In the following, I will tell how I met Sandu Tudor, what my relations were with him, what memories I have of him, and of course I will be able to evoke him from my point of view, which may be different from today’s point of view, perhaps even partial and biased, but certainly complementary.
In March 1956, at the beginning of the month, when the mountains around Câmpulung were covered with snow, I decided to make a trip to the Rarău hermitage, where there was talk of a special monk. In the middle of the night, together with a “friend”, who I later found out was in the service of the Securitate and had been put on my trail, I set off on the road to Rarău. A long and hard road, with snowstorms, without a footprint to be seen. A 17-kilometre road over the mountain, with snowdrifts covering the trees in places. For […]
– Father Ioan, you were a student of Abbot Daniil from Rarău. Tell us your first memory of Father Daniil? – The first memory… when we first went to the monastery in Rarău, when we first met. I don’t know if I can use the word “great”… it was something very special that impressed me very much. I saw such an old man, with a white beard – like me now – in a dock, with a cloth on his back and a lot of soul love, a lot of generosity…
In order to help remove any confusion and to clarify as much as possible as far as I am concerned, I feel it necessary to give this brief autobiographical account: I was born in Bucharest on 24 December 1896. The son of a poor intellectual, my father a simple and honest magistrate who lived on his meagre salary, I knew from childhood the hardships and privations of a large family. I did my first studies at the high school in Ploiești, supported myself by my studies, worked hard and was one of the leaders of my generation. In the face […]
We must name the one who, from the very beginning, in his own inimitable way, inspired and guided the search and expectations of those who discovered Antim monastery: Sandu Tudor. With him came a style, for him a destiny was fulfilled. At the first meeting (and even at the following ones…) he often left the impression of a paradoxical presence (especially for those coming from a different background).
Father Daniil had the most interesting way of maintaining relations with his friends. He had the most unique and powerful personality. He had a mental structure of incomparable strength, armed with a vast culture, benefiting from a highly selective spirit. He had a particular way of understanding the mission of a Christian. According to him, the Christian must know how to be in life both lion and eagle, ox and angel. Man had to unite in his being the holiness and purity of the angel, the obedience and patience of the ox, the high thinking of the eagle and the […]
It was around 1936-1937, at the Cernica Monastery near Bucharest, where I was a student at the monastic seminary; from time to time, in spring, autumn, Father Gala Galaction would come with some friends. All the students would gather under a large walnut tree in the monastery, and a gentleman, elegantly dressed and with a beard, would talk to us about things I had never heard in the monastery where I had been an apprentice for several years, nor had the seminary teachers told us. He told us about spiritual beauties found on the Holy Mountain, in manuscripts in the […]
We no longer wear leg chains. They were taken off when we arrived in Aiud. In the ten days of quarantine we had time to recover a little, but above all to collect our thoughts, to draw up our own balance sheet of suffering […]. I vaguely remember that we had no schedule other than the schedule of the room. We were not taken out for air. The solitary confinement imposed on us was a perfect example of the prison administration’s intention to keep it a secret.
In November 1953, Hieroschemamonk Daniil, former monk Agathon Sandu Tudor, arrived at the Rarău Hermitage in Suceava as abbot. He had lived for a year in the Neamului Hermitage, in that monastery under the spiritual direction of Father Cleopa Ilie and with the help of Arsenie Papacioc. He had become accustomed to monastic life according to the studied rule inherited from the elder Ioil Gheorghiu, but now Hieroschemamonk Daniil was seeking isolation and the realisation of an older idea: that of building a spiritual settlement where intellectual monks could live and face the great challenge facing Christianity: communist atheism. But […]
The most special man I met during my time at Reduit was Fr. Agaton Teodorescu, Daniil after the hermit name of Rarău, former magistrate and poet, with the pseudonym Sandu Tudor. After a life full of worldly experiences, like that of Saint Augustine, he saw the emptiness of his worldly grasp and became a monk.
My friend Sandu Tudor is a great poet, and he has written several Akathists, of St. Dimitrie Basarabov, of the Burning Bush, which is not only of great literary beauty, but contains a whole theology of the prayer of the heart, the Akathist of St. Calinic of Cernica and, in prison, the Akathist of St. John the Evangelist, which I happened to hear there, and when I returned I put it down on paper; it’s monumental!… These are not friendly words. Friendship, on the contrary, embarrasses me in the eulogy I would have liked to give. The Burning Bush Akathist […]
The “Burning Bush Movement” was initiated by a very controversial figure in the history of Romanian literature and publishing. We are talking about the poet Sandu Tudor. From his father, who had been President of the Court of Cassation and Justice, the poet inherited not only an education and encyclopaedic information specific to Romanian culture between the two wars, but also a lot of material means, which allowed him a lifetime of study and research, travelling and contact with everything of interest in world culture.
The third room of the seminary had been given by Prof. Gusti to the “University Students’ Office”, founded in 1927 on his initiative. It was run by Sandu Tudor, who was also very competent, as can be seen from the Student’s Guide that he wrote and printed that year, containing a rich and still useful documentation, to which Mircea Vulcănescu added, in an appendix, a small treatise on “intellectual work”, i.e. the initiation of young students in the craft of bibliographical information, reading, note-taking and writing. […] Sandu Tudor was an odd character: An “orthodox” militant, a poet (of good […]
The first among us to publish a magazine, his own, was Sandu Tudor. Neagu Rădulescu, of course, printed ephemeral publications, but they were more humorous and prolonged the adolescent atmosphere of the last classes of high school. This time, things were more serious, but also more disorganised. How could a publication run by Sandu Tudor be anything but chaotic?
It’s 1963, so what does re-education mean? A preparation for liberation, I wondered, or is it something else, a grouping of some people’s resistance? – How’s it going? – Hardly. They’re cruel and intransigent. If we come out, we have to come out compromised, without dignity. Disowned for what we were, a pale loser, never to raise our heads again.
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.
Father Augustin de la Aiud gives us an important testimony about the sanctity of St. Daniel the Confessor: “Father Daniil was put one winter in a cell called Alba, or the refrigerator, as it was called, at a temperature of -30º Celsius. It was a cell without windows, with faeces and wool everywhere, because those who were to die were put there – they were practically condemned to die of cold. They were dressed very scantily and they were left there with very little food, both before they went into the cell and after they went into the cell.
There is no doubt that my obstinate literary work shielded me to some extent not only from the misery of prison life, but also from the tragedy of re-education. I heard of heartbreaking scenes […] A few weeks later I was called into the commandant’s office. […]
Testimony of Father John of Rarău: What can be said about Fr. Daniil, Hieromonk Daniil Sandu Tudor? He is one of the greatest of all the Martyrs, a confessor of the true Orthodox faith. Hieromonk Daniil Tudor was a man with a holy, perfect life, a man of study; he was always writing and praying incessantly. Did you know him? Yes, I knew him. He was also a man of the Spirit. He had a great love for prayer, for the Mother of God. The hermitage of Rarău, where he was at that time, was very, very, very poor and […]
An exceptional figure was Sandu Tudor, who was tonsured in the monastery of Rarău with the name Daniel and then in the Great Schism with the name Agaton. He was a famous journalist, poet and publicist. Returning from a pilgrimage to the Holy Mountain, he founded the “Burning Bush” group at the Antim Monastery in Bucharest, a circle of Christian intellectuals dedicated to the prayer of the heart. He had a cerebral understanding of the spiritual beauties of Orthodox mysticism and tried to live them, but he was unable to bring his whole being into harmony with life in the […]
