Icons on canvas in Mislea prison

The atmosphere during Lent was very different. Much was said about the lives of the saints. Lenten prayers were sung. Nana knew them all. Special preparations were made for Passion Week. In the common wall with the windowless room between our ward and the third ward there was a small iron. It was probably the twin of the dark room, now bricked up.

Here Nana Sofica made a small shrine out of twigs stolen from the yards we passed on our way to the showers. Icons were made for it.

Nuți, a very talented art student, painted three icons on canvas: Calvary, the image of Christ crowned with thorns and the Resurrection. The Calvary was painted by Tanti “the little one”, representing the crucified Jesus and the two figures who accompanied him with devotion at the foot of the Cross: Saint Loan, the Apostle of Love, and the Holy Mother. The head, crowned with thorns, I also executed in Goblin from a card that Nuți had painted with watercolours that she had secretly obtained from the carpet workshop, a face that she had preserved in her graceful memory from a famous canvas. The card was torn in two during a subsequent search. Recovered and glued together by Angela, it is now in my niece’s house. The finished icon, later framed, is on the baldachin of the chapel built in Mislea after the Revolution, the Resurrection, which I also executed in single thread under Nuți’s direction. I had achieved something special. The priest who later consecrated the icon said that he had never seen anything more beautiful.

The icons were taken out of the prison with great courage and skill by Maria R. She gave them to my mother who, out of gratitude, made a tablecloth for the altar of the church in Maria’s village in the mountains of Sebeș.

(Aspazia Oțel Petrescu – I cried to You, Lord)