Fr. Aurel Bazilescu – “the most gentle, the most merciful and dignified priest Craiova has ever known”
I cannot talk about my uncle Aurel Bazilescu without introducing the family he comes from. His father, Ștefan Bazilescu, one of the first teachers in the village of Soceni, Dolj, traces his family tree back to 1750, through ancestors who were priests. The priest Aurel Bazilescu’s humble origins are not due to a lack of wealth, but to the misfortune that befell the family when he was five years old, in January 1912, when the black wing of death covered his 38-year-old mother, leaving an orphan and a three-day-old baby, Virgiliu, my father, and other brothers.
Ștefan Bazilescu, father of the future priest Aurel Bazilescu, teaches at the village school he built with his father, he also lives in the school, he teaches all grades I-IV through the monitorial system. The teacher Ștefan Bazilescu, member of the Volapukist Academy in Bad Godesberg (Germany), one of the two Europeans who founded the Esperanto language, author of the book “Neamul Bazileștilor” and of a comprehensive monograph on the village Soceni and the commune where he was born, of the administrative-territorial map of the region, he gave etymologies, presented customs and traditions, collected folklore, wrote portative poems and hymns, bequeathed Byzantine music in manuscript to the Romanian Academy in Bucharest and lived not only the tragedy of the death of his wife Ioana, a woman of rare dignity, but also the care of the older orphans: Fan, 9, George, 11, Marioara, 18, Ioniță, 20, a young priest for whom he had to pave the way for the future alone.
Nursed and brought up by his nanny, a sister of Stefan Bazilescu, whose daughter had just died, the three-day-old Virgiliu received a haphazard upbringing, being told from an early age that he would have no siblings and being kept as far away from them as possible. Less than two years after his wife’s death, the eldest son, Ioniță, a young priest, died of exanthematous typhus and an injection deliberately administered by his nurse, because he had accused her of adultery with the doctor on duty and had imposed his point of view on the scandal that broke out between the two lovers in the middle of the night, a few hours before Ioniță Bazilescu was to be released. Ștefan Bazilescu wrote a booklet about Ioniță: How my son, the priest, died.
In 1927, death came to the manor house again and took away another beloved son, Fan, a 24-year-old, sixth-year student of military medicine. My father was 15 when his brother Fan died, and with all the constraints of being kept away from his brothers, with all the grief, my father remembered him and told us how Fan used to come home in the winter holidays and load the sledge with logs all by himself, how he used to climb the hills in the winter after the oxen, with the sleeves of his shirt rolled up to his elbows; how he lifted the sledge or the cart in his hands, how he won gold medals in Greco-Roman wrestling and javelin throwing in the Balkans, how he received diplomas signed by King Ferdinand, how he spent his last days in fever and delirium reciting Schiller, how he died in hospital of acute pneumonia, which was untreatable at the time. What remains of Fan is the memory of a sportsman like no other in his family, his passion for curing illness and pain, the beautiful photograph and the inscription on the stone cross in the Sineasca-Craiova cemetery: “Silence! Je veux dormir…”
The teacher Ștefan Bazilescu, distraught at the death of his wife and two sons, kept my father close to the house and gave him a rifle to shoot wild ducks, crows, hawks, rabbits and otters. Aurel Bazilescu, who had become a priest and whom I also knew, saved my father from the army and the war.
Fr. Aurel Bazilescu had a parish house in Craiova, a priestess with a passion for arrases which turned his rooms into museum rooms, covering all the walls with landscapes, flowers, still lifes, pictures of the Saviour as a child or crucified on the cross. Unjustly imprisoned for hiding legionaries he had never seen, the most gentle, compassionate and dignified priest the whole of Craiova and the world around him knew was released, but too late.
In the long winter evenings, my father would whisper to us about Aurel after he had tightened the bolts and closed the windows, we didn’t know why he was so shy, we found out that he had been arrested late, when the priest, released from the communist dungeon, came to the village to see his parental home and the places where he was born. From the carriage a distinguished and sober gentleman, dark-eyed, with a gentle look, next to a beautiful lady who did not let go of his arm. People, as if from the earth, appeared at the gates, uncovered their heads and he, the priest, stopped, blessed them on the head and asked them about their livelihood… I saw them as they turned the elbow of the church and shouted as long as my mouth could hold, “They’ve come, they’ve come, they’ve come!!!” as if I wanted the whole world to know. Barefoot and on the run, I entered the courtyard, climbed the high stairs of our house and ran through the veranda to the room prepared for them. I don’t even know when I put the wild flowers in a pot of water and put on my dress, fresh from the tailor, or when I put on my slippers and ran across the street to tell his brother George – the magistrate – six years older than Aurel, and Aunt Dafina – George’s wife – that the long-awaited guests had arrived and were on their way down the valley.
For a whole week I had been robotically preparing their guest room, the room on the road overlooking their parents’ house, the courtyard of willows and vines, the wooded hills, the most beautiful I had ever seen. They stopped first at the house where he was born – a Bohemian villa used as a summer and winter residence – and where their uncle George, still a judge at the Palace of Justice in Bucharest, was waiting for them, having arrived from the capital a few weeks earlier on holiday, attracted by the landscape that only God knew how to create in this image on earth. Aunt Dafina, Uncle George’s wife, with the help of the maids, had prepared the most appetising dishes, cakes and coffees.
I didn’t hear Uncle Aurel complaining about anything in those August days, although he must have been released from prison then, I didn’t see him taking his medicine, the two brothers seemed to be telling funny stories, from the veranda of the manor house – a wooden building covered with shingles, in Gothic style, with a high staircase, a floor and a brick wall – they looked melancholically at the water of the fountain in Făget, from where, more than 50 years ago, one stormy winter, a young woman, their mother, climbed up to the house with two glasses of water in her hands, pulled one boot and another out of the waist-deep snow to wash a newborn baby and boil food for the older children and the man at school, when only three days later the evil angels snatched her from them; With outstretched hands they looked at the folds of the hills, at the wooded peaks where heaven and earth were twinned, and where they, two playful boys, once rolled the oak leaves under which they hid and rolled, from whence, long ago, on those sown ridges, God opened before their eyes the whole panorama of the village, where they could no longer climb because of the pain, because of the rheumatism of the priest, who walked with difficulty on his stick – his hands were clenched in the doorway – so he leaned against the wall.
On the other hand, my father also tried to make their reception and visit more pleasant, but being clumsy and awkward, he tempted his brother with brandy, and the priest Aurel Bazilescu did not tolerate drinking. If Uncle Aurel and Aunt Liza, the priestess, were in the company of Uncle George and his wife during the day, they slept in our house across the street at night. My sister Eugenia and I were in charge of the room, and we were surprised to see that instead of pajamas, both the priestess and the priest wore long nightgowns, beautifully hemmed, thread-worked with small needles by the priestess. On the only table in the room of our dear guests we placed a large glass water jug and two glasses, which we changed daily and covered with a white cloth napkin.
They stayed in the village for a week, they even celebrated the feast of Saint Mary, all kinds of people came to see him: officers, priests, teachers, doctors, people from our village and from other villages. Since the day they left, I had walked more and more through the room where they had been resting, and just at Easter, when I was putting the basket of red eggs in the cold cellar, I saw the big glass jug on the table: the water was still crystal clear and had not dried up. My father and mother, who seemed to be of different faiths – they didn’t pray before or after they sat down to eat, they didn’t go to churches – and so, at the risk of being mocked, I showed them the jug of crystal clear water. Dad put his hands on his hips and sighed, “Bastards! They must know that they arrested a… a… a… a saint, beat him like a dog and mutilated him… do they know how Uncle helped me… when they threw me out of the Post Office? …., he helped me with advice, with guidance on where to send my children to work and to school, how to save my money and how to join the collective, how to work thirty years with what I had left of my land and forget the one I gave to the collective…” and my father came out stumbling, really stumbling, looking at the cup of water on the table…
I was ten years old when Uncle Aurel died. Little was known about the tortures in the communist prison. It was only at the funeral that we learned that he had developed cirrhosis of the liver as a result of the injustice of being imprisoned without charge. I had two brothers who were students and three older ones who were in the service. My father didn’t have the courage to tell us to come to the funeral – he only went with my mother – he was afraid we would be expelled from high school and college because we had an uncle who was a priest and had been imprisoned. Of course, this was also the reason why my father whispered to us and shied away from being heard when we listened to “The Voice of America” and “The Free Europe” radio stations. In 1970, the year of Aurel Bazilescu’s death, there were only telephones at the post office and at the People’s Council, but the news was passed from one People’s Council to another, all over the Amărăzii and Ploștii valleys, People announced themselves to each other, gathered before dawn and, with trailers, vans and trucks, arrived at the house of the priest Aurel in Craiova and at the Sineasca cemetery, where his other brother, Fan, a student of military medicine, had been lying for 43 years.
This is how Fr. Aurel Bazilescu left us…
(Prof. Ecaterina Bazilescu Chiriță, granddaughter of martyred Father Aurel Bazilescu – testimony given on March 14, 2016, Târgoviște)