Authors
Iona Ramsay1; 1 University of Exeter, UK Discussion
This paper shows how the creation of life through martyrology – specifically, the life of an anti-communist dissident, confessor and martyr – was entangled within the religious and political shifts of the late Cold War and post-communist periods. It does so by focussing on one case study: the Romanian Orthodox priest and dissident Gheorghe Calciu-Dumitreasa, whose opposition to the Romanian communist regime during the late 1970s drew significant international attention, and whose life has been remembered and re-told transnationally. These anti-communist retellings of Calciu’s life have differed in important ways, reflecting differences between the places where these narratives developed (Romania, the US, France and Germany), between the narratives that emerged at different times (Cold War and post-communist periods), and between different religious worldviews (Orthodox, evangelical, secular). They reveal how Calciu’s life was taken up in a plurality of forms, as a life story that through circulation between different places and times, generated new interpretations. It is through examining these different retellings of Calciu’s life that a wider story can be told about how stories of resistance to communism have been repurposed for a new transnational illiberal politics. This paper shows how Christian traditions of martyrology have shaped the political instrumentalization of life-writing, and the production of historical lives as models of spiritual, social and political life. 
