“His life was that of a martyr”
Bartholomew Ananias, Metropolitan of Cluj, Alba, Crișana and Maramureș, one of the great friends of Bessarabia, has gone to be with the Lord.
He encouraged the actions of the Democratic Forum of Romanians in the Republic of Moldova, sending messages of blessing for all its important actions.
On the 17th and 18th of May 2008, he invited the leaders of the Forum – the late Andrei Vartic, Vasile Șoimaru and myself – to his residence at the Nicula Monastery.
We stayed with him for an evening and half a night, then, at a late hour, he took us to the personal chapel of Nicula; after removing a gilded lime-wood canopy, he took out from under the communion table a cardboard box in which he kept a pair of boots with leather laces.
– I got them in prison. I keep them here so that I don’t fall into the sin of pride, and so that I can always thank the One above who took off my prison boots to put on the shoes of a Metropolitan. The cracks are from the beatings I received from the guards in Gherla, who beat me with sticks on the soles of my feet. After these blows, which were intended to leave no marks, I walked for several weeks on my knees and elbows, unable to walk on the swollen soles, which had become open wounds…
In 1958, the military tribunal in Ploiești sentenced him to 25 years’ hard labour for “conspiracy against the social order”. He served his sentence in Aiud prison.
He was 38 at the time and promised himself that if he got out of prison alive, he would translate the Bible, the Word of God, in which he had found refuge.
Mircea Eliade tells how many prisoners saved themselves by telling stories. Ananias saved himself by praying and by writing. He saved himself through unceasing prayer, mediated faith and effective creation.
There, in the hell of Aiud, he composed two plays, “The Star of the Bison” and “The Handmaid“, more than 10,000 verses in all, which have been preserved in his memory.
After his release, he spent several months at his desk, clearing his memory of the plays, poems and prose he had written in prison.
I compared his life to a waterfall. Only it was pouring into the sky. With its menace, its hopelessness and its confidence.
If you were lucky enough to hear this Niagara of the spirit, you will never forget it.
We, the three Bessarabians, stood before it as before a patriarch from the beginning of the world.
We came from a piece of land beyond the land where God was most humiliated.
What is a land from which God is banished? We asked ourselves this question and sought the answer together.
A country without churches is a sad country, and a country without God is a dead country. It is a desert with people, with buildings, with markets, but still a desert. A country that has no place where you can light a candle, where you can get down on your knees and pray, is lifeless, even if it is teeming with life.
He told us about his executioners without bitterness, as if he pitied them. He was in the high flight of memory without having started the engines of indignation.
Some of those who had denounced him envied him after December 1989: that he had served a communist prison sentence and they had not. That he had translated the Bible in one of the chapels in Văratic and they… Lord, have mercy on them, the Metropolitan added.
– Prison is a place where you rethink the world. Do you know what the greatest punishment in prison is? he asked us. The beatings?! Cold?! Hunger?!
And without waiting for us to guess the answer, he told us:
– The impossibility of being alone.
He needed solitude to pray and to create. And it was precisely this that the jailers had taken away from him: they kept sending various noisy delinquents to prevent him and others like him from being alone with themselves.
He endured his suffering with dignity, like a future Metropolitan, a candidate for the throne of Patriarch of Romania.
To come out of hell unscathed was the great victory of Bartholomew Ananias.
After leaving Aiud and taking off the slippers that had bound him in prison, he walked around Bucharest barefoot for a while.
– My freedom was barefoot.
A woman, Patricia Pâslaru, kept his written memoirs in a bank safe in the USA until 2001, when, convinced that he was no longer in prison, she sent them to him.
She completed them at Cluj and Nicula.
Then she published them in 2008 with a publishing house in Iași, “Polirom”.
She sent them to each of us as a continuation of our discussion that unforgettable night in May.
Bartholomew Ananias’ memoirs sometimes seem like fragments of science fiction: a Romanian destiny that a man could hardly invent, because fiction cannot be as ingenious as life.
He writes about his suffering without anger, without rage, without fury.
Put in the position of telling his story, his only regret is that his young years were wasted in prison cells.
“What is told with hatred breeds hatred,” he says. That’s why he speaks with compassion about those who treated him so mercilessly.
It is life and fate that Bishop Bartholomew takes upon himself.
The book ends on page 696. But it continues beyond that page, as does the destiny of Archbishop Bartholomew Ananias.
His life was that of a martyr.
When it is hard for me, I think of Father Ananias, the man who, with his body in chains, knew how to preserve his spiritual freedom, and who conquered the world through suffering that could not bring him to his knees in the cells of Aiud.
(Acad. Nicolae Dabija – Ziarul Cotidianul, electronic edition of 16 February 2011)