I still have a few notes in a notebook from the week I spent at Dintr-un Lemn Monastery in early autumn 1982: ‘9 September. In the morning, near the small church, amongst the fir trees, the service for the founders. Fifteen nuns, the priest and a few women kneeling in the cemetery. The final prayer, followed by the singing of ‘Eternal Memory’. The service was held in the open air, accompanied by birdsong, on a bright and indescribably beautiful day. // We arrived here yesterday, on the feast day – the Nativity of the Mother of God – with His Grace Gherasim and a deacon. At 9.30, when we got out of the car, there were quite a few people in the stone church, built by Matei Basarab, on the porch and outside. For the most part, peasant women in headscarves and shawls, elderly women, but also young women, and men whose faces and dress reminded me of those I had seen 20 years ago during my summer holidays spent in Verbicioara; also in Oltenia. I was sitting in the pew on the left, between six seminary students who were singing and bowing their heads in devotion, deeply absorbed and serious. At the end of the Liturgy, His Grace Gherasim spoke for a few minutes, simply and briefly, making himself easily understood. When he had finished, cries of ‘Kiss my hand!’ (from the women) and ‘Long may you live!’ (from the men) burst forth from the hearts of those present.”
It was the second time that His Grace Gherasim, at that time vicar-general with the title of ‘Piteșteanul’ of the Diocese of Râmnic and Argeș, led by Bishop Iosif Gafton, had invited me to Vâlcea, where I had also been in July 1982. I stayed, again for a week, in the diocesan centre building, in a spacious, cool, clean room, where the noise of the town could not be heard.
On 8 September ’82, after the service, I had lunch with the bishop and the abbess in a room in the princely residence, the small voivodal palace begun by Brâncoveanu and completed by Ștefan Cantacuzino, which also served as the abbess’s quarters. It was a building that was falling into disrepair and indeed crumbling, in need of restoration, which required state approval – not easily obtained – and funds allocated by the diocese. At the end of the meal, we sat down for coffee and sweets in the Brâncoveanu gazebo, whose roof was painted to resemble a chapel; then His Eminence took his leave and set off for Râmnic. I was to stay in a room in a wing to the left of the stone staircase that linked the stone church of the monastery to the wooden church rebuilt at the beginning of the 19thon the site of the one erected some three hundred years earlier from a single oak tree, in the hollow of which an icon of the Mother of God had been found. Near the church, surrounded by the monastery’s small cemetery and fir trees, stood two ancient oaks. A plump, reddish, voracious squirrel leapt from one branch to another with a walnut in its mouth.
The monastery had extensive grounds, with plenty of land – including arable fields – evoking a Romania of days gone by, an impression further enhanced by the watermill situated on a wide stream flowing amongst trees, shrubs and reeds. On another side were stables with dairy cows, a sheep pen, pigsties, a vegetable garden, and two or three pogoane of maize with unharvested cobs… Beyond the monastery gate, to the right, a forest came to an end, whilst on the opposite side lay the village of Dezrobiți, home to many Roma with small children. The inhabitants, as in all villages untouched by industry, greeted strangers with a ‘good day’.
The monastery had extensive grounds, with plenty of land – including arable land – evoking a Romania of days gone by, an impression also created by the watermill situated on a wide stream flowing through the trees…
It was a very hot day – as the whole of September 1982 had been – the third or fourth since we’d been staying at Dintr-un Lemn, when we passed through Dezrobiți, climbing a dusty lane to reach Surpatele Monastery, three kilometres away – a distance that seemed longer to me because of the sweltering heat and the dry weather; in the courtyards, the cocks crowed shrill and long. Situated at the far end of the village, the monastery church, rebuilt by Lady Marica Brâncoveanu in the early eighteenth century, possessed the slender beauty of an ark. All around, not a soul in sight; there was absolute silence and lush vegetation surrounding the bell tower and a few cells connected by a stone porch. I went into the church to pray and look for the fresco depicting the Holy Trinity at Mamvri. When I came out, I was overwhelmed by the scent of lush grass, stronger than at Dintr-un Lemn, where I could also smell the scent of maize husks, whether green or dry, of cornstalks, of the earth breathing as evening drew in, when the darkness fell heavily… Three times a day, my meal was brought to my room by Sister Emanuela, who also served as a guide; a few years later I found her serving as abbess. It had been a long time since I’d seen egg yolks so yellow and fresh, fried in the fat of lean pork, kept very tender. As tall as a cozonac, with a thick crust on top, the bread was baked in the monastery’s old wood-fired oven.
The day after I arrived at Dintr-un Lemn, I asked the abbess to send me something to read. About two years earlier, I had begun to study theology systematically. God had enlightened me to start with the Orthodox primer, that is, the Abridged Creed, which is simpler and clearer than the 1952 edition in question-and-answer form. That is how I learnt what the Church’s main dogmas are, what the Holy Mysteries are, what the liturgical rites are… This came after I had stumbled through a couple of volumes of the Philokalia, from which I had not understood much; the language was also new, radically different from that of the books I had read up to that point. In 1981, a literary historian with a background in theology urged me to go and buy, from one of the bookshops of the Archdiocese of Bucharest, Father Stăniloae’s course on asceticism and mysticism, which had just been published and was disguised under the title Orthodox Moral Theology III. Then, following the same advice, I began to read the Russian theologians in exile, some of whom wrote in French or had been translated into that language.
The Abbess sent me several typewritten texts, bound in pergamoid, which were, at the same time, examples of ecclesiastical samizdat. Derived from the Russian language, samizdat means ‘self-published’. In this way, many books banned in the Soviet Union were circulated. Here, I saw only a single samizdat; it was being read by an actor’s wife and was Orwell’s novel – it had been broadcast in instalments on Radio Free Europe – Animal Farm, in an anonymous translation, typewritten, the pages clipped together in a ring binder...
Church samizdat—or rather, monastic samizdat, as I was to discover—was varied and rich. Texts from the Holy Fathers, as well as books by contemporary theologians, were copied and reproduced, initially on a typewriter and later on ‘Xerox’ photocopiers: in 1986, at Sinaia Monastery, I saw a Romanian version of Pavel Evdokimov’s work Woman and the Salvation of the World. I still have at home, photocopied and bound, L’Orthodoxie, a treatise by the same theologian, printed in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
Church samizdat—or rather, monastic samizdat, as I was to discover—was varied and rich. Texts from the Holy Fathers, as well as books by contemporary theologians, were copied and reproduced, initially on a typewriter and later on ‘Xerox’ photocopiers.
The communist regime deliberately avoided allowing books on edification and spiritual life to be printed by the Patriarchate’s publishing house or under the auspices of diocesan centres, which were permitted only a small number of titles. A Romanian Paterikon had, however, been published, which caused a stir amongst monks and nuns as its pages included living persons, whereas the classical Paterikon, also known as the ‘Egyptian’ Paterikon, had not been reprinted since 1930, when Gheorghe Racoveanu had it printed in Râmnicu Vâlcea, in the 1828 version by Metropolitan Grigorie IV Dascălul – now counted amongst the saints – in superb Romanian. From the very first reading, I was struck by the stylistic expressiveness (to give just one example: the devils are referred to there as the ‘nobles of darkness’). In 1984 I purchased a bound photocopied edition of the Paterikon for four hundred lei, which was quite a large sum for a book. Other essential books for Orthodox monks were also circulating in photocopied form in our monasteries: the Lavsaicon and the Limonarium.
One day, at Dintr-un Lemn, I met Father Paulin Lecca, an abbot at Arnota, after he had spent a long time at Frăsinei Monastery, where he had entered as a novice in 1940. He was the author of a manuscript, Beauty in the Work of Dostoevsky, which was to be published in the 1990s. Around the same time, another remarkable volume of his, From Death to Life, a monastic bildungsroman, was to be published in several editions. A native of Bessarabia, Father Paulin had served as a missionary priest during the war in several villages in Transnistria and in Odessa, helping to revive church and religious life in places devastated by Bolshevik atheism.
When I visited Hurez Monastery, Mother Mihaela Ghișoiu, the pro-abbess, also joined us for the meal; she was treated with great deference by the current abbess and the other nuns. A native of Sibiu, Mother Mihaela had been a schoolmate of Father Stăniloae’s wife, Presvytera Maria; they were bound by a long-standing and close friendship. Sister Mihaela was a cultured nun, with a rich memory and a gift for storytelling. She had been abbess at Hurez since the end of the war, when the monastery also had a monastic seminary, which was maintained until the mid-1950s. In 1947, the pro-abbess recounted, some seven hundred souls were gathered together at the nearby Bistrița Monastery: nuns, sisters and pupils, some of whom were orphans or had been abandoned by their parents… To feed them, nine ovens of bread were baked daily and thirty pots of polenta were cooked in large earthenware pots. The last time I met Mother Mihaela, also in Hurez, she was nearly a hundred years old, stooped with age, but clear-headed.
In January 1988, I went to Căldărușani Monastery, where Father Lavrentie Gâță had been appointed abbot; I had become friends with him whilst he was in charge of Sinaia Monastery; Patriarch Iustin had appointed him there whilst he was still a theology student. After entering the church, he took me to see the carpentry workshop, the mill—which was no longer in working order—and the stables, where, for the first time in my life, I saw rams butting heads, then we made our way through the fresh snow towards some outbuildings on the lakeshore, outside the monastery grounds… A hare as big as a dog darted past us in a flash. When we reached the lean-to of a barn, I saw the rusty bodywork of a two-tonne Ford, with worn-out tyres, the sort that used to be assembled at the Floreasca branch of the American factory. It was the lorry that His Grace Gherasim had told me he’d bought from a private individual shortly after he’d been posted here in 1952, when the monastery had no means of transport other than a carriage and a few horse-drawn carts.
During my first visit to the Diocese of Râmnic, in July ’82, I went with His Grace Gherasim to visit several monasteries. It was then that I revisited Cozia, which I had known since childhood. In the summer of 1964, when my parents went away for a week or two on a trip abroad, they sent me to a school camp situated a hundred metres from the monastery, on the hill across the road. I went several times on my own to the almost deserted courtyard of Cozia, where one afternoon I saw two French tourists get out of a car. I entered the cool church with a sense of awe, bowing my head in prayer, and then, after crossing the courtyard, to the opening between the walls with its footbridge and a view towards the River Olt, which at that time still flowed noisily, just as in Grigore Alexandrescu’s poem. By 1982, the river had the stillness of a lake, having undergone hydrological works. In the monastery courtyard, which was very well-tended and lined with dense trees, there was a cool tranquillity. The cells had been refurbished, and the single-storey abbot’s residence, whitewashed in bright white, was a radiant building, its porch brimming with bright red geraniums. The abbot since the 1950s had been Father Gamaliel Vaida, a native of Maramureș, who had created a trout pond and a pheasant aviary within the grounds.
Also from the late 1950s, Father Neonil – the longest-serving abbot – had been the abbot at Frăsinei Monastery. I had first been there in the autumn of 1981, with a poet from Râmnicu Vâlcea, who knew Brother Gheorghiță, a former orderly, a humble and kind-hearted young man who was to become Father Ghelasie. In the 1990s, he published a volume entitled Memoirs of a Hesychast – I never got round to reading it – which, like the ‘hesychast cake’, provoked a reaction of profound disapproval from Father Arsenie Papacioc.
At Frăsinei, an 18th-century monastery founded by Saint Calinic, the only one in the country exempted from Cuza’s Secularisation, the monks’ life was very harsh. When I went there with His Eminence Gherasim, the lunch we shared with Father Neonil was as simple and modest as could be: a few slices of cheese with tomatoes and rings of pepper, vegetable borscht brought from the refectory, two tins of sardines opened in front of us, and a few apples for dessert.
His Grace Gherasim’s residence as vicar bishop was equally modest. The bishop’s palace is situated close to the city centre, but its grounds climb up the lushly vegetated Capela Hill. Incorporated into the episcopal residence next to the cathedral is the chapel built in 1750 by Bishop Grigore Socoteanu; the building retains traces of Brâncoveanu-style art, its exterior murals depicting the Philosophers and the Sibyls... A few dozen metres further up stood the infirmary church, whitewashed in a milky white, and a further hundred metres away – a house straight out of a bygone market town, where the hierarch lived. In its small courtyard there were poultry coops and a dovecote with pigeons, which I saw on several occasions gliding onto the shoulders of His Grace Gherasim. Inside, apart from the outbuildings, the temporary occupant (like any monk) of that dwelling had a bedroom with a desk, a dining room with a massive walnut sideboard and a table covered in damask, at which I often ate, the dinner conversations sometimes dragging on until midnight, after which His Grace Gherasim, taking his walking stick and placing his fez on his head, would lead me through the cool air and the chirping of crickets to the room where I slept in the main building of the Bishopric.
Whilst I was his guest in 1982 and 1983, His Holiness Gherasim, who lived to be nearly a hundred, was surprisingly sprightly. At the age of 30, as I was then, I found myself breaking a sweat keeping up with him on the hill leading up to the chapel-hospital at Cozia, along the paths of the Turnu and Stănișoara monasteries, or as we visited the chapels one by one at Hurez. The hierarch, who with genuine modesty considered himself a ‘monk of the Paterikon’, and who had been abbot of Căldărușani Monastery from 1952 to 1970, was an admirable storyteller. Upon hearing that I was reading Nae Ionescu, he told me how, during his student year at the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest, he had bought from the philosopher’s widow, in 1944 or 1945, the edition of Patrologiae cursus completus, compiled by Abbot Jacques Paul Migne in 382 volumes grouped into the Series graeca and Series latina. A few years later, Patriarch Justinian confiscated it, transferring it to the library of the Patriarchal Palace, where it remains to this day.
On hearing that I was reading Nae Ionescu, he told me how, during his year as a student at the Faculty of Theology in Bucharest, he had bought from the philosopher’s widow, in 1944 or 1945, the edition of Patrologiae cursus completus, compiled by Abbot Jacques Paul Migne in 382 volumes grouped into the Series graeca and Series latina. A few years later, Patriarch Justinian confiscated it, transferring it to the library of the Patriarchal Palace, where it remains to this day.
We also climbed up to the Ciocanu Hermitage near Câmpulung-Muscel. From the hilltop, with its old, beautifully painted little church and a few mud-brick cells, the town could be seen in the distance. We set off with the hierarch towards the heart of the forest, where it was cool and quiet, stopping after a few hundred metres and sitting down on some fir tree trunks. A quarter of an hour later, a monk from the monastery and two other monks appeared amongst the tall trees, coming one after the other. The first was carrying a tray with a jug of red wine and two glasses; the second was carrying a small plate of snacks; and the last, stepping carefully along the steep, narrow path, was carrying a plate with a few slices of cozonac…
From the Ciocanu Hermitage, as we were in the vicinity, the bishop took me to see the patriarchal summer residence at Dragoslavele, situated a few kilometres from Rucăr. In 1929, the priests of Muscel presented Patriarch Miron Cristea with a holiday home for the warmer months, built in a peaceful spot with a view of the mountains and plenty of open space around it. In 1949, Justinian, the new Patriarch, brought here a small 17th-century wooden church from Maramureș, assigning two monks to live within its walls and founding a hermitage dedicated to Saint George, the Bearer of Victory. In this way, the residence at Dragoslavele and the land surrounding it were protected from the arbitrary actions of the new government, which had begun to expropriate the Church’s non-liturgical property. The hermitage at Dragoslavele was granted the status of a stavropegia, which meant that it was canonically subject to the Patriarch rather than to the diocese in which it was situated. A year or two later, in order to preserve the priests’ residence and the sanatorium at Techirghiol, Justinian also established a church there, granted the status of a historic monument, and founded a nunnery (whose spiritual father, from the 1970s onwards, would be Father Arsenie Papacioc) with the rank of stavropighia.
The house in Dragoslavele was simple, sturdy, cool, whitewashed, with a porch, and furnished with imposing pieces, such as the massive desk in the patriarch’s study, with a chair featuring a leather backrest and armchair-style legs, whilst in the bedroom there were rugs and carpets in soothing yet rich colours. A hundred or two metres away ran the road, beyond a silent stream with high banks and a curtain of trees through which the faint evening breeze could be heard.