Mircea Vulcănescu – “a man of diamond character”

He was a tall, handsome, dignified, imposing man, full of prestige and with a remarkable personality. He was the assistant of Nae Ionescu, the Romanian Orthodox philosopher who founded the school. He was himself a profound thinker, unable to write down everything he thought because of his imprisonment and early death.

He spoke in prison and his words were listened to. He taught thinking to those who were leaders of the country. His view was deeply Christian, from a democratic political position. I often saw him in church, when the church in Aiud had not yet been converted into a toilet.

Mircea Vulcănescu, a fervent intellectual among the prisoners, was an avowed enemy of Marxism. Because of some lectures he gave in Jilava, he was taken, almost naked, to the black room with other “bandits”. Starved and with nothing to rest on, they began to fall on the cold mud, which brought illness and death. Mircea Vulcănescu sat down so that others could sit on him and said to them, “I am going to die. Save yourselves.”

He didn’t die, but when he went back to Aiud he kept on talking and they kept on punishing him until they killed him.

He was a man of diamond character.

We cannot fail to mention here Mircea Eliade, from the same school as Nae Ionescu, who escaped from the Viforniță and developed Romanian thought, as well as the profound theologian Gheorghe Racoveanu.

(Ioan Ianolide – Return to Christ. Document for a New World, Bonifaciu Publishing House, Bucharest, 2012, pp. 306-307)