Paper short abstract:

The paper will look at the secular time of post-socialism experience and the sacred time of Sainthood heritage to discuss the role of historicity on the construction of religious truthfulness in Orthodox Christianity.

Paper long abstract:

In the lead up of the Soviet collapse, Eastern Christians seemed to elude from the hardened core of atheist Marxism and religion was vindicated by history. The spirit that spawned from the Romanian democratic revolution attempted to glorify the anti-communist resistance. Prisons which hosted the regime's dissidents were transformed in heritage sites, displaying the hypostasis of political and religious oppression. Deceased prisoners became "martyrs of communism" and Saints for a large group of Orthodox Romanians. Their historicity was incorporated in the production of religious truthfulness.

The paper will discuss truthfulness as the moment of selection within the array of the possibility of specific elements, facilitating "decision-events" to form a certain individuality, and converting from one subjectivity to another within the same tradition. Secular temporality becomes a part in the matrix of faith, creating a rupture within a discursive tradition of continuity.

Historicity of martyrs of communism can be creatively beared by influencing the formation of religious truth. The ethnographic material will show how in constructing religious truth affectivity of the past prevails over the reference, or historicity prevails over historicism. The believer neutralizes the causality of political time by claiming the agency of religious formation. The memory of the past is enacted, creating frameworks for certifying the Sanctity by concomitantly experiencing intimate relation with the divine in the present and give a verisimilar vote for eschatological discourses of the near future. Martyrs of communism, as Saints, can fusion the past-present-future through their intercessory power.