Father Sofian was adorned with all the virtues

[At Antim] people were treading on their toes, such holiness [had] descended there…

Sandu Tudor laid the foundations of monasticism in another way – through the prayer of the mind. Now [this] was not circulating at the time. Patriarch Nicodemus was in office and he was afraid that [this] novelty might be a heresy. It was considered a novelty, this movement. We were not seen well.

Antim monastery brought a breath of fresh air, such a clean wind from Bessarabia! Before, we didn’t serve in churches, [only] on Sundays. There were the priests of myrrh, they had turned the [monastery] churches into parishes. Antim monastery set fire to the whole capital.

But in Antim, Sandu Tudor left a great fire. He received the blessing of the prayer of the spirit and immediately continued with Sofian.

And they made me say the litanies (ektenia) and I couldn’t get the tone right. Felix Dubneac, his colleague in the monastery, taught me the tone. You didn’t know what world you were in! It was an incantation… but you were happy! Calm, calm, you were…

If they were to make a statue of a man of perfect virtue, it would be of Fr. Sofian, adorned with all the virtues.

I think he should be counted among the Saints, because he is a man of prayer, a great man of prayer; he has adorned the triumphant Church in heaven!

Once, out of the blue, a willow tree snapped so loudly; it was right by the space as you enter the courtyard [of Antim]. It fell like a thunderbolt and people gathered around and filled the courtyard. And Fr. Sofian came and reassured them: The father who planted the willow tree – Gladun from Cluj – died in the sanatorium. And so he blessed: “That the willow tree may live as long as he lives”.

Antim monastery was a living being.

(Fr. Nicodim Bujor – Father Sofian, 2nd edition revised and added by Constanța Costea and Ioana Iancovescu, Byzantine Publishing House, Bucharest, 2012, pp. 232-233)