Note of the informer “Nicoară Iulian” (February 4, 1964)

MAY

Sibiu County Office

Received by: Major Surd Dumitru

Agent: “Nicoară Iulian”

Home: “Tribuna

Date: 4th February 1964 

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Ex. no. …

Informative note

I knew Boca Zian when he was a theology student in Sibiu, around 1928-1930. He was a well-behaved, modest and poor student. In his studies he was one of the average students. He didn’t stand out from the crowd, neither from his teachers or from his colleagues. In addition to his usual studies, he engaged in drawing and painting.

After finishing his studies, he expressed his wish to become a monk, which attracted the attention of the Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan, who supported and helped him. The Metropolitan sent him to study at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bucharest. Prof. Costin Petrescu of Belle Arte, a man of talent, highly appreciated his student Boca Zian, saying that he was a young man of will and talent. After completing his studies in Bucharest, he was sent to Greece and Mount Athos to study painting and monastic life.

Back in the country, he became a monk at the monastery of Sâmbăta de Sus, in the district of Făgăraș. In a short time he became the abbot of this monastery. He led an extremely austere life, submitting himself to a rigorous asceticism, and he imposed it on all the monks and believers who went to the monastery. He ate very little, only vegetables, fasted, slept on the floor and prayed incessantly, spending hours on his knees in prayer.

Then he began to preach and confess the faithful who came to him. Both in preaching and in confession, he was severe, harsh with people’s faults and sins. He was an extremist, rigorous and exaggerated in his demands for a pure life of fasting, prayer, abstinence and spiritualism. He began to dig a cell for himself in the rock of the mountain, at a great height, where he wanted to withdraw and live isolated from the world.

His body was not very strong, he was always weak, pale, anaemic; he suffered from chest pains. Doctors forbade him from fasting and recommended diet and rest.

His reputation as an austere monk, a man of God, had gone to the ends of the earth. People flocked to him like mad. He cultivated this cult of personality and the monk Arsenios – that’s what they called him in the monastery – became a great man, famous throughout the country. It was during the war. There was much sorrow, trouble and suffering. Hundreds and thousands of peasants and intellectuals came from all over to see him, to hear him, to talk to the “saint” of Sâmbăta. He passed before the crowds as a just man, a connoisseur of human mysteries and a miracle worker.

On some theological questions he disagreed with the Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan.

During the construction of the Danube-Black Sea canal, he was taken to the canal, where he stayed for a year. When he returned from there, Metropolitan Nicolae Bălan did not reinstate him as abbot of Sâmbăta. (sic!)

Slightly annoyed with the Metropolitan, he moved from the diocese of Sibiu to that of Arad. There he became a priest confessor in the nunnery of Prislop, near Hațeg. The abbess of the convent there was a nun named Zamfira. She was originally from Bucharest.

When they both left the convent – which had been closed – Boca Zian went to Bucharest with the former abbess Zamfira-Julieta. There he took a job as a painter in the patriarch’s workshops. Of course, he was clean-shaven, in civilian clothes, a painter and not a monk.

In 1961, with official permission, he worked for three months as a painter in Bogata Olteană, Rupea County, painting the church there. Julieta helped him with the work and came with him. I think they are married.

At the moment he is in Bucharest in the painting workshops of the Patriarchate. In Bogata he could not continue painting because the Patriarch made him learn enamel painting and did not let him leave and neglect the enamel painting.

When he left for Bogata, I talked to him about his work in Sâmbăta de Sus. Then he told me: “Now I don’t agree with what I’ve done. I made a lot of mistakes and today I would never make those mistakes again”.

I don’t know if he had been a member of any political party in the past. When I discussed this with him, he told me that he was not registered anywhere and that the rumors that he was a legionnaire was not true.

3.02.1964

ss/Nicoară Iulian

ACNSAS, informative fond, file 2637, vol. 1, pp. 161-163

(Extract from “Father Arsenios Boca in the Attention of the Political Police in Romania” by George Enache and Adrian Nicolae Petcu, pages 105-106)