John of Galesh

Holy Priest Confessor John of Galesh was a Romanian Orthodox priest from the village of Galeș, near Sibiu, who was imprisoned until his death for the Orthodox faith in the second half of the eighteenth century.

In the middle of that century many defenders of the ancestral faith rose from among the Romanian priests and faithful of Transylvania against the attempts of the Habsburg authorities to detach them from Orthodoxy. John was among them, and, since there was no Orthodox bishop in Transylvania, he was ordained at Bucharest or at Râmnic. The Orthodox Church in America describes him as a bishop consecrated at Bucharest, but the Romanian sources speak of a priest. He was one of the boldest defenders of the faith. In 1756 he was arrested and taken in chains to Sibiu. Empress Maria Theresa ordered him taken to the prison of Deva fortress, to be held there until death, but at the end of the following year he was sent under strict guard to the prison at Graz in Austria. A chronicler of Brașov, Radu Duma, says that in 1776 some merchants of Brașov visited him in prison and he told them he would rather die there than abandon the faith of his fathers. Later he was moved to Kufstein, where other Transylvanian confessors had ended their lives.

In 1780 another prisoner, the Serb Gennady Vasich, sent Empress Catherine II and the Russian Synod a letter asking for help for the prisoners, and mentioned a Romanian priest of Transylvania named John who had been suffering captivity for twenty-⁠four years for the Orthodox faith. This was the priest John of Galesh, arrested in 1756. He died in prison and was glorified as a martyr by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1992.

He is commemorated on 21 October, together with Father Moise Măcinic of Sibiel and the other Transylvanian confessors.