionary moment of friendship’.Footnote 90 In order to strengthen the internal unity, it prescribed the fascist confession of sins to each other and the idea of the aspirant's complete ‘sincerity’ as a precondition to joining the FDC.Footnote 91

The time spent in Târgu-Ocna sanatorium (1949–53) stands out in the life of the group of FDC members as the height of the legionary communitarian understanding of their relationship with the others.Footnote 92 The acceptance of any hardship without complaining, the ceaseless prayer, the experience of the communitarian life, the stern belief that, during their prayers together, Christ and Codreanu and all the other legionary martyrs descended in their midst, were the result of a spiritual synthesis between a carceral legionary imaginary and different ascetic trends coming from outside prison walls.Footnote 93 The spiritual ideas of Fr. Arsenie Boca from Sâmbăta monastery and those from Vladimirești and Antim monasteries flowed through the communist prison bars and enriched legionary prison spirituality propagated in the mystical legionary milieu.Footnote 94 Their unshaken belief in the final resurrection of the Romanian Nation was now grounded in the ‘white martyrdom’ of the youth and of the Orthodox priests in preaching the word of God in atheist communist prisons and society at large.Footnote 95

I believe that the most crucial goal of our existence must be an unceasing preparation for the day of the Christian [final] resurrection when the individuals and the nations will present themselves with their good deeds and their sins before the Final Judgment to receive their deserved place in the spiritual hierarchy of heavens.Footnote 96

The legionary mystics imposed this personal awareness of the finality of their suffering in communist prisons (the resurrection and the final salvation of the Nation) as a mandatory requirement and starting point of legionary engagement in the Jesus prayer.Footnote 97

As in the case of the Vaslui and Ciuc camps, legionary hagiographers spoke regularly about the presence of miracles among the detainees, alleged divine apparitions of saints (Virgin Mary, St. Paraskevi, the guardian angel), ‘dreams of terror’, dreams of the Captain foretelling the gruesome torments awaiting them or visions of upcoming death.Footnote 98 Virgil Maxim claims to have witnessed that, when the guards forced detainees at gunpoint to work on Sunday instead of attending the liturgy, a violent storm erupted that terrified the guards and destroyed all the hayracks, compromising food supplies.Footnote 99 Another supposed miracle performed by the Virgin Mary supposedly ensured the survival of the starved prisoners in Aiud prison, who received a supplement to their meagre daily rations, although no member of the administration knew where it had originated.Footnote 100

‘White martyrdom’ passed from Orthodox monasteries into prison cells and determined further developments in legionary religiosity behind bars. Inmates had contact with the non-violent and monastic imperative of white martyrdom as preached outside their prison cells through contact with Fr. Arsenie Boca and Fr. Benedict Ghiuș or with the Vladimirești nunnery – for which the mystics carved a wooden tabernacle.Footnote 101

As early as September 1941 some of the legionaries and FDC members imprisoned denounced political activism instilled by Ilie Niculescu, the leader of the legionaries imprisoned in Aiud.Footnote 102 They grouped around legionary commanders Traian Trifan and Traian Marian (1909–87), who converted younger members of the FDC, such as Valeriu Gafencu, Ion Ianolide, Gheorghe Jimboiu, Anghel Papacioc or Fr. Vasile Serghie, to the virtues of non-violent spiritual resistance and incessant Jesus prayer.Footnote 103 Labelled by the prison administration as the ‘mystics’, they denounced the political activism imposed inside the prisons by Horia Sima's supporters, such as Victor Biriș, claiming that such an approach would be contrary to the dogmas of the Orthodox Church.Footnote 104 Between 1942 and 1948 during the time spent together in Aiud prison, the ‘mystics’ Traian Trifan, Traian Marian, Valeriu Gafencu, and Ion Ianolide designed a missionary program to be disseminated among all the Romanian prisons.Footnote 105

Entitled ‘Principles of Christian Life’ (Principii de viață creștină) and divided into twelve points (honour, love, education, prayer, unity, obedience, freedom, the council of elders, communion, the spiritual bath, spiritual knowledge and continuous self-sacrifice), these spiritual guidelines took inspiration from Codreanu's ideas as expressed in his Jilava memoirs and the oath of allegiance taken by legionaries following the Moța-Marin funerals.Footnote 106 The 1937 oath could be explicitly found within the latter six spiritual principles. Drawing inspiration from Codreanu's prison diary emphasising the need for the legionaries to reconvert all nations to Christianity, the accent fell chiefly on the missionary aspect, a form of legionary ecumenicity encapsulated in the idea of a ‘Romanian messianism’.Footnote 107 This explains their work of conversion behind bars undertaken in Aiud, Târgu Ocna, and Gherla prisons, and in other places of confinement, but also their resistance to the process of re-education at Aiud prison.Footnote 108

Breaking with his activist past, Valeriu Gafencu told one informant of the Romanian secret police that he had parted ways with Nicolae Petrașcu's followers, who supported the legionary tenets of violence and the cult of the leader.Footnote 109 Additionally, in his feud with the engineer Voinea he pointed out to his interlocutor that the greatest legionary commandment was that of Christian self-sacrifice: legionaries had to give up their lives for the resurrection of the Nation as Christian martyrs did, without protestation, suffering to their last drop of blood.Footnote 110 Due to their opposition to violence and their constant emphasis on Jesus prayer, their fellow-legionary inmates perceived many of these mystics (Valeriu Gafencu, Virgil Maxim, Nicolae Mazăre, Nicolae Itul, Gheorghe Jimboiu) as ‘monks’, future candidates to monasticism or priesthood after their release from prison.Footnote 111

Following the ‘Principles of the Christian Life’, the mystics worked tirelessly on converting their fellow-prisoners to the values of Christian spirituality and to accept their imminent martyrdom without turning against God or their persecutors.Footnote 112 The young mystics Valeriu Gafencu and Ion Ianolide put the ‘Principles’ into missionary practice during their stay in Târgu Ocna prison sanatorium. One of the essential testimonies regarding their ability to convert people to the Christian faith came from Octavian Anastasescu.Footnote 113

When Gafencu saw me, he enveloped me with such a radiant look and you felt his love. From the first time he laid his eyes on me, I understood the meaning of his words: ‘I have awaited you for such a long time, Octavian’! From that moment onwards, we were inseparable until the day I left prison.Footnote 114

The most significant conversion achieved by the mystics during their stay in Târgu Ocna sanatorium was that of the former Jewish communist at that time, Protestant pastor Richard Wurmbrand (1909–2001).Footnote 115 The testimonies of Octavian Anastasescu, Marin Naidim, Alexandru Virgil Ioanid and Mihai Lungeanu concur that, after several days of theological and political dialogue with Gafencu, Richard Wurmbrand was baptised into the Orthodox faith, taking the name Valeriu.Footnote 116 According to his biographers, when receiving from Relu Stratan five vials of antibiotic (an almost guaranteed cure for TB patients), Gafencu sent the gift to Richard Wurmbrand because of his unshakeable belief that his fate was already sealed and that Wumbrand's survival would be useful to the survivors of Târgu Ocna.Footnote 117 Although there were other cases of legionaries saving the lives of imprisoned Jews, the reason why Valeriu Gafencu chose to save Wurmbrand's life instead of his own indicates that he wanted to help someone with whom he had no spiritual and personal ties.Footnote 118

Although rabidly anti-Semitic, the biographers acknowledged that saving the life of a Jew could change the negative perceptions of the Legion as an anti-Semitic movement.Footnote 119 Following on from the example of Codreanu, who saved a Jew from drowning, Gafencu's final gesture in sacrificing his life for Wurmbrand singled him out as a proof of legionary innocence when accused of anti-Semitism.Footnote 120 Regarding the perception of his acts, the hagiographical writing places immense importance on the conversion of this Jew (despite it being a second conversion for the previously Protestant Wurmbrand). Gafencu's apparent success in having a Jew baptised into the ‘legionary faith’ proved the spiritual superiority and the everlasting validity of the Legion over Judaism.Footnote 121

The case of Richard Wurmbrand showed that in Romania ‘the reality of the communist rule did not extinguish that myth [of Judeo-Bolshevism]. Instead, it transformed its meaning and function.’Footnote 122 In the legionary discourse during imprisonment and after liberation, communism and Jews remained synonymous, with legionaries developing their anti-Semitism in samizdat memoirs. In archival sources from interwar and communist years, but also post-1989 testimonies of the legionary political prisoners, the Jews were invariably depicted as a threat for both the Nation and the Orthodox Church, as the main plotters behind the overthrow of the European Christian civilisation.Footnote 123 This episode between Gafencu and Wurmbrand should be read as the reinterpretation ‘of their biographies to the realities of the new Cold War.’Footnote 124

Following the 1964 liberation of political prisoners, the surviving legionary hagiographers presented in their memoirs the damaging effects of communism over the lives of legionaries.Footnote 125 As a point of reference, due to its atheism and persecution inflicted on religious organisations (mainly, the Orthodox Church), communism became their ideological archenemy and a ‘religion’ opposed to Christianity.Footnote 126

Official atheist propaganda promoted by the communist authorities in Soviet Russia succeeded in bolstering religious awareness and the proliferation of hetero-orthodox rituals in various religious groups.Footnote 127 For legionaries, opposing communism through imprisonment, the refusal to collaborate and passive or armed resistance became matters of personal faith.Footnote 128 This explains why, in their prison accounts, the legionaries depicted themselves as Christian crusaders against the spread of communist atheism.Footnote 129 From the legionary perspective any person suffering political imprisonment at the hands of the communists was a potential Christian martyr.

Legionary hagiographers regarded the communist narrative depicting the Legion's interwar years as having been falsified by the Jews and questioned the testimonies preserved in the secret police archives, which provided a false account of the movement's history behind bars.Footnote 130 The communist period was presented as an artificial historical parenthesis in Romanian national history, as a ‘heresy’, incapable of destroying Codreanu's legacy.Footnote 131 The glorification of the legionary past through the hagiographical lens ensured that, among the younger generation's members of the FDC, there was collective amnesia regarding the violent interwar history of the movement. It also paved the way for disregarding the grim reality of the present and preserved their faith in the final victory.

In response to their counterparts, the principal battlefield between biographical views revolved around opposing conceptions of the new man. Reshaping biographies and selecting individual details according to a hagiographical pattern, the hagiographers employed several narrative strategies to depict the subjects of these biographies as saintly, ‘honourable and heroic’.Footnote 132 The first strategy involved the production of a competing view for engineering the ‘new man’, contrary to that already present in communist hagiographies.Footnote 133 While the communist authorities, through an intricate and often violent process of re-education, intended to eradicate the inmates' former values to instil a proletarian conscience founded on a scientific perception of reality, the fascist biographers promoted a reinterpretation of Christian teachings in a dialectical sense. They opposed the vision of the communist new man with one that extolled faith in God and the movement, cultivated among its members the practice of Christian sacraments and prayer and embraced the importance of Christian life to fulfil their political ideal.Footnote 134 The ‘missionary fervour’ of the prison interrogator to ‘convert’ the political enemy to his communist ‘faith’ became locked in a contest of wills with his prisoner, who was equally committed to his own ‘Christian’ faith and his fascist missionary work.Footnote 135

In the first stage of building the new legionary man in the communist prisons, carceral spiritual exercises that led to conversions and repentance for past errors played a significant role for the legionary biographers.Footnote 136 Following readings from the Church Fathers made available in a newly published Romanian edition of the Philokalia by Fr. Arsenie Boca, and the writings of numerous Christian philosophers (Berdyaev, Pascal, Bulgakov and Papini), the mystical legionaries went through an intricate process of self-transformation through analysing their previous sinful lives.Footnote 137

Looking out one day, he then faced the ground, burst into tears and exclaimed: ‘I am the most sinful man!’ This was the crucial moment of his spiritual life. From that point onwards, he attempted to cleanse his sins and live in communion with Christ.Footnote 138

As was the case with the interwar legionaries, the experience of religious transformation through incessant prayer intended to produce a new spiritualised man, better able to cope with communist persecution.Footnote 139 The mystics learned the hesychast Jesus prayer from monks and priests based at Antim or the Vladimirești monasteries, such as Fr. Adrian Făgețeanu (1912–2011).Footnote 140 This transformation culminated in a Christian, mystical perspective on life, that of the Christian ‘new man’, ready to accept sufferings without complaint about the collective sins of the Nation and to abstain from responding to his sufferings with violence.Footnote 141

As in the Soviet case, the prison experience went hand-in-hand with the production of biographies discussing their previous political stances and their current views.Footnote 142 As ‘ritual laments’ in response to pressure for legionary inmates to ‘speak Bolshevik’, prison biographies brought about a narrative mutation in the legionary psyche and constituted a turning point in shaping later hagiographies.Footnote 143 Employing autobiographical skills acquired during their imprisonment, in a manner similar to ‘Christian confession’, the prison hagiographers were in a position to subsequently undertake ‘a process of transcodation’ of their previous statements before the authorities.Footnote 144

In their underground memoirs, some Iron Guard hagiographers changed the testimonies they gave to the secret police officers denouncing their comrades into clandestine hagiographies for those who died in prison.Footnote 145 In other words, hagiographers could hide their deeds in prison behind those of the martyr.

While wartime literature is indeed filled with depictions of brutality, the violence toward the reader in such narratives is partly undermined by the lack of the victim's body which is typically replaced by an ideologically charged voice. Although the ideological voice sometimes speaks through the hero, it is devoid of subjectivity. This replacement of interiority with transcendence resembles a kenotic rather than a masochistic subject.Footnote 146

As a new literary genre, this allegorical and subversive biographical approach of former legionary ‘saints’ became a literary expression of resistance of the legionary self against communism in the process of successfully building the new legionary man as a martyr-saint.Footnote 147 The post-1948 generation of hagiographers' refuge in diaries and memoirs after their 1964 release and after 1989 constituted both a form of resistance to the atheist communist regime and an individual self-transformative, out-of-history experience.Footnote 148

Another critical aspect of these hagiographical accounts concerns the need to safeguard the purity of the legionary rhetorical style. In establishing a continuity between their generation and that of Codreanu, the first generation of FDC hagiographers undertook a mimetic re-enactment of fascist religiosity within oral or written testimonies. They also sought to heal the wounds of individual concessions made by various important legionaries during violent episodes (Pitești, Gherla) or in the peaceful processes of re-education (Aiud), through clearly portraying the biographies of those legionaries who died in communist prisons as Christian martyrs.Footnote 149

In a similar manner to interwar newspapers and books praising legionary martyrs and leaders, the subjects of these hagiographies were presented as ‘Archangels’, ‘defenders of their Christian faith and fatherland’, ‘pure and chaste’, ‘endowed with saintly virtues’ and as ‘the most virtuous sons of the Nation’.Footnote 150 Focusing extensively on the effect of legionary religiosity, in generating a new fascist subjectivity, Gafencu's depiction generates a specific hagiographical account that is linked to the importance of suffering for the Nation, as envisaged in Codreanu's spiritual insights.Footnote 151

Valeriu was the personified image of the Christian fighter who stood for every one of us on the ‘mountain of suffering’ (distancing himself from bodily passions, the stage of purification), in the ‘forest with wild beasts’, the stage of illumination, the confrontation with the evil spirits, and in the ‘swamp of despair’. He carried the cross [of the Nation] and followed the example of Christ's submission to the Father: ‘Thy will be done’.Footnote 152

In their accounts regarding legionary martyrdom, the legionary hagiographers sought to both preserve the purity of Codreanu's insights and to emphasise for the reader that these martyrs were indeed legionaries and that legionary life continued even under harsh conditions.Footnote 153

However, in the post-1948 mind of young legionaries, a notion of saintly martyrdom brought about a transformation in the understanding of the legionary martyrs of the Nation from the 1930s (Ion I. Moța, Vasile Marin or Corneliu Zelea Codreanu) into holy martyrs of the Orthodox Church.Footnote 154 The legionary tradition of holy martyrs began with the legionaries declared to be saints of the communist prisons during the post-1989 years and, to integrate these saints into the legionary pantheon of martyrs, the hagiographers drew on the heroic death of the founding fathers of Romanian fascism. Among legionaries, this highlighting of legionary martyrdom, now galvanised with Christian associations, ensured its historic and ongoing significance and stood as a warrant for the future rebirth of the Nation and the movement.Footnote 155

Besides sanctifying the deaths of legionary martyrs from the 1930s and 1940s, the Christian martyr as employed in the hagiographical pattern in tailoring the biographies of exemplary legionaries also showed another aspect in promoting canonisations of these martyrs. In addition to spilling his blood for the fascist faith, the martyr also defended his religious creed before the communists, something which the official Church had failed to do.Footnote 156

Conclusion

The ‘saints of the communist prisons’ movement should be accounted for as a form of post-1989 survival of fascist ideas. It can also be considered an alarming development in the legionary spirituality that passed the test of time and continues to flourish as an underground sub-culture inside the fundamentalist and anti-Western milieus of the Romanian Orthodox Church. The increasing popularity of Valeriu Gafencu's cult as a martyr of the Orthodox Church should be further analysed, as a symptom of the persistence of the Iron Guard's anti-Semitic and ultra-nationalist mindset in post-communist religious communities. However, although most historians considered that fascist movements across Europe were on their way to extinction after the Second World War, fascism associated itself with various social aspects of contemporary civilisation (politics, religion, sport, etc.) and has continued to thrive.

Following the chronology of the hagiographical attempts to create an ideal-type of the fascist saint, a model that could be translated to different time frames and ideological contexts, the article lays out the continuities and the points of departure between fascist generations. The first attempts of legionary intellectuals to shape an ideal type of the legionary martyr drew inspiration from the figure of the heroic soldier sacrificing his life for the Nation. Following Codreanu's vision, they reshuffled the secular, heroic model with that of the leader who welcomes without opposition his earthly demise.

The ideal-type of the legionary martyr was gradually developed from the interwar up to the post-communist years. The legionary martyrs Ion I. Moța and Vasile Marin stood as the ideal type of martyr for the late 1930s generation, as the embodiment of Codreanu's idea of a new, ascetic, self-sacrificial legionary elite. Most of the FDC generation that would constitute the movement of the mystics behind prison bars took inspiration from their example and the sacrificial rhetoric imbued by the legionary publications.

For the 1941 generation of mystics, the figure of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu represented the ideal type of martyr reflected in his Jilava diary, as the mystical figure that eagerly delivered his life to God for the good of the Nation. Circulating inside and outside of prisons in monasteries and nunneries, Codreanu's figure became the embodiment of ‘white martyrdom’ and the living proof of the legionary religiosity prevailing against all the odds. Codreanu as an ideal-type martyr was offered to a generation of young FDC members without first-hand knowledge of the movement (‘vicarious memory’). This second-hand knowledge of the Iron Guard came through oral prison accounts of the Legion's history and was combined with a close reading of the lives of the saints in the Orthodox Church.

After 1989, the paradigmatic figure of the legionary martyr becomes Valeriu Gafencu, a young representative of the 1941 FDC generation of mystics. Memoirs and biographies about his life written as first- and second-hand accounts appear after 1989 in the circles of the former political prisoner. Their account is transformed into a canonical narrative of the life of the prison saint Valeriu Gafencu. As the last piece of the legionary construction of martyrdom, Gafencu establishes a precedent for the canonisation of the 1941 and 1948 FDC imprisoned generations. The process of his canonisation presupposes the recuperation of the previous tradition of legionary martyrs and sources of inspiration such as Codreanu, Moța and Marin.

The selection of names, the virtues extolled (Christian and secular), the trials they went through (imprisonment, death) are all part of a conceptual framework that was laid out in the 1930s, developed and improved on in the examples of the second generation of legionaries that suffered in communist prisons to become canonical in the post-1989 literature of political prisoners.

The abundant usage of a quasi-religious language and various Orthodox tropes (the self-sacrifice for faith, fascists as Orthodox mystics) present in the newly emerging hagiography of the fascist martyrs in Eastern Europe tends to obscure the rabid anti-Semitism and violent activism of these figures proposed for canonisation. The appeal for the canonisation of these legionary martyrs as exemplary Christians defending Orthodox faith from the threat posed by Bolshevism/communism should be seen by historians and theologians alike as a blatant example of erasing fascist activism from the biographies of these soon-to-be saints. It should also be interpreted as a desperate attempt by legionary sympathisers to divert historians' attention away from the violent past of such fascist movements as that of the Romanian Iron Guard.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to express his gratitude to Jochen Hellbeck (Rutgers University), Igal Halfin (Tel Aviv University), Holly Case (Brown University), Paul Hanebrink (Rutgers University), Radu Ioanid (Romania's Ambassador to Israel) and Roland Clark (Liverpool University) for all their advice, email exchanges and suggestions. Dr. Anca Șican provided much-needed inspiration and support throughout the lengthy process of researching and writing this text, being a constant source of encouragement and contagious enthusiasm. This article is dedicated to her.

Footnotes

1 Danion Vasile, ed., Din temnițe spre sinaxare: despre mucenicii prigoanei comuniste (Galați: Egumenița, 2008); Ciprian Voicilă, ed., Mărturisitorii: Minuni, Mărturii, Repere (Bucharest: Lucman, 2010). Although in interwar Romania there were a plethora of right-wing movements, the article refers only to the fascist Legion of Archangel Michael, also known in scholarly literature as the Iron Guard, the All for the Fatherland Party or the Legionary Movement.

2 Muriel Blaive, ‘The Memory of the Holocaust and of Communist Repression in Comparative Perspective: The Cases of Hungary, Poland and Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic’, in Muriel Blaive, Christian Gerbel and Thomas Lindenberger, eds., Clashes in European Memory: The Case of Communist Repression and the Holocaust (Innsbruck: StudienVerlag, 2011), 158–9; Mark, James, The Unfinished Revolution: Making Sense of the Communist Past in Central-Eastern Europe (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 93–126. The quote is from Anna Müller, If the Walls Could Speak: Inside a Women's Prison in Communist Poland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 14.

3 Fr. Alexandru Atanase Barna, ed., Chipuri de lumină: Vol. II. Renumiți preoți de mir din trecutul Arhiepiscopiei Bucureștiului (Bucharest: Cuvântul Vieții, 2015); Fr. Florin Dobrei, ed., Pătimitori și pătimire în închisorile comuniste (Alba-Iulia/Deva: Editura Reîntregirea/Editura Episcopiei Devei și Hunedoarei, 2015); Adrian Nicolae Petcu, Dicționarul clericilor și mirenilor ortodocși români mărturisitori în detenția comunistă (Bucharest: Basilica, 2018).

4 Hieromonk Grigorie Benea, Andreea Ineoan, Emanuil Ineoan, Andreea Opriș, Adrian Nicolae Petcu, Fr. Dorin Sas and Dragoș Ursu, eds., Preoți din Arhiepiscopia Vadului, Feleacului și Clujului în temnițele comuniste (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Renașterea/Memorialul Gherla, 2017); Adrian Nicolae Petcu and Fr. Nicolae Cătălin Lucian, Clerici și mireni mărturisitori din Arhiepiscopia Iașilor în închisorile comuniste (Iași: Doxologia, 2017); Dragoș Boicu, ed., La limita rezistenței: Un martirologiu alternativ (Sibiu: Agnos, 2017); Fr. Mihail-Simion Săsăujan, ed., Mărturisitori ai Ortodoxiei în timpul regimului comunist: Studii și evocări (Bucharest: Cuvântul Vieții, 2018); +Varlam Ploieșteanul, Fr. Florin Marica and Fr. Gheorghe Holbea, eds., Congresul internațional de teologie ‘Viața Bisericii Ortodoxe în timpul comunismului: persecuție, rezistență și mărturisire’ (Bucharest: Basilica, 2018). For the display of their relics in public and their miracles, see ‘Când oasele vorbesc: Minuni ale sfinților martiri din Aiud’, Atitudini, 1, 3 (2008), 20–3; Augustin, Hieromonk [Vărvăruc], ‘Noi minuni ale sfinților martiri de la Aiud’, Atitudini, 1, 6 (2009), 32–5.

5 ‘Programul campaniei “Din temnițe spre sinaxare”’, in Danion Vasile, ed., Din temnițe spre sinaxare, 168; Claudiu Târziu, ‘“Și morți vom izbândi!”’, Rost. Revistă de cultură creștină și politică [onwards Rost], 6, 70 (Dec. 2008), 3, 7. There were other appeals addressed to the Holy Synod of the Romanian Orthodox Church in Bucharest requesting publicly the individual canonisation of legionary priests who died in prison. See Mihai Rădulescu, Rugul Aprins: Duhovnicii Ortodoxiei sub lespezi, în temnițele comuniste (Bucharest: Ramida, 1993), 60–2 for Fr. Gheorghe Șerban, shot to death in the labour camp at Baia Sprie mine in 1952. In 2011 the Rost Association assimilated the initiative of canonising legionary martyrs as saints in its political strategy of initiating a ‘conservative revolution’ that would sweep the ‘corrupt’ political parties from the public life and restore Romania to the pre-1940 borders. See Claudiu Târziu, ‘Rostul nostru la o sută de ani’, Rost, 9, 100 (June 2011), 4. In the general elections held on 6 December 2020 with Claudiu Târziu as co-president, the fascist Alliance for the Unity of Romanians won 9 per cent of the votes.

6 In the post-communist literature the number of legionary martyrs that should be canonised varies. See Cezarina Condurache, Chipuri ale demnității româneșt: Eroi ai neamului și sfinți ai închisorilor (Bucharest: Evdokimos, 2015), who presents 22 large biographies and another 15 brief biographies of legionary martyrs; Cezarina Condurache, Sfinții închisorilor: 28 de biografii exemplare (Bucharest: Evdokimos, 2015), 28 biographies of legionary martyrs; Sfinții închisorilor (Petru Vodă: Petru Vodă, 2019), 35 legionary hagiographies.

7 ‘Programul campaniei’, 169.

8 Filotheu, Monk [Bălan], ‘Înapoi la Hristos și la sfinții săi’, Atitudini, 1, 3 (2008), 1–4.

9 The term comes from Nicolae Steinhardt, Jurnalul Fericirii (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1991), 112, footnote: Steinhardt states that he has started to use the term ‘saint of prisons’ for Valeriu Gafencu inspired by no other than Ioan Ianolide, Gafencu's closest friend and, at that time, his future brother-in-law.

10 Roland Clark, Holy Legionary Youth: Fascist Activism in Interwar Romania (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2015), 240–43; Shafir, Michael, ‘Ideology, Memory and Religion in Post-Communist East Central Europe: A Comparative Study Focused on Post-Holocaust’, Journal for the Study of Religion and Ideologies, 15, 44 (2016), 52–110; Rodica Ciobanu, ‘Remembering the Gulag: Religious Representations and Practices’, in Lavinia Stan and Lucian Turcescu, eds., Justice, Memory and Redress in Romania: New Insights (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholar, 2017), 214–35; Grigore, Monica, ‘The Aiud “Prison Saints”: History, Religion, and Lived Religion’, Eurostudia, 10, 1 (2015), 33–49; William Totok and Elena-Irina Macovei, Între mit și bagatelizare: Despre reconsiderarea critică a trecutului. Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu și rezistența armată anticomunistă din România (Iași: Polirom, 2016), 152–7; Michael Shafir, ‘Romania: Neither “Fleishig” nor “Milchig”’, in Alexandru Florian, ed., Holocaust Public Memory in Postcommunist Romania (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), 106–10.

11 Michael Prokurat, Alexander Golitzin and Michael D. Peterson, Historical Dictionary of the Orthodox Church (London: Scarecrow Press, 1996), 149: ‘hagiography means “the writings of the holy ones”, i.e. saints, and includes writings on the lives and legends of the saints, generally without any modern critical claim to veracity of verification. The lives of the saints have constituted the popular reading of Byzantine, Russian and other Orthodox believers down to the modern era. As all popular literature hagiography was, and is, highly stylised and employs a number of standard types and tropes’.

12 Jacob Climo, ‘Memory of American Jewish Aliyahs: Connecting Individual and Collective Experiences’, in Jacob Climo and Maria G. Catell, eds., Social Memory and History: Anthropological Perspectives (Oxford: Altamira Press, 2002), 118–19.

13 I. Ishino, ‘Memories and Their Unintended Consequences’, in Marea C. Teski and Jacob Climo, eds., The Labyrinth of Memory: Ethnographic Journeys (Westport: Bergin and Garvey, 1995), 185–202.

14 A lawyer with deep-rooted connections in the post-1918 nationalist, anti-Semitic, and anti-communist milieus in Romania, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, the ‘Captain’ as he would be known later on by his legionaries, founded the Legion of Archangel Michael on 24 Jun. 1927, in Iași. In 1931, following partial elections in Neamț County, he was elected to the Romanian Parliament. Due to the stern anti-Semitism of his movement, his pro-German and pro-Italian views and his clashes with the authoritarian King Carol II, he would be imprisoned on 16 Apr. 1938, condemned for treason and assassinated on the early morning of 30 Nov. 1938. In late November 1940, his remains were exhumed by the legionaries and a state-funeral was organised on his behalf.

15 Emilio Gentile, Sacralisation of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 11; Lamber, Peter, ‘Heroisation and Demonisation in the Third Reich: The Consensus-building Value of Nazi Pantheon of Heroes’, Totalitarian Movements and Political Religions [henceforth TMPR], 8, 3–4 (2007), 523–646; Casquete, Jesús, ‘Martyr Construction and the Politics of Death in National Socialism’, TMPR, 10, 3–4 (2009), 265–83.

16 Falasca-Zamponi, Simonetta, ‘On Storytellers and Master Narratives: Modernity, Memory, and History in Fascist Italy’, Social Science History, 22, 4 (1998), 432. For the equivalence between biography and hagiography in the Nazi martyrology, see Sabine Behrenbeck, Der Kult um die toten Helden: Nationalsozialistische Mythen, Riten und Symbole (Vierow: SH-Verlag, 1996), 241–5; Daniel Siemens, The Making of a Nazi Hero: The Murder and Myth of Horst Wessel (London: I. B. Tauris, 2009), xiv.

17 According to George L. Mosse, Nazism: A Historical and Comparative Analysis of National Socialism. An Interview with Michael A. Leeden (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 90, the Christian identity of the Romanian fascist movement and, therefore, of its views on martyrdom differentiates the Romanian case from the German and Italian cases.

18 ANR, Ministerul de Interne, Fond Diverse, file no. 9/1933, 341; Ion I. Moța, ‘Esenţialul’, Cuvîntul studenţesc, Apr. 1935, 1.

19 Grupul Orientări, ‘+Ion Moța și Vasile Marin’, Orientări, Jan. 1937, 1; Șerban Milcoveanu, ‘Mormânt de sfânt. Neam mesianic’, Cuvântul studențesc, Jan.-Febr. 1937, 1: ‘Ion Moța is the saint of the Romanian Nation.’ N. Crudu, ‘Doi sfinți noui în calendar’, Porunca Vremii, 28 Jan. 1937, 1; Fr. Ion Dumitrescu-Borșa, Cea mai mare jertfă legionară (Sibiu: Editura ‘Totul pentru Țară’, 1937), 274. For the late 1940s legionary perspective among the FDC regarding the Moța-Marin sacrifice, see Fr. Liviu Brânzaș, Raza din catacombă: Jurnal de închisoare (Bucharest: Scara, 2001), 86–7; ‘Petre Georgescu’, in Cosmin Budeancă, ed., Experiențe carcerale în România comunistă, vol. 2, (Iași: Polirom, 2008), 83. See Clark, Holy Legionary Youth, 203–10.

20 ANR, Ministerul de Interne, fond Diverse, file no. 4/1937, 4.

21 Horia Sima, ‘Jertfa lui Moța din Spania’, Frăția de Cruce, Jan. 1941, 1. Petre Neagu, Marșul F.D.C.-1937: 8 zile de educație legionară (Constanța: Biblioteca Petre Țuțea, 1999), 18; Spiru Zechiu, Memorii octogenare: Însemnări de pe front, din închisori și lagăre (Bucharest: Sânziana, 2019), 70–1.

22 An essential source of the representation of Moța-Marin as canonical legionary ‘saints’ was the letter addressed to Codreanu that Moța left behind before leaving for the Spanish front in late 1936, which is imbued with the religious rhetoric of Christian martyrdom. See Testamentul lui Ion Moța (Munich: Colecția ‘Europa’, 2003), 13–21.

23 ‘Osemintele Căpitanului au fost scoase la lumină’, Cuvântul, 30 Nov. 1940, 10; Vasile Posteucă, ‘Nevoia ispăşirii’, Cuvântul, 2 Dec. 1940, 1; Ion Diaconescu, ‘Începutul fără sfârşit’, Buna Vestire, 8 Nov. 1940, 1–2. See Oliver Jens Schmitt, Capitan Codreanu: Aufstieg und Fall des rumänischen Faschistenführers (Vienna: Paul Zsolnay, 2016), 279–87.

24 R. G. Waldeck, Athénée Palace (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2006), 262; Vasile Posteucă, Dezgroparea Căpitanului (Madrid: Editura Mișcării Legionare, 1977); Ana-Maria Marin, Poveste de dincolo: Amintiri din țara cotropită (Constanța: Ex Ponto, 2002), 45–6.

25 Gala Galaction, Jurnal, vol. 4, 2nd edn (Bucharest: Albatros, 2000), 69.

26 ACNSAS, fond Penal, file no. 013206, vol. 2, 233.

27 Galaction, Jurnal, 65.

28 Fr. Grigore Cristescu, ‘Dumineca’, Calendarul, 10 Oct. 1932, 1; Nicolae Roșca, Cronica unor violențe politice, 3rd edn (Bucharest: Evanghelismos, 2018), 33; Sofia Cristescu Dinescu, Pe firul amintirilor (Bucharest: Gutenberg, 2012), 13–15.

29 Ion I. Moța, ‘Cranii de lemn’, Axa, 7 Dec. 1933, 1, 5; ‘Primul mort’, Garda Bucovinei, 8 Dec. 1933, 1; Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Circulări și manifeste, 5th edn (Munich: colecția ‘Europa’, 1951), 23.

30 ANR, fond Ministerul de Interne, Diverse, file no. 9/1933, 341.

31 Mihail Polihroniade, ‘Construim,’ Axa, 6 Sept. 1933, 3; Vasile Marin, ‘Răboj’, Axa, 19 Sept. 1933, 5.

32 Gh. I. Furdui, ‘Orientarea politică a studențimii’, in Congresul general studențesc ținut în zilele de 17, 18, 19 aprilie la Craiova (Bucharest: Copuzeanu, 1935), 49. The same statement appears in Tudor V. Cucu, Totul pentru țară, nimic pentru noi, vol. 1 (Brașov: Transilvania Express, 1999), 84–5.

33 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 236666, vol. 2, 23; Dumitru Tache Funda, După 60 de ani mistificarea continuă: Cui folosește? (Bucharest: Editura Fundației Buna Vestire, 1998), 83; Virgil Maxim, Imn pentru Crucea purtată: Abecedar duhovnicesc pentru un frate de cruce, 2nd edn (Bucharest: Antim, 2002), 39–41. According to Jean Suciu Buchiu, Iertare, da uitare, nu (Bucharest: Lucman, 2005), 68–9, the anti-violent Christian turn was already present in the thinking of the FDC. For the impact of their sacrifice after 1948 on the FDC elite, see Brânzaș, Raza din catacombă, 37. According to Constantin Pascu, ‘Traian Trifan’, in Virgil Maxim, ed., Mărturisesc… Robul 1036 (Bucharest: Scara, 1998), 69, it was Traian Trifan who propagated the non-violent, Christian fascism among his fellow-inmates.

34 Fr. Ilie Imbrescu, Apostrofa unui teolog: Biserica și Mișcarea Legionară (Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1940), 115, 116. The same account can be found in Ernest Bernea, Stil legionar (Bucharest: Serviciul Propagandei Legionare, 1940), 8, 27–9; Ernest Bernea, Îndemn la simplitate (Bucharest: Cugetarea, 1941), 16.

35 Budișteanu, În secolul luminilor stinse (Madrid: Carpații, 1986), 33; Ilie Tudor, Un an lângă Căpitan: Amintiri sfinte din lumea legionară, 3rd edn (Bucharest: Sânziana, 2009), 86; Viața Părintelui Gheorghe Calciu după mărturiile sale sau ale altora (Bucharest: Bonifaciu, 2007), 33 considers Codreanu as ascetic martyr of the Orthodox Church.

36 ACNSAS, fond Penal, file no. 000160, vol. 3, 186–190. The reference can be found in Roland Clark, ‘Die Damen der Legion: Frauen in rumänischen faschistischen Gruppierungen’, in Armin Heinen, Oliver Jens Schmitt, eds., Inszenierte Gegenmacht von rechts: Die ‘Legion Erzengel Michael’ im Rumänien 1918–1938 (München: R. Oldernbourg Verlag, 2013), 208. For other legionaries who abstrained from violence after these murders, see Zechiu, Memorii, 98

37 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 160128, vol. 4, 81.

38 ACNSAS, fond Rețea, file no. 469781, 10; Dumitru Lungu, Luptă și temnițe (Bucharest: Ramida, 1998), 74; Ana Maria Marin, Prin poarta cea strâmtă, 3rd edn (Bucharest: Evdokimos, 2018), 67; Banea, Acuzat, martor și apărător în procesul vieții mele (Sibiu: Puncte Cardinale, 1995), 89; Baciu, Răstigniri ascunse: Mărturii 2 (Bucharest: Fundaţia Culturală Buna Vestire, 2009), 153: ‘From many martyrs in prisons someone could detach the luminous and saintly figure of Mother Mihaela. She is the homonym in the sainthood of Valeriu Gafencu’. For the experience of detention of [legionary] women during the communist regime, see Claudia Florentina Dobre, Ni victime ni heroine: Les anciennes détenues politiques et les mémoires du comunisme en Roumanie (Bucharest: Electra, 2019).

39 Viața Părintelui, 27. According to Ilie Tudor, Un an lângă Căpitan, 67, since 1937 the FDC members guarded information about the tomb of the legionary martyrs.

40 Fr. Ilie Imbrescu, Biserica și Mișcarea Legionară (Bucharest: Cartea Românească, 1940), 116. For the spiritual experience of the ‘white martyrdom’ in Vladimirești monastery considered as the ‘new Maglavit’, see ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 234104, 50, 70–1. The fascination with the mid-1935 theophany experienced by the young shepherd Petrache Lupu had a powerful echo in the legionary milieu. During the last years of the interwar and immediately after the end of the Second World War, the Maglavit theophany played a foundational role for Orthodox monasteries such as Vladimirești, Sâmbăta de Sus, Sihastru and Antim. Their leaders attempted to embed among their followers the idea that these communities were also places of divine apparitions where God talked to people and was ever-present, delivering his blessings. See Ionuț Florin Biliuță, ‘Fascism, Race, and Religion in Interwar Transylvania: The Case of Father Liviu Stan (1910–1973)’, Church History, 89, 1 (2020), 109–10.

41 Codreanu, Circulări și manifeste, 105.

42 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 236666, vol. 2, 23; ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 160128, vol. 4, 71. For the militarism and violent activism of the legionary generation, see Banea, Acuzator, 101.

43 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 234104, 138: the Securitate identified four centres of the legionary monastic revolution, the monasteries of Sâmbăta, Vladimirești, Sihastru and Slatina. See also Vasile Scutăreanu, Prin Gulagul valah (Bucharest: Majadahonda, 1995), 63.

44 Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Cărticica șefului de cuib, 2nd edn (Bucharest: Serviciul Propagandei Legionare, 1941), 6–7. For their appropriation as monastic guidelines, see ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 236666, vol. 1, 316.

45 Marin, Poveste de dincolo, 93–4; Dan Lucincescu, Jertfa (Bucharest: Siaj, 2008), 23, 33. For the legionary implication of Fr. Ioan Silviu Iovan, see Aspazia Oțel-Petrescu, Doamne strigat-am! (Bucharest: Platytera, 2008), 56. For the relation between those from the groups of mystics imprisoned at Tg. Ocna sanatorium, see Mihail Rădulescu, Chemarea lui Dumnezeu în temnițele comuniste (Bucharest: Ramida, 1998), 69.

46 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 234104, 142. The resurrection of the Nation was one of the cornerstone ideas of legionary ideology. See Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Pentru legionari (Timișoara: Gordian, 1994), 425; Emilio Gentile, ‘Fascism as Political Religion’, Journal of Contemporary History, 25, 2–3 (1990), 39; Mark Noucleous, ‘Long Live Death! Fascism, Resurrection, Immortality’, Journal of Political Ideologies, 10, 1 (2005), 31–49.

47 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 234104, 143.

48 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 234104, 49. ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 002214, Vol. 1, 133. ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 002214, Vol. 3, 157.

49 ACNSAS, fond Penal, file no. 000202, Vol. 2, 80–81; Ioana Iancovescu, ed., Părintele Voicescu, un duhovnic al cetății (Bucharest: Bizantină, 2002), 124. For Fr. Ioan Iovan, see ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 160128, vol. 2, 70. For Mihaela Iordache, see ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 160128, vol. 4, 63; Gheorghiță, Et Ego, 141.

50 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 160128, vol. 2, 97; ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 234104, 68.

51 Robert A. Orsi, History and Presence (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016), 21, 73.

52 For Mother Veronica's Marian visions, see ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 234104, 36; Marin, Prin poarta, 61. Orsi, History, 66: ‘What is really real about the Marian event at Lourdes and the experiences of visitors at its many replicas is the real presence of the supernatural with humans’. For ‘abundant events’, see Orsi, History, 73.

53 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 234104, 249–325; Hieromonk Benedict Stancu, Iată duhovnicul: Părintele Arsenie Papacioc (Bucharest: Sophia, 2010), 228–302.

54 Marin, Prin poarta, 62; Remus Radina, Testamentul din morgă, 2nd ed. (Bucharest: Jurnalul literar, 2008), 64; Nicu Păun, Muntele suferinței (Iași: Institutul European, 1997), 6.

55 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 236666, vol. 2, 32.

56 Părintele Voicescu, 124. For the meetings of Arsenie Boca with some of the mystics, see Georghe Popescu, Sub sabia Cavalerilor Apocalipsului (Bucharest: Majadahonda, 1997), 114. For the importance played by Arsenie Boca for the imprisoned legionaries, see Petre Baicu, Povestiri din închisori și lagăre (Oradea: Biblioteca Revistei ‘Familia’, 1995), 22. According to Mihail Lungeanu's testimonies at Securitate, he found out about the Vladimiresti monastery and the visions of Nun Veronica from Valeriu Gafencu in the prison of Tg. Ocna. See ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 160128, vol. 2, 70.

57 Rădulescu, Chemarea lui Dumnezeu, 70.

58 Müller, If the Walls, 3.

59 Victor Puiu Gârcineanu, Din lumea legionară, 5th edn (Bucharest: Sânziana, 2011), 13. First edition 1937.

60 Mabel Berezin, Making the Fascist Self: The Political Culture of Interwar Italy (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997), 27; Padraic Kenney, Dance in Chains: Political Imprisonment in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 73. For the prison experience and the FDC as ‘communities of feeling’, see Corneliu Andrei, ‘Dragostea și camaraderia Legionară’, Frăția de Cruce, Dec. 1940, 1; Budișteanu, În secolul, 128; Nicu Iancu, Sub steagul lui Codreanu (Madrid: Carpații, 1973), 118; Maxim, Imn, 113.

61 ACNSAS, fond Penal, file no. 013206, vol. 3, 4, 9. ACNSAS, fond Penal, file no. 258626, 10, 13; Nicu Păun, Un soldat pe baridaca idealului legionar (Brașov: n.a. 1997), 106.

62 Puiu Gărcineanu, ‘Omul nou’, Cuvîntul Argeşului, March 1935, 2; Natalia Manoilescu-Dinu, Memorii (Cluj-Napoca: Renașterea, 2016), 104.

63 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 160128, vol. 4, 71; Gheorghiță, Et Ego, 224; Mărturisesc, 75; Maxim, Imn, 117; Brânzaș, Raza din catacombă, 36; ‘Traian Popescu’, in Cosmin Budeancă, ed., Experiențe carcerale în România comunistă, vol. 6 (Iași: Polirom, 2012), 292. According to Nanci Adler, Keeping Faith with the Party: Communist Believers Return from the Gulag (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012), 29, the Gulag internees depicted the Soviet camps in the same monastic metaphor.

64 Müller, If the Walls, 108.

65 Lungu, Luptă, 39.

66 Dragoș Protopopescu, Fortul 13, 2nd edn (Bucharest: Elisavaros, 1998), initially published in 1936; Dragos Protopopescu, Tigrii, 2 volumes (Bucharest: Cugetarea, 1937); Gheorghe Stănescu, Jurnal de prigoană (Bucharest/Chișinău: Venus/Cărții de Știință, 1996), 194.

67 Gh. C. Croitoru, ‘Crăciunul lui 1939 în lagărul de la Miercurea-Ciuc’, Frăția de Cruce, Dec. 1940, 4.

68 Monk Filotheu Bălan, Mărturisirea unui creștin. Părintele Marcu de la Sihăstria (Petru Vodă: n. a.), 28. For the sessions of spiritism and hetero-Orthodox religious rituals performed in prison by legionaries, see Nichifor Crainic, Zile albe, zile negre (Bucharest: Gândirea, 1991), 255. For miraculous or peremptory dreams behind bars in the 1930s, see Ion Fleșeriu, Amintiri (Madrid: Artes Grafical Benzal, 1977), 106, 112; Nicolae Ciolacu, Haiducii Dobrogei: Rezistența armată anticomunistă din Dobrogea, 3rd edn (Bucharest: Sânziana, 2018), 65.

69 Banea, Acuzat, 37, 49; Păun, Un soldat, 103; Ion Constantin, Istorie trăită, 2nd edn (Bucharest: Blassco, 2010), 75; Iancu, Sub steagul, 83; Protopopescu, Fortul 13, 84–5.

70 For the concept, see Reinhardt Koselleck, Future's Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time, translated by Keith Tribe (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1985), 218.

71 Lungu, Luptă, 71–2.

72 Lungu, Luptă, 41.

73 Fleșeriu, Amintiri, 99; Fr. Zosim Oancea, Datoria de a mărturisi: Închisorile unui preot ortodox (Bucharest: Harisma, 1995), 50.

74 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 1086645, 80; Fr. Nicolae Grebenea, Amintiri din întuneric, vol. 1, 2nd edn (Bucharest: Blassco, 2017), 58; Banea, Acuzat, 105. According to Fleșeriu, Amintiri, 101; Marin, Poveste, 100.

75 Budișteanu, În secolul, 177; Monk Atanasie Ștefănescu, Oameni și fapte din vatra Aiudului (Petru-Vodă: Fundația Iustin Pârvu, 2012), 122.

76 Nicu Iancu, Sub steagul, 131–3.

77 Grebenea, Amintiri, 62.

78 Scutăreanu, Prin Gulagul valah, 62.

79 Marin, Prin poarta, 68.

80 Ilarion Țiu, Istoria Mișcării Legionare, 1944–1964 (Târgoviște: Cetatea de Scaun, 2012); Dennis Deletant, Ceaușescu and the Securitate: Coercion and Dissent in Romania, 1965–1989 (London: Routledge, 1995); Vladimir Tismăneanu, Stalinism for All Seasons: A Political History of Romanian Communism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 85–107; Marius Oprea, Bastionul cruzimii: O istorie a Securității, 1948–1964 (Iași: Polirom, 2008), 213–31.

81 Ana Antic, ‘Therapeutic Violence: Psychoanalysis and the “Re-education” of Political Prisoners in Cold War Yugoslavia and Eastern Europe’, in Matt ffytche and Daniel Pick, eds., Psychoanalysis in the Age of Totalitarianism (London: Routledge, 2016), 167–9.

82 Luca Călvărăsan, Istoria în lacrimi: episodul Târgușor și altele, vol. 1 (Sibiu: Bucura, 1998), 5, 8; Traian Popescu, Experimentul Pitești: Mucenicie și satanizare, 3rd edn (Bucharest: Scara, 2007), 65, 69; Dumitru Bacu, Piteşti: La Buchenwald se murea mai uşor (Bucharest: Atlantida, 1991), 94; Filoteu Bălan, Viața Cuviosului Părinte Justin Pârvu: 1. Nașterea unui sfânt (1919–1964) (Petru-Vodă: Petru Vodă monastery, 2016), 78; Nicu Ioniță, Experimentul Pitești: Spălarea creierului și re-educarea prin tortură în România comunistă (Bucharest: Eikon, 2016), 20; ‘Aurora Dumitrescu’, in Anca Ștef, ed., Supraviețuitorii: Mărturii din temnițele comuniste ale României (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2014), 106. For Pitești as a ‘mystical’ phenomenon and an apocalyptical confrontation between God and Satan, see Bordeianu, Mărturisiri, 6; Ioan Ianolide, Deținutul profet (Bucharest: Bonifaciu, 2009), 147–8.

83 ‘Sfinții din Aiud – Glasul care strigă în pustia lumii de azi: Interviu cu Părintele Iustin Pârvu’, Atitudini, 1, 7 (2009), 9: ‘The [legionary] young generation imprisoned in 1948 was the elite of our Nation’. Nicolae Purcărea, Urlă haita… Pitești, Canal, Gherla, Jilava, Aiud (Bucharest: Fundația Sfinții Închisorilor, 2012), 12, 33.

84 Aurel State, Drumul Crucii, vol. 2 (Bucharest: Litera, 1993), 248; Petrișor, Cumplite încercări, 138. For Țurcanu as the Devil or as its embodiment, see Bordeianu, Mărturisiri, 133; Viața Părintelui, 53; Costin Merișca, Tragedia Pitești: O cronică a ‘reeducării’ din închisorile comuniste (Iași: Institutul European, 1997), 58; Dumitru-Cătălin Rogojanu, Imaginea torționarului comunist reflectată în memorialistica universului concentraționar românesc (1947–1989) (Târgoviște: Cetatea de Scaun, 2014).

85 See Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Însemnări de la Jilava (Bucharest: Sânziana, 2008), 9.

86 Brânzaș, Raza din catacombă, 15; Pușcașu, Mărturii, 68. The same argument of the 1948 generation appropriating the 1930s carceral experience can be found in Roland Clark, ‘Re-Membering Codreanu: Undermining Fascist Masculinities in Aiud Prison, 1964,’ Caietele CNSAS, 8, 2 (2017), 181–215.

87 Viața Părintelui, 41 depicts a behavioural similarity between the 1938 Ciuc and the post-1948 generation although most of the 1948ers converted to legionary ideology during or after 1940. See ACNSAS, fond Penal, file no. 000327, vol. 1, 6; Mărturisesc, 111; Traian Trifan, Testament (Petru Vodă: Petru Vodă monastery, 2019), 310–1.

88 Alexandru Popșor, Trecutul, sămânță rodnică de viitor (Bucharest: Bonifaciu, 1999), 8, 276; Baicu, Povestiri, 138; Ioan Boacă, Prahova și idealul legionar: amintiri din prigoane și pribegii (Munich: ‘Omul Nou’, 1981), 68. Păun, Muntele suferinței, 292, compares the exemplary death of Valeriu Gafencu with that of the lapsed Nicolae Petrașcu, who committed suicide by hanging, just like Judas.

89 Ianolide, Întoarcerea, 57; Purcărea, Urlă haita, 72; Călvărăsan, Istoria, 163; Aiudule, 22; Popa, Coborârea, 19–20. For the FDC unity behind bars, see Brânzaș, Raza, 84. For the persistence of legionary rituals in the communist prisons up to 1962, see ACNSAS, fond Documentar, file no. 012613, 2. For the legionary communitarian life as experienced inside or outside the prison's walls, see Lucinescu, Jertfa, 29; Purcărea, Urlă haita, 70.

90 Maxim, Imn, 25, 133. Cultivated by Valeriu Gafencu, Ion Ianolide, and Gheorghe Jimboiu in Târgu Ocna sanatorium, the ritual of confessing their sins to one another among the FDC members (‘the spiritual bath’) was preceded by a ‘chain of prayers’ involving multiple young legionaries, to convert the moribund student Traian Maniu to Christian penance before embracing death. Părintele Voicescu, 127. See Octavian Voinea, Masacrarea studențimii române în închisorile de la Pitești, Gherla și Aiud (Bucharest: Majadahonda, 1994), 34.

91 In the first stage, when a student intended to join the FDC the first thing tested by the legionary leader considering the application of the candidate was ‘To prove his sincerity we will ask him to write down all his sins which he thinks he has (cursing, lies, skipping classes, dishonesty, intrigues, lack of faith in God, etc.). This “list of sins” would be later confronted with the observations gathered on the aspirant by his FDC supervisor’. Gheorghe Istrate, Frăția de cruce, 2nd edn (Bucharest: Editura Fundației Culturale ‘Buna-Vestire’, 2005), 38; Îndreptarul Frățiilor de Cruce (Bucharest: n.a., 1935), 37–8.

92 Aristide Lefa, Fericiți cei ce plâng, 2nd edn (Bucharest: Evdokimos, 2016), 75; Păun, Muntele suferinței, 158–9.

93 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 233727, vol. 1, 163v.

94 Părintele Voicescu, 29, footnote 6, 123.

95 Eugen Dimitriu, ‘De aici a pornit renașterea spirituală’, in Nicolae Trifoiu, ed., Studentul Valeriu Gafencu, “Sfîntul închisorilor din România”: Studiu, mărturii ale camarazilor de suferinţă şi corespondenţă (Cluj-Napoca: Napoca Star, 1998), 113.

96 Aurelian Guță, ‘Prietenul Valeriu’, in Studentul, 117; Hieromonk Teognost, Părintele Iustin Pârvu și bogăția unei vieți dăruite lui Hristos, vol. 1 (Petru-Vodă: Credința strămoșească, 2009), 174.

97 Guță, ‘Prietenul Valeriu’, in Studentul, 117–18.

98 Tudor, Un an, 134; Marin, Prin poarta, 45; Brânzaș, Raza, 116–17; Petrișor, Cumplite încercări, 120; Păun, Muntele suferinței, 72–3; Mihai Pușcașu, Mărturii din iadul închisorilor comuniste (Făgăraș: Agaton, 2010), 68–70.

99 Maxim, Imn, 136, 144; Ianolide, Întoarcerea, 61.

100 Bălan, Mărturisirea unui creștin, 43.

101 Maxim, Imn, 118–19, 142, 148.

102 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 375778, vol. 2, 10.

103 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, 263411, vol. 3, 187; ACNSAS, Fond Penal, file no. 000327, vol. 1, 6; Stănescu, Jurnal, 110. For a moderate account about the mystics, see Ioniță, Experimentul Pitești, 75–6.

104 ACNSAS, fond Documentar, file no. 012613, 17; Mihai Rădulescu, Rugul Aprins de la Mănăstirea Antim la Aiud (Bucharest: Proxima, 2009), 111–12; Bălan, Mărturisirea unui creștin, 38; Mărturisesc, 57; Maxim, Imn, 107; Buchiu, Iertare, da, 113; ‘Nota informativă a sursei Andrei Teodorescu’, in Archimandrite Andrei Tudor, Mariana Conovici, Iuliana Conovici, eds., Am înțeles rostul meu: Părintele Arsenie Papacioc în dosarele Securității (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2014), 145; Pandrea, Garda de Fier, 516. According to Grebenea, Amintiri, 140, during the time of their imprisonment, the two former legionary leaders had nothing to do with politics but rather with theology. For the conflict between the mystics and other legionaries led by Victor Biriș and how this relationship evolved during the late 1950s and the early 1960s, see Mihai Demetriade, ‘Victor Biriș, cel mai important agent de influență din penitenciarul Aiud,’ Caietele CNSAS, 5, 1–2 (2012), 11–148; Dragoș Ursu, ‘Misticism și reeducare: Avataruri ale confruntării dintre deținuți și regim în cadrul reeducării de la Aiud,’ Caietele CNSAS, 8, 2 (2017), 217–40.

105 ACNSAS, fond Penal, file no. 000327, vol. 1, 13.

106 ACNSAS, fond Penal, file no. 000327, vol. 3, 36–8.

107 ACNSAS, fond Penal, file no. 000327, vol. 3, 36.

108 Lungu, Luptă, 166.

109 ACNSAS, fond Informativ, file no. 235977, vol. 2, 45. According to another archival source, the mystics’ opposition to the militant legionary activism of Nicolae Petrașcu and Ilie Niculescu left room for compromise. In 1946, when Nistor Chioreanu brought into prison a letter of Petrașcu urging all legionaries to work outside prisons in labour camps, the mystics complied with the request and went to work in Unirea labour camp. See ACNSAS, fond Penal, file no. 000327, vol. 3, 36.

110 ACNSAS, fond Penal, file no. 000327, vol. 3, 36.

111 Brânzaș, Raza, 147; Mihai Rădulescu, Chemarea lui Dumnezeu în temnițele comuniste (Bucharest: Ramida, 1998), 70.

112 Aristide Lefa, Fericiți, 90.

113 Rădulescu, Chemarea, 75–9; Bordeianu, Mărturisiri, 330–3, speaks about the conversion to Christianity and the subsequent death of Ion Flueraș, one of the former leaders of the Romanian Social Democratic Party. For Costache Oprișan's ability to convert, see Viața Părintelui, 61.

114 Octavian Anastasescu, Lângă Valeriu Gafencu, Sfântul Închisorilor (Bucharest: Areopag, 2014), 60; Popescu, Sub sabia, 112; Maxim, Imn, 76–7. Even Richard Wurmbrand, Cu Dumnezeu în subterană (Bucharest: Casa Școalelor, 1993), 81 acknowledges that because of the legionary process of religious conversion among their fellow-inmates from Târgu Ocna sanatorium no inmate there died as an atheist.

115 Mircea Stănescu, Reeducarea în România comunistă (1949–1955), Vol. 3 (Iași: Polirom, 2012), 11–107.

116 Ianolide, Întoarcerea, 191–3; ‘Alexandru Virgil Ioanid’, Studentul, 125; Mihai Lungeanu, 2002, 137; Maxim, Imn, 375; ‘Nicolae Itul’, in Dragoș Ursu, Ioana Ursu, eds., Aiudule, Aiudule: Crâmpeie de memorie întemnițată (Cluj-Napoca: Renașterea, 2011), 162–3. Although Wurmbrand in his depiction of Gafencu confirms the lack of his anti-Semitism, his self-sacrifice for other sick inmates and his religious fervour, he fails to acknowledge his conversion to the Orthodox faith under Gafencu's spiritual guide. See Wurmbrand, Cu Dumnezeu, 90–1.

117 Ianolide, Întoarcerea, 163.

118 Lefa, Fericiți, 92. For legionaries' pro-Jewish attitudes behind communist bars, see Paul Miron, Măsura faptelor (Timișoara: Marineasa, 2000), 18; Popa, Coborârea in iad, 155–6; Pușcașu, Mărturii, 98. According to Stănescu, Reeducarea, 74, 98, the medicines received from a Protestant pastor before those received from Valeriu Gafencu and his wife in the spring of 1952 saved the life of Richard Wurmbrand.

119 Wurmbrand, Cu Dumnezeu, 77; ‘Neculai Popa’, in Experiențe, vol. 2, 316–17.

120 For legionary anti-Semitism from the interwar up to 1944, see Radu Ioanid, The Sword of the Archangel: Fascist Ideology in Romania, translated by Peter Heinegg (Boulder: East European Monographs, 1990), 116–32; Elie Wiesel, Tuvia Friling, Radu Ioanid, Mihai E. Ionescu and Lya Benjamin, eds., International Commission on the Holocaust in Romania: Final Report (Iași: Polirom, 2004), 19–57, 89–109; Henry Eaton, The Origins and the Onset of the Romanian Holocaust (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2013), 43–69; Clark, Holy Legionary Youth, 28–63. For Codreanu's aleged sympathy towards the Jews, see Neagu, Marșul, 19; Zechiu, Memorii, 62.

121 ‘Octavian Anastasescu’, in Cosmin Budeancă, ed., Experiențe carcerale în România comunistă, vol. 5 (Iași: Polirom, 2011), 266.

122 Paul Hanebrink, A Specter Haunting Europe: The Myth of Judeo-Bolshevism (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2018), 166.

123 ANR, Ministerul de Interne, Diverse, file no. 3/1933, 96–7; ANR, Ministerul de Interne, Direcția Generală a Poliției, file no. 155/1940, vol. 2, 7, 24; ACNSAS fond Informativ, file no. 236666, vol. 2, 24.

124 Hanebrink, A Specter, 201.

125 Demostene Andronescu, Reeducarea de la Aiud: Memorii și versuri din închisoare (Bucharest: Christiana, 2009), 179; Roșca, Cronica, 5. For the 1964 decrees that released from the communist prisons all political prisoners, see Dennis Deletant, Romania under Communist Rule (Iași: Center for Romanian Studies, 1999), 103.

126 Brânzaș, Raza, 71; Bordeianu, Mărturisiri, 117. For religion as antithetic to everything Soviet, see Sonja Luehrmann, Secularism Soviet Style: Teaching Atheism and Religion in the Volga Region (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2011), 16; Miriam Dobson, ‘The Social Scientist Meets the “Believer”: Discussions of God, the Afterlife, and Communism in Mid-1960s’, Slavic Review, 74, 1 (2015), 83. For ‘Communism as a belief system akin to a (secular) religion,’ see Adler, Keeping Faith, xiii.

127 Catherine Wanner, ‘Introduction’, in Catherine Wanner, ed., State Secularism and Lived Religion in Soviet Russia and Ukraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 1–2; Adler, Keeping Faith, 44; Dominic Erdozain, ‘Introduction. The Rhythm of the Saints’, in Dominic Erdozain, ed., The Dangerous God: Christianity and the Soviet Experiment (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2017), 7.

128 Bordeianu, Mărturisiri, 5.

129 Brânzaș, Raza, 71.

130 Ștefănescu, Oameni și fapte, 18; Adelina Busuiocescu-Călin, Vai, celui întemnițat (Sibiu: Constant, 1999), 76; Petrișor, Cumplite încercări, 108; Fr. Gheorghe Calciu, Cuvinte vii: A sluji lui Hristos înseamnă suferință (Bucharest: Bonifaciu, 2009), 130.

131 Teognost, Părintele Iustin Pârvu, 131.

132 Miriam Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer: Gulag Returnees, Crime, and the Fate of Reform after Stalin (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 77.

133 Peter Fritzsche, Jochen Hellbeck, ‘The New Man in Stalinist Russia and Nazi Germany’, in Michael Geyer and Sheila Fitzpatrick, eds., Beyond Totalitarianism: Stalinism and Nazism Compared (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 302–45; Yuliya Minkova, Making Martyrs: The Language of Sacrifice in Russian Culture from Stalin to Putin (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2018), 11. For the legionary anthropology, see Roland Clark, ‘The Salience of the “New Man” Rhetoric in Romanian Fascist Movements, 1922–1944’, in Matthew Feldman, Jorge Dagnino, and Paul Stocker, eds., The New Man in Radical Right Ideology and Practice, 1919–1945 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018), 275–88.

134 Bacu, Pitești, 79, 124; Baicu, Povestiri, 27. For the Bolshevik stylisation of martyrdom language, see Minkova, Making Martyrs, 36.

135 Igal Halfin, Stalinist Confessions: Messianism and Terror at the Leningrad Communist University (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 112–74; Adler, Keeping Faith, 56.

136 Gabriel Bălănescu, Din împărăția morții: Pagini din istoria Gărzii de Fier, 2nd edn (Timișoara: Gordian, 1994), 111; Popescu, Experimentul, 901.

137 Maxim, Imn, 134; Brânzaș, Raza, 33 defines the prison as a ‘school’ of education legionary cadre and Fr. Iustin Pârvu as the ‘real university’. See Teognost, Părintele Iustin Pârvu, 117.

138 Ianolide, Întoarcerea, 43; Valeriu Gafencu, ‘Letter from 29 Jan. 1946’, in Studentul, 196–9. For the same spiritual crisis of rejecting the ‘old man’ and becoming a ‘new man’ through prayer, see Hieromonk Teognost, Părintele Iustin Pârvu 91; Brânzaș, Raza, 22–3, 44 who speaks about the prison experience as ‘spiritual resurrection’. Aurel Vișovan, Dumnezeul meu, Dumnezeul meu pentru ce m-ai părăsit? Reeducarea de la închisoarea Pitești, 2nd edn (Bucharest: Evdokimos, 2017), 82.

139 Tudor, Un an, 138; Oancea, Datoria de a mărturisi, 30; Marin, Prin poarta, 48; Scutăreanu, Prin Gulagul valah, 100–101; Stănescu, Jurnal, 108.

140 Bălan, Viața, 167; Ciprian Voicilă, ed., Fr. Adrian Făgețeanu: Viața mea, mărturia mea (Bucharest: Areopag, 2012), 63.

141 Valeriu Gafencu, ‘Letter from 29 Oct. 1945’, in Studentul, 192: ‘I will always attempt to become a new, Christian man. I am happy and satisfied spiritually’. The same preoccupation appears also in the testimonies of Vasile Turtureanu, who met Gafencu in Aiud prison. See Aiudule, Aiudule, 20.

142 Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer, 54–5; Konrad H. Jarausch, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the 20th Century (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 5–14; Jeffrey S. Hardy, The Gulag After Stalin: Redefining Punishment in Khrushcev's Soviet Union, 1953–1964 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2016), 106.

143 For ‘speaking Bolshevik’, see Steven Kotkin, Magnetic Mountain: Stalinism as Civilisation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 199–237. For ‘ritual laments’, see Golfo Alexopoulos, Stalin's Outcasts: Aliens, Citizens, and the Soviet State, 1926–1936 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 102, 140. For the emphasis on generating biographies in the communist prisons, see Baicu, Povestiri, 219.

144 For the autobiography as a form of Christian confession, see Oleg Kharkhordin, The Collective and the Individual in Russia: A Study of Practices (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 61–75; Igal Halfin, Red Autobiographies: Initiating the Bolshevik Self (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2011), 4; Minkova, Making Martyrs, 30–31. For the ‘process of transcodation’, see Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse in Contemporary Historical Theory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987), 47–8.

145 Halfin, Red Autobiographies, 16; Halfin, Terror in my Soul, 52; Dobson, Khrushchev's Cold Summer, 57; Halfin, Igal, ‘Looking into Oppositionists’ Souls: Inquisition Communist Style’, Russian Review, 60, 3 (2001), 316–39; Jochen Hellbeck, Autobiographical Practices in Russia/Autobiographische Praktiken in Russland (Berlin: Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht, 2004); Irina Paperno, Stories of the Soviet Experience: Memoirs, Diaries, Dreams (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2009), 56; Cristina Vatulescu, Police Aesthetics: Literature, Film and the Secret Police in Soviet Times (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 27–55.

146 Minkova, Making Martyrs, 30.

147 This section is built heavily on arguments taken from Hellbeck, Revolution, 3. See Alexis Peri, The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017), 37–67.

148 Hellbeck, Revolution, 6, 8.

149 According to Ștefănescu, Oameni și fapte, 128, these experiments had the sole purpose of blemishing the religious faith of imprisoned legionaries.

150 Baciu, Răstigniri ascunse, 264–9; Fabian Seiche, ‘Creştinismul Mişcării Legionare: Cadru de formare a viitorilor Sfinţi ai închisorilor comuniste’, in Fabian Seiche, ed., Martiri şi mărturisitori români din secolul XX: Închisorile comuniste din România, (Făgăraș: Agaton, 2010), 28–50; Constantin I. Stan, Crucea reeducării: O istorie a “reeducărilor” în temniţele comuniste din România (1948–1964) (Bucharest: Christiana, 2010).

151 Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Cărticica șefului de cuib 10th edn (Bucharest: Fundaţia Culturală Buna Vestire), 73, points 56, 57, 58. Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, Cărticica, 74, point 60: ‘only someone who has passed the three exams, climbing the mountain of suffering, walking through the forest with wild beasts and the swamp of despair has succeeded to become a true legionnaire’. For the legionary ascetic behaviour while in prison, Lucinescu, Jertfa, 95.

152 Virgil Maxim, ‘Iubitul frate Valeriu’, in Studentul, 91; Dumitru Bordeianu, Mărturisiri, 97: ‘He [Gafencu] will remain in the memory of all political prisoners from Romania and especially of those suffering of tuberculosis from prison-sanatorium from Tg. Ocna as a saint. When confronting Gafencu even the evilest ones forgot who they were’.

153 Maxim, Imn, 182. See also, Popa, Coborârea in iad, 87, 114; Lucinescu, Jertfa, 215; Ianolide, Întoarcerea, 60; Munteanu, La pas, 53; Viaţa Părintelui Gheorghe Calciu, 43.

154 Viața Părintelui, 45, 47; Hieromonk Teognost, Părintele Iustin Pârvu, 141; Bordeianu, Mărturisiri, 5.

155 Funda, După 60 de ani, 11, footnote 5.

156 Bălănescu, Din împărăția morții, 29; Ștefănescu, Oameni și fapte, 149.