About the conversion of Father Daniil when he visited Mount Athos

I was very close to Fr. Daniil, very close, and I know him better than anyone else. Many did not love him because he was very demanding, that is to say he demanded that everyone was very correct in what they said and thought, but he was most demanding of himself. He wasn’t loved because he was always making remarks and telling the ladies and everybody that they talked too much.

He was very literary, he liked to sit and talk, so much so that many bishops in his time called on him to proof their books for them to print. I was there, a witness, and so was Firmilian from Craiova and others, when he stayed all night and worked with him, all night, to revise their books, to make them more literary. He set off for the Sacred Mountain with a definite thought! If a Pitigrilli or a Damian Stănoiu made money with The Abbess’s Choice and other pornographic books, he would make a thousand times more with his style, right? But when he arrived there and made remarks to the brothers in some monasteries: “This is a coat, what has the abbot given you? This is food, what has the abbot given you? That’s human behaviour? That’s pessimism!” And the brothers answered him in a way that neither he nor anyone else in the world expected: “This is my abbot in whom I trust, and through him God will save me!” He could say no more! He wanted to incite everyone against the abbots, but instead the brothers put him in his place and he returned to the country humbled. He met Tit Simedrea, the most learned metropolitan, and he said to him: “The brothers are right, not you. You humble yourself!” And then he was totally transformed from the thoughts that the Pitigrilists, the Damascenists had – to be humble, to worship, to sacrifice himself for the faith, for the Church, and that’s why he was beaten worse than all of them in Aiud, and that’s why they beat him to death.

(Fr. Adrian Făgețeanu – My Life. My Testimony)