Oprea of Salistie

Holy Martyr Oprea of Salistie was a ploughman of Săliștea Sibiului in Transylvania who defended the true faith against the pressure to bring the Orthodox into union with Rome, in the time of Empress Maria Theresa (1740-1780).

He lived with his wife, Stana, and his children in good piety. At that time the Habsburg authorities took the Orthodox people's churches, drove out their priests, burdened with taxes those who would not bow to Rome and filled the prisons. Oprea prepared himself with fasting and prayer, and with the blessing of the expelled priests and the counsel of wise elders he sought out the Orthodox faithful in the mountains and valleys, encouraging those who suffered. When he asked the ruler of the land to stop the persecutions, he was rebuked as a rebel and threatened with prison and death. In the autumn of 1748 he went to Vienna to complain to the empress, pointing out that the union with Rome had been made so secretly that even the priests did not know what it was. The empress listened to him craftily and secretly ordered him imprisoned on his return, but Oprea, learning of it, stayed in the Banat as a shepherd.

Since the sufferings of the faithful could no longer be borne, he went to Vienna again before Easter, asking either for a bishop of their own faith or free passage to leave the country. The empress ordered him seized and sentenced to life in the fortress of Kufstein in the Tyrol. His wife waited for him a long time, dressed in black at the church door, but he did not return. According to other sources, he was sent to Vienna in 1752 together with the priest Moise Măcinic, and both were thrown into Kufstein; in 1784 Stana asked Emperor Joseph II to free him after thirty-⁠two years of captivity, and the prison administration replied that nothing more was known of him. The Orthodox Church in America gives the year of his death as 1776.

He was glorified as a martyr by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1992, together with the other Transylvanian confessors. He is commemorated on 21 October.