5/24/2022
Bogdan Lupescu
And there are even more nuns than monks. They are martyrs! Women live their lives richly adorned with virtues.
The tradition of eremitic life in Romania has never been interrupted: it is still alive, and monks continue to struggle in gorges and precipices.
In this community, which Church chronicles of those times called “wondrous,” the monks abode in perfect harmony and obedience, loving silence, humility, and material poverty, and faithfully following the rules of their Elder: no meat, no glasses of wine.
St. Basil was called here by the icon. That’s what the old-timers around Dălhăuți believe today. After all, the icon brought him from Russia.
I never saw him again, but our meeting turned my life around. I started persistently asking the Patriarchate for a transfer somewhere deep in the mountains, to a remote monastery: “Anywhere! Anywhere where it will be more difficult and more secluded,” I asked.
The last three hermits arrived here in 1998 and have remained in the caves ever since. They haven’t seen anyone from the outside world except him, and even he sees them rarely, when he brings them rusks and Holy Communion.
