“Father Tarcea’s sermon went through walls”

Father Tarcea died in prison in Aiud in 1963. He was over 70 years old. He had come to the Bărăgan ten years before, I think from Hunedoara, where he was a priest and had become troublesome with his industrious presence in the city of steel.

Here, in the new village, he did a good work. When the authorities took pity and allowed the people of Banat to build their church, giving them a deadline – two days – then the priest and the Orthodox Christians hastily erected a kind of shed, two metres high, ten metres long and four metres wide, and covered directly with reeds. Then, on the Day of the Cross, they consecrated it, and this shed was called a church. The people gave the icons they had brought from home and borrowed objects of worship from neighbours and the prayers of the church were heard in this consecrated shed, in the absence of a bishop. Father Tarcea’s sermon went through the walls, so that the villages of Balta Brăilei could hear it all the way across the Danube. Here we gathered, here we worshipped, here we strengthened our souls. Prayer was always a comfort and support.

(Pr. Dimitrie Bejan, The Cursed Village, Cartea Moldovei Publishing House, 1998, p. 43)