Petre Anculia, martyr for Christ during the communist regime
He was born into a family of hardworking farmers from the south of Banat. His parents, Peter and Martha, had four children, whom they raised and educated with faith in God and respect for Christian morality. They were simple but faithful and talented people, lovers of truth and justice.
There was still a strong tradition of the Church among the inhabitants of Teregova. On its foundations, a special way of life of the local people developed over time, strongly marked by a sense of dignity, a desire for freedom and resistance to oppression.
It was in this particular human atmosphere that the personality of the young Peter Anculia was formed. His faith in God, his will to live as a free man and in the spirit of the Christian religion marked his whole life until his tragic end in 1949. He completed seven years of primary school in his native town and then attended the CFR vocational school in Caransebeș. But he was drawn to another profession. In Caransebeș he learned tailoring and leatherwork from a private craftsman. After six years of training (three as an apprentice and three as a journeyman), he returned to Teregova, where he worked as a peeler. He was respected by the villagers for the skill, ability and fairness with which he practised his trade. On 16 February 1935 he married the young Ana Stoichescu and they had two daughters: Elena and Maria. After Romania’s entry into the Second World War, he was concentrated in the 96th Infantry Regiment and then sent to the Eastern Front. He experienced the horrors of war between 10 March 1942 and 23 August 1944.
At the end of the war, he returned to Teregova and worked for a time as a caretaker in the town hall¹. The Soviet military occupation of Romania and the installation of the atheistic and totalitarian communist political regime provoked a natural reaction of resistance in Peter Anculia’s conscience. He became a close friend of the notary Gheorghe Ionescu from Teregova. He prepared the whole community of the village for the anti-communist resistance². Petru Anculia was one of the main collaborators of the notary Gheorghe Ionescu in the organisation of the resistance, in supplying and supporting the anti-communist fighters in the Banat Mountains. At the end of 1948, he took refuge in the mountains and joined the group of anti-communist fighters led by the lawyer Spiru Blănaru³. A report of the Timișoara Security Police of February 1949 lists him as a member of this group⁴. He also took an oath of faith “before God and the Holy Cross” that he would “fight with life and death, with all possible means, for the Holy Church of Christ, for the destruction of communism”. He took part in all the actions of this group and was killed in 1949 in the Semenic Mountains⁵.
His bullet-riddled body was taken by the Securitate and displayed in front of the Teregova Prefecture building to frighten the population⁶. He was secretly buried by the communist authorities on the outskirts of Teregova, in the “cattle graveyard”. A new tomb, without a cross, will house the body of a martyr who sacrificed himself for the defence of the Christian faith and the ancient Church, for the overthrow of an atheistic and oppressive political regime.
(Ioan Munteanu – Martyrs for Christ, from Romania, during the communist regime, Publishing House of the Bible and Mission Institute of the Romanian Orthodox Church, Bucharest, 2007, pp. 51-52)
- Information from Ana Anculia, wife of Petre Anculia, collected by Professor Gabriela Bica.
- Anti-Communist Resistance in the Banat Mountains. Interviews and Evocations, Timișoara, Marineasa Publishing House, 1998, pp. 79-80.
- Ibid, p. 117.
- A.T.M.T.T., Criminal fonds, file 64/Caraș Severin, vol. 3, pp. 149 – 150; vol. 2, pp. 41 – 42.
- Ibid, vol. 3, p. 195. See also Anti-Communist Resistance in the Banat Mountains in Documents, Bucharest, Civic Academy Foundation Publishing House, 2000, pp. 115 – 117.
- Anti-Communist Resistance. Interviews and Evocations, pp. 117-118.