Daniil (Sandu) Tudor

Daniil Sandu Tudor, born Alexandru Teodorescu on 22 December 1896 in Bucharest, was a journalist, poet and hieroschemamonk, called Agathon at Antim and Daniil at Rarău, the initiator of the Burning Bush prayer group. He died in Aiud prison on 17 November 1962, the date usually given, though other sources allow a later year. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization.

He studied painting, was a naval officer and a teacher, and at Chișinău, through Gala Galaction, deputy director of the Theological Boarding School. In 1928 he spent eight months on Mount Athos, a visit that changed his life. He published the weekly Floarea de foc (1932-1936) and the daily Credința (1933-1938). Unlike the right-⁠wing circles of the time, he distanced himself in the 1930s from the extreme right and from antisemitism and contributed to left-⁠wing publications; he was arrested in 1942 by the Siguranța together with other left-⁠wing writers and held two years at Târgu Jiu. On his return he found his family scattered and resolved to become a monk.

In 1948 he was tonsured a monk at Antim Monastery, with the name Agathon, having Father Cleopa Ilie as confessor. From 1944 intellectuals and students had gathered at Antim around the Russian confessor Ioan Culîghin, among them Vasile Voiculescu, Dumitru Stăniloae, Mircea Vulcănescu, Arsenie Papacioc, Benedict Ghiuș, Sofian Boghiu and Bartolomeu Anania, for the study of the prayer of the heart. This was the Burning Bush. The meetings lasted three years, until Patriarch Justinian forbade them.

In 1949 he was arrested and convicted, after a staged trial, of espionage and high treason, and served until 1952 hard labour at the Danube-⁠Black Sea Canal. In 1955 he became the hieroschemamonk Daniil at Rarău Monastery. On 14 June 1958 he was arrested again, as head of the Burning Bush group, and on 8 November 1958 sentenced to twenty-⁠five years of hard imprisonment, in a file in which, though it was not his case, legionarism was also charged against him. Two years of this detention he spent with heavy chains on his legs. He died at Aiud. Some of his writings have entered the liturgical use of the Romanian Church.