Authors

Discussion

“We dug out a hole in the garden before the secret police came. We burried there brother Teodosie’s diary of the last 4 years of our monastery. It was kept at the request of our bishop. Then they came and they arrested all of us, they destroyed our church they plowed the field, and they cultivated it. Much later when we got out of prison, we came back and dug the field to retrieve the diary and some of the things we put there.”

The presentation looks at the way in which communities of the religious underground recuperate their recent pasts and develop a public narrative around lost religious objects and lost sacred spaces through the story of the circulation of a samizdat diary of a young monastic brother that chronicled the life in the religious underground in the late 1970s and early 1980s Romania. The diary, still in manuscript was copied by hand by select readers and circulated among insiders and church members until in surfaced publicly and was handed to secular historians to bring out its story. The diary is one of the rare moments when the narrative of the secret police is paralleled and contested by a written account of the community and not by an oral one and its significance for the community is recognized. It accounts for a powerful moment in the Old Calendarist Orthodox Church history during the communist period, it documents a period of repression, it documents the last days of one of the figures with impact in the community. These were the reasons the diary has this impressive afterlife in the 2000s when the Old Calendarists were well into re-writing their past.