Romanian Orthodox Quotes

ALL POST-COMMUNIST SOCIETIES ARE uprooted ones because Communism uprooted traditions, so nothing fits with anything else,” explained the philosopher Patapievici. Fifteen years earlier, when I had last met him, he had cautioned: “The task for Romania is to acquire a public style based on impersonal rules, otherwise business and politics will be full of intrigue, and I am afraid that our Eastern Orthodox tradition is not helpful in this regard. Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia, Russia, Greece—all the Orthodox nations of Europe—are characterized by weak institutions. That is because Orthodoxy is flexible and contemplative, based more on the oral traditions of peasants than on texts. So there is this pattern of rumor, lack of information, and conspiracy….”11 Thus, in 1998, did Patapievici define Romanian politics as they were still being practiced a decade and a half later. Though in 2013, he added: “No one speaks of guilt over the past. The Church has made no progress despite the enormous chance of being separated from the state for almost a quarter century. The identification of religious faith with an ethnic-national group, I find, is a moral heresy.” Dressed now in generic business casual and wearing fashionable glasses, Patapievici appeared as a figure wholly of the West—more accurately of the global elite—someone you might meet at a fancy

Bishop Trifa embraced his past, almost taunting immigration authorities for more than thirty years to come after him. Politically well-connected, Trifa became the national leader of the Romanian Orthodox Church in America.

When he eventually returned to his native country, Vlad was called “Dracul” by the boyars, who knew of his honor, because he was a Draconist, a member of the Order of the Dragon (draco in Latin), dedicated to fighting Turks and heretics. On the other hand, the people at large, unfamiliar with the details of Vlad's investiture in the order, seeing a dragon on his shield, and later on his coins, called him “Dracul” with the meaning of the “devil,” because in Orthodox iconography, particularly those ikons that depicted St. George slaying a dragon, the dragon symbolized the devil. The word drac (-ul is simply the definite article “the”) can mean both “devil” and “dragon” in the Romanian language. It is important also to underscore the fact that, at the time, the use of this particular nickname in no way implied that Dracul was an evil figure, in some way connected with the forces of darkness, as some have suggested. The name Dracula, immortalized by Bram Stoker, was later adopted, or rather inherited, by Dracul's son. Dracula, with the a, is simply a diminutive, meaning “son of the dragon.” (The son inherited the title Dracul by virtue of the statutes of the order.) Evil implications were attached to the name only much later by Dracula's political detractors, who exploited its double meaning.