In the ancient world, the cross was a symbol and an object of torture for malefactors, and it aroused a sentiment of fear and repulsion in people’s souls. For the Hebrews, the cross was known as a sign of curse; it is written in Deuteronomy 21:22-23 that he who is hung on the tree is a curse before God.

After the Son of God was hung on it, the cross immediately became the sacrificial altar of Christianity. On this altar the sacrifice of reconciliation between man and God was offered.

 ~ Fr. Roman Braga

Ten years ago, in May 2014, I traveled to Romania to present a paper at a conference in Alba Iulia in Transylvania. Romania is a beautiful country marked by centuries of conquest and tragedy, not least the period of communism in the twentieth century. Of the many horrors of this time, the Pitesti prison is known for being particularly dark and evil, diabolic even. Fr. Roman Braga, of blessed memory, had been a prisoner there as a young man. Unexpectedly, in my trip from Bucharest to Alba Iulia, I discovered I would be visiting the prison in Pitesti. I recorded my memory at the time and present it below without major revision:       

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After approximately three hours of sleep, I awoke at six o’clock in the morning, got dressed and packed, and met Bogdan outside. I had been misinformed, he was not the stout, forty-something man in the lobby but rather the young man that met me outside, perhaps younger than myself, with black hair and beard, thin and tallish. It was raining, though not as much as the day before, and Bogdan wore his jacket hood over his head.

“Hello. Dylan?” he asked. I nodded. “I do not speak English good, sorry. You will go with me and we will meet Father _____.” (Unfortunately, I have forgotten his name.)

“Okay,” I replied, following him down the sidewalk and carrying my bags.

I had thought that Bogdan would be driving me somewhere, but instead we just walked a block or two to a van with a monk outside who met us in the street and gave us his blessing. In the van, three nuns were in the front, we were in the middle, and our bags were in the back. Bogdan told me that he had not slept very much either. I hoped that perhaps we would stop for coffee, but we did not stop until the mothers got lost.

In their defense, it seems that they were taking their directions from the father, but since I don’t know Romanian, I am not sure who was to blame.

In any case, we had lost our way until someone else met us alongside the highway. Father got in their car and we followed.

I am unsure when we arrived at the Pitesti prison. It was still early, but I could not be tired, not sleepy at least. I had prepared myself to be somber and serious, but the nuns immediately ruined that, laughing with a young woman that we met inside. Her father was there as well, but I can’t remember his name. She was Maria. Maria gave me the tour while the others went to the paraklesis, which is what Romanians call a chapel, elsewhere in the building.

First we went to the basement, which has been the most unchanged since the Communist torture experiment there. It had flooded, however. The rain had been exceptional in Bucharest the previous night. My hosts and I enjoyed little protection from our umbrellas. We barely made it into a restaurant in the oldest building in town before it began to hail and thunder. Once inside, we had only just ordered our drinks and pizza when the streets flooded. The road had become a river. My guides, two of whom were thirty-seven, said that they had never seen anything like it.

So in Pitesti, I only really peaked into the basement. There were two or three inches of water over the floor. I guess it was not used, at least primarily, for torture, but the gates, low lights, and water certainly conveyed a haunted atmosphere.

Back upstairs, Maria told me that the prison was originally a political prison, and probably not too bad. But the communists had turned it into a torture experiment. I told her that I already knew the details so she would not need to explain—sleep deprivation, beatings for no reason, intimidation to incriminate others, starvation, being made to eat human feces in ceremonies that mimicked the liturgy with blasphemous words sung to the tune of the hymns, and many other terrible things. The goal was to brainwash young Christian students. Once their wills had been broken—or rather if, since many were martyred and others successfully resisted—and they had been “reprogramed,” they were sent out of the prison to find new victims, then made to be their torturers at the threat of undergoing the whole process over again. The communists designed this final stage to destroy any remaining semblance of goodness in the young men’s hearts.

Maria said that after the communists shut it down—if I am not mistaken—it was used again as a normal prison. In any case, at some point after communism the building was sold to a private company: her father’s road construction business, she told me later. They had no idea what had happened there. She says they had heard rumors that something bad had taken place, but they only found out years later. For her it was just Dad’s office. She used to play there as a little girl.

At the winding stairs to the second floor, Maria explained that this was the site of one of the few successful suicide attempts. The stairs went all the way to another area of the basement, so one could see how suicide there might be possible.

“After that, they covered the opening in the middle,” she explained. “The lead torturer would clang this railing as he went up the stairs. The sound itself was a source of great fear for the prisoners.” And then I followed her up the stairs.

“These were their cells.” They were small rooms and likely crowded at the time. The room at the end of the short, wide hall was the primary torture room. But the others were there, and I had thought that they had gone to the chapel. Though trying to prepare myself to enter such a dark and gloomy place, what I discovered was altogether different. It was beautiful—beautiful in its own, simple way, at least. It had not been finished yet. There were the customary icons of Christ and the Theotokos on a podium toward the middle. (The entrance was from the south side and Orthodox churches and chapels traditionally face east.) In front of these there was a small altar, and behind the altar, against the wall but not yet mounted, there was an icon, written (i.e. painted) by the nuns that commemorated those who suffered here in the room. There was a large middle panel with Christ, the Theotokos and St. John the Forerunner, and the archangels Michael and Gabriel behind him. To either side there were many saints standing in doorways.

All of these figures, including Christ, were dressed in white, which is not typical. My conjecture is that this is because the Orthodox wear white at funerals, which itself is out of an understanding of death and suffering being redemptive and, ultimately, defeated by the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. In baptism we die with Christ and don a white garment, our wedding clothes for the feast of the Lamb that was slain.

Below these figures the prisoners kneel in a circle offering up to Christ bowls of their blood, which they shed for their faith. The many smaller, surrounding square panels around the border, depict the tortures that the prisoners endured. On either side of the icon were two large windows, about the same size as it, with the morning sunlight shining through the thin curtains.

Perhaps this may sound peculiar to some readers. Why not leave the room as it was? This question has been asked by many Romanians as well, Maria said, but none in the end have objected to the chapel.

One survivor of Pitesti bravely returned to see it. He said it was the first time that he could think about that room without reliving the horrific experience he endured there. It was as if, he said, the upside down cross of the devil had been turned back by Christ.

While the martyrs and confessors of Pitesti are not currently canonized by the Romanian Orthodox Church due to the involvement of many, before they were imprisoned, in a political group that became radical at the end of the 1930s, the victims here were only students when they were arrested, and ultimately they were clearly targeted for their faith. I cannot judge the situation myself, and it seems that Romanians are still debating the question, but I can say that in the early Church, suffering and especially dying for one’s faith was thought to cleanse a person of all sin. Indeed, many stories survive to us today of executioners in Rome being converted through the testimony of the death of the martyrs they killed, after which they were themselves executed for their faith and were subsequently commemorated as saints too. If them, then why not these men, even if whatever controversy there is surrounding them is in some cases true?

From what I could tell, at least, it will only be a matter of time. Maria and her family at least think so. In the meantime they are interviewing the remaining survivors and publishing memoirs of the survivors. And they are continuing to build the chapel, of course, sanctifying what once was a cursed temple of evil but which now witnesses to the hope of the resurrection as a humble palace of salvation. This, as well, was the practice of the ancient Church, the beauty of which now shines a bit clearer to me in the morning sunlight of that rainy, Romanian morning in Pitesti.