Ioan Ianolide

Ioan Ianolide was born on 27 January 1919 at Dobrotești, in Teleorman, and died on 5 February 1986 in Bucharest, after twenty-⁠three years of detention. He was one of the leaders of the group of mystics in the communist prisons and the author of the memoirs Return to Christ, published after his death. He is venerated by the faithful, without synodal canonization; his cult, like that of the other "saints of the prisons", is contested by some historians because of his legionary past.

He was the second son of Nicolae and Aspasia Ianolide. He was a member of the Brotherhoods of the Cross, a legionary organization, and in 1941 the Antonescu regime sentenced him to twenty-⁠five years of prison. At Aiud he belonged to the group of mystics, with Valeriu Gafencu, Traian Trifan, Traian Marian, Anghel Papacioc and Marin Naidim, a group oriented toward the prayer of the heart and liturgical life. He then passed through Pitești, Gherla and Târgu Ocna, where he was close to Gafencu until the latter's death in 1952. In 1958 he was moved to Bucharest in a trial of the mystic group of Târgu Ocna, regarded by the Securitate as an "organized criminal group"; the care of the sick in room 4, collections and moral support were counted as subversive activity.

In prison he refused re-⁠education for many years; when a colonel spoke to him of it, he answered that he settled his problems of conscience by himself. He was sent as punishment to a room of the mentally ill, then to the punishment cell and to the hospital, until his release in 1964. He said later that he was hungry for more than twenty years and spent almost five years in total isolation.

He came out stiff with rheumatism, ill with "cellulitis". He wished to enter a monastery, but the authorities did not allow it. He worked in a laboratory, then in a cooperative, carving in bone medallions and small crosses that he gave to people, to urge them: Bear your cross. He married Constanța and was refused a passport. Between 1981 and 1984, watched and threatened by the Securitate, he wrote hundreds of pages, gathered in Return to Christ and other works, published posthumously. Many accounts of Valeriu Gafencu come from them.

He fell ill with liver cirrhosis and a malignant tumour and died on 5 February 1986, cared for by his wife. He was buried in the cemetery of Cernica Monastery, in a place he had prepared, to be among monks; on the cross stand the words Everything in Christ. The Church has not canonized him; his book, however, has been widely read and criticized by some historians as a source of legends about prison life.