The Confessors of Ardeal
The Romanian hierarchs and priests of seventeenth-century Transylvania who suffered imprisonment, deposition and death rather than give up the Orthodox faith under Calvinist and Habsburg pressure, commemorated together on April 24. Distinct from the eighteenth-century Confessors of Transylvania kept on October 21.
In seventeenth-century Transylvania the Orthodox Romanians were the majority population and had no legal standing as a church. Their metropolitans held office at the pleasure of a Calvinist princely court that expected them to accept its doctrine and its books, and the two commemorated here refused. Ilie Iorest was deposed, imprisoned and beaten, then released to spend his last years begging alms in Moldavia and Russia to pay the fine imposed on him. Sava Brancovici was deposed in 1680, tried, tortured and imprisoned, and died soon after his release.
Joseph the Confessor of Maramureș, bishop of that region, was likewise driven from his see for holding to Orthodoxy. Elijah the Wallachian is kept on the same day among the confessors of these lands.
They are commemorated on April 24 by the Romanian Church, which glorified them in 1955. They are not the same company as the Confessors of Transylvania kept on October 21 — those suffered a century later, under the Habsburg pressure to accept the union with Rome.