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“They Must be Brought to the Right Path”: Monastic Incarceration of Old Calendarist Believers in Interwar Romania* Cover

“They Must be Brought to the Right Path”: Monastic Incarceration of Old Calendarist Believers in Interwar Romania*

Open Access
|Dec 2023

Abstract

This study concerns the issue of monastic incarceration of members of the Old Calendarist Orthodox Church in interwar Romania. The practice of incarcerating individuals in Orthodox monasteries was common across Orthodox Eastern Europe, especially in Imperial Russia. Even though this constitutes a neglected aspect of Romanian history, monastic incarceration seems to have been a practice that affected the Old Calendarist communities during the interwar period. When the Old Calendarists were seen as a threat to the Romanian state and the Orthodox Church, the Holy Synod decided, in October 1936, that the fate of the Old Calendarist nuns and monks was to be arrested and sent to detention at isolated sketes. There they were put to work and forced to accept the new style calendar. The archives of the secret police, as well as the National Archives of Romania, preserve various documents in the form of letters, postcards, declarations, and Gendarmerie reports which prove that monastic incarceration of Old Calendarist believers was a phenomenon that extended during a longer period of time and involved at least four Orthodox Monasteries in the country.

DOI: https://doi.org/10.2478/ress-2023-0019 | Journal eISSN: 2359-8107 | Journal ISSN: 2359-8093
Language: English, German
Page range: 277 - 296
Published on: Dec 21, 2023
Published by: Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu
In partnership with: Paradigm Publishing Services
Publication frequency: 3 issues per year

© 2023 Iuliana Cindrea-Nagy, published by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu
This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 License.