Adrian Fageteanu

Adrian Făgețeanu, born Alexandru on 16 November 1912 at Deleni, near Cernăuți, was an archimandrite, a member of the Burning Bush group at Antim Monastery and a great confessor of the twentieth century. He died on 27 September 2011, aged ninety-⁠nine. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization.

His father was a priest. He attended the Aron Pumnul lyceum in Cernăuți and Law, between 1931 and 1937, then worked in the Ministry of the Interior, as police commissioner, at Fălticeni and Bacău, until 1941. He was fascinated, like many intellectuals of the time, by the legionary movement, without enrolling in it. Yet he was arrested in the repression of the rebellion of January 1941 and sentenced to five years; released in June 1941, he was sent to the front, was gravely wounded at Stalingrad, then stayed in the camp at Târgu Jiu until 1943.

In 1943 he resolved to become a monk and received tonsure at Putna, with the name Adrian, then studied Theology at Cernăuți, moved to Suceava. In the summer of 1945 he was arrested again for his work as commissioner and held in the camp at Slobozia until August 1946. In 1947 he came to Bucharest for Philosophy and grew close to Antim Monastery and the Burning Bush, where he met Sandu Tudor, who told him that the legionaries' methods no longer made sense and that the only fight against materialism is the religious one, in monasticism. He organized spiritual retreats after the Athonite model at Crasna and Govora; he said later that he was a kind of right hand of Father Daniil.

He was imprisoned between 1950 and 1956, then settled at Lainici. In 1958 he was arrested again, with the Burning Bush group, and sentenced to twenty years of hard labour. Released in 1964, he served in parishes and at the monasteries of Viforâta, Surpatele and Antim. In 2003, at ninety-⁠one, he went to live as a hermit at Locurele Skete near Lainici, until 2011, when his health worsened. He died on 27 September 2011 at the Marius Nasta hospital in Bucharest and was buried on 1 October 2011 in the cemetery of Lainici Monastery.

His teachings, kept in interviews, speak of abstinence and prayer, which all people have, of obedience and humility as the source of the other gifts, and of sacrifice: only those who know how to sacrifice themselves for others are saved.