Father Gheorghe Tarcea – the unwavering confessor of the just-martyr faith

Priest Gheorghe Tarcea was born into a peasant family from the Ardeleni region of Sibiu. He attended primary school in his home town and secondary school, high school and university in Sibiu. He was mobilised and took part in the First World War. After the war, he settled in Hunedoara, where he married and had 4 children. He worked as a teacher in Hunedoara and was an Orthodox priest, serving in various parishes under the Hunedoara deanery.

He was arrested several times without being convicted. From 1945 he was arrested and interned in various forced labour camps or forced to live in a ghetto until 1956. On 22 May 1958, he was arrested again and tried before the Military Court of the Third Region of Cluj. He was sentenced to life imprisonment. Sentenced to life imprisonment, he died on 30 September 1963. The resting place of his mortal remains is unknown.

The son of peasants from Transylvania, Gheorghe Tarcea distinguished himself from his youth by his passion for study and a national idealism that would bring him closer to and involve him in important political activities. In 1913, he enlisted in the 31st Sibiu Infantry Corps and took part in the bloody battles that marked the First World War. He returned wounded from the front in Galicia and, after his funeral, went to Hunedoara, where he would work in education for almost three decades. He worked as a teacher at the Central State School in Hunedoara between 1920 and 1945, with short interruptions. From 1940 to 1945, he was the headmaster of this institution. During these years he also taught Romanian language, history and geography at the Hunedoara School for Industrial Apprentices, next to the local ironworks[1]. After 1920, he also attended the Theological-Pedagogical Institute of Sibiu, Pedagogical Section[2]. On 30 December 1929 he was ordained priest by the Metropolitan of Ardeal. He led the faithful in several parishes of the Hunedoara Protoparchy, in the localities of Josani, Peștiș, Mânerău, Răcăștia, Nandru, Buiuturi[3].

At his initiative and insistence, a canteen for low-income steelworkers was organised and inaugurated in Hunedoara. He was arrested and investigated during the authoritarian regimes of King Carol II and Marshal Ion Antonescu, then the communist regime[4]. In August 1945 he was suspended from teaching and worked as a priest for a while, until 1950, when he was arrested again and forced to live in Răchitoasa in Bărăgan. He was released on 20 June 1956 and returned to Hunedoara[5]. During 1957 he worked as a priest in the parish of Buituri, Hunedoara County. On 22 May 1958, he was arrested again and accused of belonging to the subversive organisation “White Guard”, whose aim was to overthrow the communist regime in Romania by armed insurrection. During the investigation, which took place at the Deva Security Police Station, he was severely mistreated and brutally tortured. He remained dignified. He firmly denied the accusation of involvement in the White Guard organisation, but admitted that he had carried out anti-communist propaganda and condemned the atheist policies of the totalitarian communist regime. During his trial, he publicly denounced the torture he had been subjected to and claimed that his statements had been extracted under duress. The following members of his family were arrested: his son Mircea and his son-in-law Amos Mihailă, each sentenced to 20 years’ hard labour[6].

In the documentary material compiled by the Association of Former Political Prisoners of Hunedoara, the priest-teacher Gheorghe Tarcea is defined as a person “with unwavering faith in the ancestral law of the just Church”, who made himself “an example to all, leading the people to enlightenment of mind and purity of heart”[7]. He is considered a priest who guarded the Christian faith, his life being an unceasing striving towards “the service of the nation, towards goodness, truth and light, with unwavering faith in God”[8]. As a priest, between 1930 and 1938, he built and consecrated several shrines in Hunedoara and the towns of Răcăștia and Buituri[9]. Between 1954 and 1956, when he was forced to settle in Răchitoasa (near Fetești), he built a small mud church with the help of the deportees there. Here, with piety, he conducted services and kept alive the faith and hope of freedom of the deportees and political prisoners.[10] During the Securitate investigation in Deva (1958), he declared that, as a priest, he had no right to denounce the existence of a secret anti-communist organisation. Exemplary in his Christian behaviour, he refused to involve others, declaring that he had “never spoken to anyone” about the organisation[11]. In this way he sought to prevent the arrest and sentencing of others.

For his political and Christian convictions, he has repeatedly suffered the ordeal of prison and forced labour camps. He was investigated during the authoritarian Carlist regime. After the Legionary uprising in January 1941, he was arrested and accused of taking part in the rebellion. The accusation was unfounded and he was acquitted by the civil court of Deva in judgement no. 1283/5 May 1941. In September 1945 he was arrested and interned until October 1946 in the camp of Săcel-Hațeg, Hunedoara County. In February 1950, he was arrested again and sent to the Ghencea-București camp[12] and then to the Danube-Black Sea Canal camp[13], where he was given an administrative sentence of four and a half years. In August 1954, at the end of his sentence, he was sent to Răchitoasa, where he had to stay until 20 June 1956.

On 22 May 1958, he was arrested and interrogated at the Securitate police station in Deva. The criminal investigator, Security Major Lieutenant Lupea Gheorghe, accused him of active participation in the secret anti-communist organisation “White Guard”. The White Guard was in fact a brutal political organisation set up by the Securitate after the anti-communist revolution in Hungary and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from Romania, with the aim of intimidating and suppressing the Romanian people’s resistance to the policies of the communist regime. Father Tarcea denies the accusation that he was a member of this organisation. He admits that in his speeches to the villagers he condemned the policies of the communist rulers in Romania, on the issue of collectivisation of agriculture, quotas, taxes, anti-religious propaganda. He admits that he vehemently condemned the overthrow of King Michael I, that he criticised the communist act of nationalising industry, that he urged the peasants to attend Christian services and not to join the C.A.P.s[14]. During the investigation he was tortured.

The trial took place in January 1959 before the Military Court of the 3rd Military Region of Cluj. The prosecutor demanded the death penalty for the priest, Gheorghe Tarcea, who had shown dignity by publicly revealing the torture he had suffered at the hands of the Securitate. For this attitude, the investigating Securitate officers took him out of the court’s custody and brutally tortured him, tearing off his beard and banging his head against the walls[15]. By sentence No. 20/15 January 1959, he was sentenced to life imprisonment for “the crime of armed insurrection”. It also provided for the total confiscation of his personal assets.[16] The appeal was heard by the Supreme Court, Military College. By decision No. 181/14 April 1959, the original sentence was confirmed. Imprisonment and further suffering followed in the Deva prison and, from January 1960, in the Aiud prison. On 16 January 1963, his sentence was commuted to 25 years’ hard labour. He was 73 years old at the time. He died in Aiud prison on 30 September 1963, suffering from tuberculosis meningitis and cardiorespiratory failure[17]. Despite his serious illness, he was punished with severe solitary confinement before his death. The life and work of the priest Gheorghe Tarcea is a model of sacrifice for the defence and affirmation of the moral values of Christian spirituality. To the end of his life in Aiud prison, he remained a man of deep faith in God, convinced that his martyrdom was for the Christian faith and for the Church he served with such dedication.

(Ioan Munteanu – Martyrs for Christ, from Romania, during the communist regime, E.I.B.M.B.O.R, Bucharest, 2007, pp. 683-686)

[1] AFDP Hunedoara, Written documentary information.

[2] ATMTT, Criminal fonds, file 1880/58/Hunedoara, vol. 1-2.

[3] Orthodox priests, p. 212.

[4] Professor Victor Isac, Written report.

[5] ATMTT, Criminal fonds, file 1880/58/Hunedoara, vol. 2, f. 365.

[6] Orthodox priests, p. 213.

[7] AFDP Hunedoara, Written documentary information.

[8] Ibid.

[9] ATMTT, Criminal fonds, file 1880/58/Hunedoara, vol. 2, f.405

[10] Professor Victor Isac, Written report.

[11] ATMTT, Criminal fonds, file 1880/58/Hunedoara, vol. 2, f.397-399.

[12] Professor Victor Isac, Written report.

[13] ATMTT, Criminal fonds, file 1880/58/Hunedoara, vol. 2, f.364-365.

[14] Ibidem, f. 394-400

[15] AFDP Hunedoara, Written documentary information; Orthodox priests, p. 213.

[16] ATMTT, Criminal fonds, file 1880/58/Hunedoara, vol. 2, f.365-366.

[17] Ibidem, vol. 7, f. nepag.