“Hieromonk Valerius Ananias understood the call and accepted the sacrifice”

The regime had planned the early release of all politicians. To this end, it had sent Colonel Crăciun here with his secretaries. First came re-education, at least total self-disclosure, as in Pitești, if not a change of beliefs, followed by amnesties and pardons in 1964. This included the physical restoration of the survivors. I was lucky.

Since I only knew Aiud from the cells and hospital rooms, I don’t know what went on in the ward where he put us. It was a large courtyard surrounded by buildings, some of which overlooked the courtyard. In one part of the courtyard were some ornamental groves and a few benches for resting.

There were a couple of good-sized rooms for the “lungers” and a big building, probably a former storeroom, with three or four more rows of stacked iron beds. This was where people with extra-pulmonary tuberculosis were housed. The younger and less sick (see, I stayed young!) occupied the upper beds. I was on the second floor and, by chance, above me was Father Valerius Ananias, with whom I had been a contemporary at the University of Cluj, but whom I no longer knew, as he had no beard, which was forbidden in the prison. But I had known him as a face of the Church, who also wore this ornament. […] 

At dawn, when I was busy with my arpacaș, with the little worldly things I had at hand, Father Ananias, who was in the bed above me, got up even more during the night and occupied himself with spiritual matters and literary creations. Lying on his back with his hands crossed under his head, he ‘wrote’ verse after verse in his mind, and out of this double effort of intellectual and creative restraint came the play The Star of the Bison. After lunch, when we gathered in the little park, he would delight us with scenes written at dawn, in classical Alexandrine verse, richly rhymed, full of figures of speech, phrases and maxims. The poet followed the audience, the effect he achieved, among the listeners were also people of culture, such as the writer Nicolae Porsena, Dan Lăzărescu, the lawyer Caftangioglu, Dr. Diaconescu and others. […]

Having finished these thousands of verses, the poet and playwright Ananias began a new play in verse. Meșterul Manole, but I never listened to the end of it, because I was moved from here. Since the theme had already been dealt with by other playwrights, including Blaga, great care had to be taken to achieve originality. When I read the play after my release, I saw that he had succeeded in what he had set out to do. His Manole is not like the others. […]

But the poet also took on simpler genres, such as the fable, and, as a former medical student, he managed to personalise parts of the human body. He called them Agrippine Fables, after the fable of Menenius Agrippa, when he was on the Sacred Mount with the plebeian revolt. I have retained only the content of one of them, in which the hero is the heart, with the stream of blood that flows through it, but of which he receives only a trickle, as much as flows through the coronary artery. The moral of the fable is for cashiers.

A real delight was the complete reproduction of two other plays in verse that he had written while still outside: Miorița and Go Time, Come Time. The author’s exceptional memory gave us the satisfaction of listening to the two plays in their entirety, with the nuances he himself wanted. We discovered a great writer. […] Father Valerius Ananias was a good friend of Tudor Arghezi, about whom he also published his memoirs after his release. He told me some of them, but I don’t remember whether they were published or not.

As my father was from Vâlcea, he was close to Patriarch Justinian Marina. He worked in the Patriarchate and was a lecturer at the clergy orientation courses held in Curtea de Argeș. He once met the representative of the government’s sectarian resort, the lawyer Vasile Pogăceanu, who had been prefect in Cluj in 1946, when the student strike took place. It was led by the vice-president of the Petru Maior Student Centre, second-year medical student Valerius Ananias. Pogăceanu knew the personality of the hieromonk and asked the Patriarch to change him so that he would no longer be in a service where he came into contact with people. The prelate had no choice but to change him, but he did not want to lose him either, so he appointed him librarian of the Patriarchate. Here the man of culture felt at home. Arghezi also visited him in the library. […]

His literary friend was also his master in anatomy, our professor from Cluj, Victor Papilian. When the young monk came to Cluj as a student, he came with all his literary baggage and joined the literary circle of the famous scientist and writer from Cluj. But for Victor Papilian, bitter days soon began. First he was expelled from the university and from public life and persecuted for his friendship with Titel Petrescu, the leader of the Independent Social Democrats. This was followed by years of imprisonment without trial. When he returned, the illustrious professor was already tired and ill, and his friendships had dwindled. Among those who remained was Valerius Ananias, unwavering in love and respect. The writer Victor Papilian also appointed him executor of his literary works.

The events of spring 1946 were also part of our common memory. I relived them because they were part of our turbulent university years. I will not describe all the events that led to the strained relations between Romanians and our Hungarian compatriots. They still held many of the levers of local power in Cluj, in the city hall, in the party, in the big economic enterprises, including “Dermata”.

After the Paris Peace Conference recognised our rights over northern Sardonia, Hungarian reaction and irritation sought new, disguised ways to attack us. At the official opening of the campaign for the November 1946 elections, a group of students, most of them nationalist-turned-peasants, held a short rally in the city centre with slogans such as “Down with terror” and “Long live Iuliu Maniu”. They arrived at Liberty Square – the square with the Roman Catholic Cathedral of St. Michael and the statue of Matei Corvin, but also with the headquarters of the Romanian Communist Party on one side of the square and the Confederation of Trade Unions on the other – and placed a portrait of Iuliu Maniu on the ground floor of the building where the trade unions were located, in effect an election manifesto with the portrait of their party leader.

It was about 6 o’clock in the afternoon of 26 (or 27) May. In the “Dermata” factories the siren began to sound, which could be heard all over the city. None of the students knew why. At that time, the factory was exclusively Hungarian, deliberately, through an ethnic exclusivism that would have been blamed on the Romanians. The Hungarians gathered, filled some lorries and came to the centre to defend – supposedly – the new democracy and a workers’ headquarters that had been attacked by hooligans.

By the time they got to the square, the students had peacefully expressed their opinions, had not harmed anyone, had not physically attacked anything and had gone home. The Dermata had virtually no one to fight with. But the scenario was that they would beat the students, intimidate them, now at the beginning of the election campaign. They went to the “Avram Iancu” student dormitory near the square, which they considered to be the headquarters of the Romanian “reaction”, and started their rally, but not only with peaceful slogans, but also with the stones and clubs they had come with, as part of their new ideas of democracy.

They smashed the windows of the dormitory. The besieged barricaded themselves in, blocking the door on the ground floor and the grate at the top of the stairs with beds and furniture from the bedrooms. With the help of Hungarian students from a neighbouring hostel, they broke down a back door, the access door to the canteen supplies (this door was made in the thickness of the old wall of the medieval fortress of Cluj, the wall that bordered the hostel courtyard). They destroyed the entire ground floor and the basement, where the canteen was located.

The streets around the dormitory – because it was on the corner – were full of attackers, who had been joined by other compatriots of the dermatologists. There was a lot of noise, booing, a constant bombardment of the dormitory with blunt objects that were found and brought in. They also accidentally broke a window of the building next door, which housed the Soviet troops’ stage post. The Ivan at the gate, seeing that he too was being attacked, began singing something to them at “balalaică”. At the sound of automatic gunfire, the attackers retreated. As there were few people in the dormitory – many had gone to the theatre, where a performance by a troupe from Bucharest was touring – they also threw everything they could find into the street: water bottles, tiles torn from the roof of the attic, where they also lived, and even bedside tables and nightstands. The attackers claimed victims, and it was said that there were about 60 of them, and they were taken to the Jewish hospital, which was more “democratic” for them, allied with the so-called “Dermata” democrats.

From Mănăștur, the Romanian population and the agronomy students gathered and went to the dormitory to harass the students. The army intervened, blocking the way of the column of Romanian demonstrators (where were these troops when the Hungarians came to the city centre?) and the police of Superintendent Crăciun, the current commander of Aiud.

The policemen arrested 28 students from the side of the column that was heading towards the city centre on Calea Moților. The next morning, the students gathered in the square in front of the dormitory. It looked desolate, with the windows all smashed – all of them – by stones, clubs and even bullets fired by our fellow citizens. The canteen was littered with broken crockery and the rooms were devastated, in total disarray. The sanitary facilities, all the electrical installations – completely damaged. Our speakers, the speakers of the day, appeared at the windows. One of them was the vice-president of the Petru Maior Student Centre, Valerius Ananias. The president, a final year medical student, did not want to get involved because he was a trainee at the clinic. […]

The Dean of Letters, prof. univ. Constantin Daicoviciu, but since he had joined the Communists, he was whistled at and could not speak. At that time, despite his professional value, he had no influence on the students because of his political stance. […]

On the balcony of the building the first city prosecutor came, who introduced himself as Pop (my illness, I forgot his first name) and said that he had joined us in our appeal to the Ministry of the Interior, that he had witnessed the attack on the dormitory from the street the night before and had heard the chauvinist slogans shouted in Hungarian, one of which he reproduced for us, first in the language of the attackers and then translated into our language: “We want Vlach blood”!

He was a man of justice, taking a public stand for a cause that had become the cause of Romanians in general, not just of students.

Valerius Ananias was the leader of the student delegation that met with Prefect Vasile Pogăceanu. I had already said that the two of them would meet again, in a different capacity, at the Patriarchate. The student monk was fearless, his words were sharp and his lively, penetrating gaze radiated from a face framed by a rich ritual beard.

The other day there was a meeting at the Academic College to discuss, or rather to declare, our strike. The pro-rector of the university spoke with a motion on behalf of the university senate, addressed to the Romanian government and to all universities in the world, protesting against the barbarity committed and the destruction of the heritage entrusted to Romanian students. The strike was voted. […]

Tempers flared. Father Ananias, our interim president, had been put under surveillance and was living in hiding in Mănăștur. From there he issued communiqués on the course of events, which were posted at the university. A few days later, a meeting of the students was convened, which became a marathon meeting, as we say today, because it lasted from morning to evening, 9 hours. The hall and foyer of the Academic College were packed with students. No more than 2,500 could fit in, and many were waiting in the streets. There was discussion about continuing the strike. Father said that we would not win if we continued, that the aim of protesting and making public opinion aware of the aggression had been achieved, and hinted that he would withdraw. But the hall cheered him on and wanted him to continue to lead us: We started with you, we want to continue with you! His new attitude of giving up the strike was also due to his consultation with Cornel Pop, which we knew at the time from Pop himself. […]

After all the atmosphere in Cluj, when the question was put to the vote, the majority voted to continue the strike. Father Ananias, even now that I am reliving all these events that took place fifteen years ago, smiles at the thought of the disguise with which he managed to enter and leave the hall during that marathon meeting, with the people of Superintendent Crăciun, in whose hands he had now ended up, following him outside.

The students of Cluj, faithful to our old song of freedom, saw him at the head of our class: “Priests with the cross on their heads,/ For the army is Christian,/ Its motto is freedom,/ And its purpose too holy”. (Verses that are no longer sung today, although they are part of the national anthem, Wake up, Romanian!)

The hieromonk Valerius Ananias understood the call and accepted the sacrifice. He was one of the very few to be expelled, almost halfway through a career he wanted to pursue as a Christian. Here is the man who, as I said at the time, was reliving his militant youth, and who paid for the struggle of his youth not only with the loss of his chosen profession, but also with the loss of his freedom. There is no doubt that this struggle hung in the balance of communist justice, which condemned him so harshly and so viciously that it made him sick to the bone. I have not given a full account of what happened, only what I thought necessary to complete his portrait.

Colonel Christmas began to call him in for talks as part of the re-education he had started, and I don’t know what else happened to him as I didn’t stay here very long. In the end, however, Crăciun managed to get him on his side[1].

(Ioan Muntean – A walk through the re-education centres of Pitești, Gherla and Aiud)

[1] It is true that Father Bartholomew had a fall during his re-education in Aiud and became the leader of a re-education club, but we must speak of this with great delicacy of heart. Moreover, in re-education, be it in Pitești, Gherla or Aiud, there were many cases of confessors and martyrs who stumbled and fell on the way to their ghoul, but rose stronger and brighter. It was not their falls that characterised them all, but their enduring uprightness. The same is true of Venerable Bartholomew.