Father Andrei Iancu, confessor under the communist persecution
As we study the archives of the former Securitate, we find more and more unknown Orthodox clergy, especially from the ranks of those who gave their lives for Christ under the Communist persecution. One of them is Father Andrei Iancu from Lunca Tulcei.
He was born on 30 November 1914 into a family of simple, hard-working farmers and believers from Lunca, Tulcea County. After primary school, the young Iancu entered the Ismail Theological Seminary, graduating in 1935. He continued his priestly studies at the Faculty of Theology in Cernăuți, where he received his bachelor’s degree in 1939. He returned to his native village, where he worked for a time as a church cantor.
Although his training could have led him to a priesthood in an urban environment, Andrei Iancu remained attached to his native village and was ordained in 1942 for the church in which he had been baptised. At the same time he attended the Faculty of Law in Bucharest. Being one of the priests with higher education in the diocese, he was appointed Protopriest of Topolog on 25 October 1949.
After the installation of the communist regime, armed anti-communist resistance groups began to appear in the surrounding area, especially in the Babadag region, and tried to make their presence felt more and more in the hope of an imminent liberation from the Soviet yoke. In search of followers and supporters, members of these groups held talks with prominent villagers. In 1949, the priest Andrei Iancu, the village intellectual, was asked to support the armed resistance groups with food and medicine. But the Securitate, which was on the trail of those active in the Dobrogea resistance, found out and made arrests in the southern part of Tulcea County in early October 1949.
Father Andrei Iancu was arrested on 23 October 1949 and sent to the Securitate for investigation. He was charged with failure to denounce and classified as a “conspirationist against the social order”. He was tried in a group of 28 defendants, called “Lot No. 6 of the Dobrogea terrorist gangs”, and sentenced by the Military Tribunal of Constanța, by judgement No. 22 of 18 January 1950, to 10 years’ correctional imprisonment. After the sentence was passed, Father Iancu was sent to the Black Valley colony on the canal to do forced labour in the despicable “thieves’ brigade”, made up entirely of priests.
In July 1952, Father Iancu was transferred to the lead mines of Baia Sprie, and four years later he was sent to Gherla prison. He was not released at the end of his sentence. Because he had been convicted in an anti-communist resistance group, he was considered a “dangerous prisoner”. As a result, in August 1959, he was taken into custody by the Baia Mare Securitate police and investigated. He was then sent to a labour camp for 60 months, first in Culmea and then in the Periprava colony. He was again interrogated and in early September 1960 he was admitted to the Tulcea City Hospital. As a result of the inhuman regime of forced labour and the investigation to which he was subjected, Father Andrei Iancu broke down physically, and on 16 September 1960 he entered the world of the just, a martyr for Christ.
(Adrian Nicolae Petcu – Lumina Newspaper)