Priest Ioan Istrati
The martyrdom of the Brâncoveanu family is in the same time fascinating and devastating. It
It draws your tears from the stone of your heart but it builds the ideal of your mind.
A voivode, a prince, a founder of tens of churches, a erudite, a builder of the Romanian baroque style, a secret adviser of the great Western empires, a champion of Christianity of all the Romanians.
He plays wisely with the Barbarian colossus and the Western chancelleries. He opens the country to Renaissance and baroque. He invest hugely in cultural emancipation. He gathers like a broody the culture men, the philologists, the philosophers, the historians, the theologians, the printers from the entire Europe.
By this he stirs the anger of the imperial oligophrenia of death. The sultan feels that Romanians could not be kept in the leash of his baggy trousers and of the foolish ambassadors from the Sublime Porte. The empire was already living its ends. After Soleyman the Magnificent from the defeat at the gates of Vienna, the sultans began to withdraw slowly from Europe too much developed culturally to bow before the yataghan.
The Romanians had passed through the Red Sea of the blood shed by Mircea, Vlad, Iancu, Stephen and Michael. They had been drawn deep in the hesychast chalice of the hundreds of monasteries built by voivodes. They began to wake up like now. And voivode Constantine was the morning blare.
The man who had everything in a minute lost everything. Without his princely glory, in his robe, knelt before the sultan, the voivode saw his sons beheaded like some lambs by the devilish Beast. His universe broke. In a moment he realized the infinite abyss of God`s love Who gives eternity by death. Devastated by the greatest human pain, sharing the Cross of God who saw in history his beloved sons dying Constantine Brâncoveanu urges his sons to accept martyrdom. And from some crushed men killed for their faith, the voivode gives them birth again into eternity, he makes them saints, he fills the sky with them, he tears the pagan crescent and prophesied its ruin and he died embraced by God, entering in glory on the golden gates of the Holy Liturgy without death. How is to keep in your arms like some pearls of heaven the heads of your sons?
From everything to nothingness. And from nothingness to everything.
Pray dear Voivode for our children who lose themselves in the new heathendom.
