Wolves in sheep’s clothing
For several years, I accompanied the descendants of the Romanian legionaries to commemorations and memorial services, and spoke with leaders and members of communities gathered around important figures in the local fascist movement. I wanted to understand how they reconcile the memory of relatives they admire for their anti-communist struggle with their role in a group based on extremist ideology that resorted to armed violence. At the same time, we have observed how the ideas promoted by these neo-legionary groups have gained increasing resonance in society. Romania was on the verge of having a fascist president, and three extremist parties entered the parliament. How did we get here?
Every year, the children and grandchildren of the Romanian legionaries honor the memory of their ancestors in public. They are of all ages. There are activists, students, university professors, public employees, and even former legionaries who survived political prisons. They are all united by a common vision of their ancestors, whom they consider models of morality and national heroes, combining the Christian Orthodox religion with nationalism. When they talk about them, however, they omit the fact that they were actively involved in one of the bloodiest movements in Romania’s recent history. The dead have been symbolically transformed into icons, and legionaries such as Valeriu Gafencu, Constantin Oprișan, and priest Calciu Dumitreasa are called “saints of the prisons.” In February 2025, the Romanian Orthodox Church canonized 16 new saints, including three legionaries.
For several years, the most important local neo-legionary organizations have been fighting in the public sphere for the memory and rehabilitation of the legionaries of a century ago. The “Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu” Foundation and the “Gogu Puiu și Haiducii Dobrogei” Association were founded by blood relatives of members who held important positions in the Legionary Movement.
Ogoranu was a member of the Frățiile de Cruce (Brotherhood of the Cross) and participated in the Legionary rebellion of 1941, during which legionaries looted, tortured, and killed Jews. During the period when the Legionary Movement formed the government with Ion Antonescu, Puiu served as a soldier in the marshal’s guard battalion, then turned against him and participated in the rebellion, serving as a legionary police commissioner in Constanța. For years, the aforementioned NGOs have been organizing conferences, book launches, hikes, religious memorial services, educational visits with students to former communist prisons, and survival camps in the mountains for teenagers and young adults. Until last year, they were also part of the “Școala Altfel” (A Different Kind of School) program.
Contemporary legionaries commemorate those of the past without mentioning their political positions in the hierarchical structure of the movement or during the rule of Marshal Antonescu. The Legion of the Archangel Michael, the Iron Guard, or Everything for the Country—names used over time by the Legionary Movement—were responsible for numerous antisemitic student violence, political assassinations, synagogue looting, attacks, and killing the Jews. For relatives and sympathizers, they are heroes; for historians guided by facts, they are decision-makers who formed the local branch of European fascism at the beginning of the last century and laid the foundations for the Romanian Holocaust.
Inspired by their grandfathers, fathers, or uncles, whom they believe contributed to a cleaner, more redeemable society, some descendants want to draw younger generations into the fight against a new collective enemy. This enemy, they say, comes from the West and threatens Romanian traditions and Christian morality. They call this enemy “new communism,” “sexo-Marxism,” or “Sorosism,” concepts invented by conservatives and ultra-nationalists to discredit human rights movements.
Since 2018, I have been documenting the presence of some of the Legionnaires’ descendants in the Romanian public sphere. I have attended their commemorations and memorial services, I have spoken with active members and participants. I have noticed that, beyond testimonies about the suffering in communist prisons, the lectures given by guests at these events are often opportunities to turn the public against groups of people or ideas they disagree with, while placing war criminals and extremists at the forefront of history, under the banner of the anticommunist struggle. Although the fighters in the mountains and those who died in communist prisons were not only legionnaires, their descendants are trying to reclaim the movement for their relatives. Historians, teachers, priests, and, more recently, politicians of all ages come to these events and defend the local fascist movement of the early 20th century. They draw a line to the present day when, many of them say, they feel just as victimized by “human rights ideology.” Narratives of rejection of those who do not fit into their vision of Romanian normality and identity were initially shared in closed circles of Legionary sympathizers.
However, the rise to power of the extremist Alliance for the Union of Romanians party opened the door to new followers who shared similar ideas but did not have the courage to express them publicly. Even though it does not have the support of all nationalists, this party has become a mouthpiece for the normalization of extremism directly from Parliament. AUR Senator Sorin Lavric speaks admiringly in public about the Legionnaires of the past, and AUR leader George Simion held his wedding ceremony in the style of interwar commander Corneliu Zelea Codreanu.
In the 2024 parliamentary elections, the extremist AUR party came in second place nationally. At the same time, two other extremist parties, the Young People’s Party and S.O.S. Romania, entered parliament. Romania was also on the verge of having a fascist president, Călin Georgescu, who also contributed to the normalization of Legionary ideology in the public sphere [in the repeated presidential elections, AUR leader George Simion came second – translator’s comment].
Although events dedicated to Legionary figures have been taking place in Romania for many years, the authorities took action for the first time to commemorate the former Legionary leader, Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, only at the end of last year, in Tâncăbești.
On April 17, 2025, eight people were brought to trial because, according to the Ilfov Tribunal Prosecutor’s Office, they made the Nazi salute, wore Legionary clothing, or waved the tricolor flag “with the fascist symbol symbolizing the superiority of the white race.” The trial is pending.
To understand how we got here, we have reconstructed part of the path that connects the Legionary movement of the interwar period to the present, where some of its descendants carry on its ideology, in a series of three extensive articles.
A Nazi salute on a summer day
At the Brâncoveanu monastery in Sâmbăta de Sus, July 24, 2022 seems like an ordinary Sunday. The priests begin the service early, and people line up in the spacious courtyard to light candles for the living and the dead.
Around 10 a.m., however, several men dressed in black begin marching along the monastery paths, waving the tricolor flag. Nothing seems to stand in their way, not even the heat that has been beating down on the Făgăraș Mountains since the early hours of the morning. They stop in front of a cross, where other strong men lay out a table with braided bread, wine, and red candles. They spread the tricolor on the grass and in the arms of the people sitting in two columns: to the left of the cross are those in traditional costumes, to the right are those wearing dark sunglasses and black T-shirts. They read ULTRAS, alongside the logo “United under the tricolor,” a group of football supporters founded by the leader of the extremist party AUR, George Simion, often involved in scandals and violence in stadiums. Some of their flags bear the images of legionnaires Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu and Valeriu Gafencu, former members of youth groups in the Legionary Movement.
This is how, after almost 80 years, the commemoration of the anti-communist armed resistance that took place in the late 1940s in the Făgăraș Mountains begins. After the establishment of the first communist government, led by Petru Groza, people with different political orientations, including legionaries, took up arms and hid in the mountains as an act of civil disobedience against the new political regime. The new rulers sought to punish all those who had been members of parties with a different ideology from Stalinism or who simply disagreed with the new state policy. The harshest sentences handed down by the communist courts were death and hard labour for life. Since 2011, this historical event has been commemorated every summer by the descendants of Legionnaires who held important positions.
The Legionary Movement, together with Marshal Ion Antonescu and the Romanian army, was responsible for the assassination and persecution of ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities, following the model of the Nazi Party. Between 280,000 and 380,000 Romanian and Ukrainian Jews and around 11,000 Roma were killed in the territories occupied by the Romanians as a final solution adopted by the administration led by the marshal. Professor Raul Hilberg, who founded the academic branch of Holocaust studies worldwide, said of Romania that “no country except Germany was involved in the massacre of Jews on such a scale.”
However, in 2022 I see a large presence of parliamentarians and mayors from today’s democratic society at these memorial services. While priests bless the food on the table, politicians lay wreaths on behalf of those being commemorated. There come a liberal representative of the Brașov County Council – Vice-President Șerban Todorică, Sorin Constantin Mânduc – former mayor of Făgăraș and current member of the Fabricii de Pulberi, a state-owned explosives manufacturing company, two senators – Sorin Lavric (AUR) and Marius Toanchină (PSD) –, four mayors and a deputy mayor of the surrounding localities. The local press is also present. I see the editor of the newspaper Monitorul de Făgăraș, Lucia Baki, and her colleague, Iosif Baki, who advertise and praise these memorial services every year.
At the end of the ceremony, the priests and politicians disperse into the crowd.
While the lyrics of the song “Like a tear of blood, / A star has fallen, / A path of fire and victory / For your Guard” can be heard from the loudspeakers, the men and women in black and white columns perform the Nazi salute and raise their hands to form a symbolic roof over the cross at the foot of the mountains.
“Come on, man, what? Are you afraid?” a woman scolds her husband for not raising his hand. Although this salute is illegal in Romania, he raises his hand like in the 1930s, when the first commander of the Legionnaires saluted the people, or in 1940, when the Legionary Movement formed the government and celebrated victory alongside German diplomats.
Photo by Andrei Pungovschii.
After the memorial service, I meet Toma Tătaru, then a student at the Faculty of History at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iași. The day before, he had presented his thesis on the anti-communist resistance of Legionary students in the Bacău Mountains in the Aula of the Orthodox Academy, a conference hall belonging to the Brâncoveanu monastery in the city. He says he first read about the Legionary Movement when he was ten years old, in a book that classified it as terrorist. “They were so virulent that you had to question it,” he says, after we sit down on a bench in the shade. Toma Tătaru, now 25, has been president of the Iași Student League for several years and is one of the youngest speakers at the memorial service in Sâmbăta de Sus. He is tall and thin and wears a black T-shirt with the image of former Legionnaire Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu, under which is written “the struggle continues.”
He started reading more and found that he resonated with the ideas promoted by the legionaries because, he says, they were religious and fought against the communist dictatorship. “If people are going to speak badly of them in public, why not speak well of them too?” the young man thought.
Toma Tătaru says that 17 ancestors of his were imprisoned for political reasons during communism, four of whom were legionaries. He describes each degree of kinship with precision and reconstructs his family tree in minute detail. He speaks proudly of his legionary relatives, who were leaders of regional groups called “nests” or youth organizations called Brotherhoods of the Cross. In our conversation, he recalls Constantin Oprișan, one of his relatives and the leader of the Brotherhoods at the national level, including during the violence and looting committed by legionaries during the 1941 rebellion. He later died in prison. “With the soul of a child at that time, I couldn’t help but empathize with the victims [of communism],” Toma Tătaru explains his sympathy for the arrested legionaries.
His first contact with the stories of his imprisoned relatives came through the memoirs of detainees that he read at Diaconești Monastery, which produced and sold books on the subject. Among them, there are memoirs of former Legionary political prisoners and children’s books, in which, among other things, “a brave little boy chooses martyrdom for his people.”
Toma justifies the violence of the legionaries by portraying their leader, Horia Sima, as an incompetent leader. After the “good” period of the Legionary Movement, under Codreanu’s protective wing, Sima came to power and allied himself with Marshal Ion Antonescu, under whose leadership the Holocaust took place. Together they formed the National Legionary State, which lasted 138 days and included some of the most violent episodes in our recent history. Toma speaks admiringly of the Frățiile de Cruce, the student organizations founded by Codreanu, where future generations of soldiers were trained, and he makes Sima the scapegoat. “When Horia Sima comes, he eliminates the rules and all the thugs can join [the brotherhoods],” he explains. He blames the Legionary rebellion on communists in disguise, whom he claims to have learned about from one source—even though he boasts that he verifies all information from three sources.
The Student League, an NGO representing the rights of students at the Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iași, which Toma leads, has as its honorary president Silvian Emanuel Man, a fiery young man who has been whitewashing the image of fascists for years under the umbrella of anti-communist resistance. Two years ago, Man spoke about the “saints of the prisons” on Mihail Neamțu’s TV show. In addition to internal university issues, the League also organizes reading circles and book launches, where former members and priests of the Legionary Movement are often rehabilitated. They particularly value their ties with the church and Christian student associations, such as the Association of Orthodox Christian Students in Romania, which has branches in several cities across the country. The League also has a branch in Cluj and another in Bessarabia.
“Today we live with human rights and we are ignored and forgotten”
“It’s terrible to grow up without a father,” says Zoe Rădulescu, the daughter of a legionary, born in prison during the early days of the Stalinist regime in Bucharest. “In the village where I grew up, the children no longer had fathers. All the men were in prison.”
She recounts her childhood in a large hall of the Curtea Brâncovenească hotel in Constanța, where the centenary of the birth of Gogu Puiu, a Legionary policeman and leader of an anticommunist armed resistance group in the region, is being celebrated. It is March 2018, and the service is being conducted by the Archbishop of Tomis, His Eminence Teodosie, accompanied by the Choir of the Archdiocese. At the end of 2024, Teodosie was sanctioned by the Romanian Orthodox Church for engaging in political propaganda for the extremist candidate Călin Georgescu and Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Apart from this, he was implicated in numerous criminal cases for influence peddling, bribery, and corruption.
Members of the nationalist-Christian organization Frăția Ortodoxă (Orthodox Brotherhood), each holding a large tricolor flag, and actor Dan Puric are standing guard at the event. The Brâncovenească Court also has a long history of hosting events that encourage, more directly or more subtly, hatred towards certain categories of people. In 2019, it appeared as the organizer of the March for Life and the conference entitled: “Wolves in sheep’s clothing: Why does death claim to be life? Sex education (pornography, gender ideology), reproductive health (abortion, contraception), gender identity (LGBT, homosexuality).
Having reached adulthood under dictatorship, the children of legionnaires say they were discriminated. Maria Trifan (89), a frequent guest at memorial services in the Făgăraș Mountains, claims she lost two jobs because she was related to a legionary activist—at a company that operated military maps in Bucharest and at a tool factory. Maria is an elegant woman, dressed all in purple, with gray hair tied back in a bun, and the Iron Guard emblem on her chest. Her father, Traian Trifan, was prefect of Brașov during the National Legionary government led by General Ion Antonescu, alongside the then president of the Legionaries, Horia Sima. He spent 16 years in prison after the Legionary Rebellion, one of the bloodiest moments of the movement. Sitting on a bench in the courtyard of the monastery in Sâmbăta de Sus, Maria recounts in 2019 that after her father’s release, the whole family was placed under house arrest and their lives were closely monitored by the Securitate. “You are amazing, but you have one big flaw: your autobiography,” she recalls one of her bosses telling her at a tool factory. She says she was forced to resign from another job. Now, she is retired.
She believes that Romania should be ruled by pure-blooded Romanians, unlike the former King Carl II, who chose sex over politics with “the Jewish sow who gave him everything” (Elena Lupescu, ed.). The former Legionary prefect is now honored in the Patriarchate’s newspaper, Lumina, and his memoir was released by the Petru Vodă Monastery publishing house, with the help of his daughter. She fondly remembers the kind words her father said about Zelea Codreanu, whom he had known in person. “He was a very handsome man and had incredible appeal with the public,” she says of the Legionary leader, whom she claims never did any harm. “The violence came after the captain’s death. He never spoke ill of anyone.”
After the Revolution, Elena Puiu-Sechila, president of the “Gogu Puiu și Haiducii Dobrogei” Association says that she also felt discriminated against as the granddaughter of a Legionnaire by her high school history teacher. “In 12th grade, I risked not being able to take my baccalaureate exams,” she says of the moment when her teacher changed his attitude towards her.
“The wolf has only changed its coat. In the past, they locked us up behind bars, but today we live with human rights and are ignored and forgotten. Behind bars, you ended up thinking, you kept your faith. Today it’s much worse,” says Galina Răduleanu, a former psychiatrist and political prisoner in the 1960s, who participates almost every year as a speaker at memorial services for Legionary figures, in Sâmbăta de Sus in 2019. “Is post-December freedom more restrictive than the boot of communism?” asked rhetorically in 2016, at a book launch for the memoirs of Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, at the Mihai Eminescu bookstore in central Bucharest. In the 2016 video, she recounts that her father, a priest, was also a sympathizer of the Legionary Movement. The book was published by Sânziana, coordinated by Florin Dobrescu, secretary of the Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu Foundation.
The children’s testimonies reinforce the role of the legionaries as victims and place them among the heroes who sacrificed their lives for an ideal of the country. Personal pride overlaps with a kind of nationalist pride for the family’s contribution to the making of history.
The descendants of the legionaries are not the only ones who attend their relatives’ memorial services. While documenting the presence of the legionaries’ descendants in public spaces, I met people who were looking for a place where they could feel connected to a world made up of their beliefs.
In 2018, on my way back from a commemoration in Constanța, I met Dragoș. He was 32 at the time and worked for a multinational company in Bucharest. Dragoș is the first legionary sympathizer I have heard talk about the problems of the younger generations—depression and stress. According to him, the solutions would be more moral guidelines and more discipline. He doesn’t think people should be aggressive like they used to be, but he feels that back then people kept their word, they were “more manly.”
Ten years ago, he met Codreanu’s grandson, Nicador Florea Codreanu, at his association, Acțiunea Română (Romanian Action). He liked his grandson’s soldierly presence, cold and tough. But they were too radical. “Many frustrated people came, living in a romantic world of the 1930s. They said they wanted to shoot people. Nowadays, you can’t fight with a revolver.” There he met the secretary of the Ogoranu Foundation, Florin Dobrescu, who seemed “more responsible” to him, and since then he has been following him at commemorations.
In 2019, in Sâmbăta de Sus, we met a 60-year-old Saxon who told us that he had paid bribes during the communist period so that he could emigrate to Germany. Later, among strangers, he felt the need to reconnect with his past in his country and found the website of the Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu Foundation online. He did not become a member, but he contributes financially and participates in their commemorative events.
In 2022, I met Nelu (54), a security guard at a school in Cluj. He feels that his place is among the descendants of the legionaries, especially after his divorce from his wife, whom he says cheated on him. He believes that the emancipation of women after the 1989 revolution is just a power game for sex, money, and influence. He writes novels and poems and describes himself as an anti-communist fighter.
“The saints of the prisons want us to take their place”
The lectures and memorial services attended by all these people serve to commemorate and reinforce the status of the legionaries as victims, but at the same time they do something else: they paint a picture of a collective enemy.
In addition to communists, whose contemporary counterparts are “sexo-Marxists,” “progressives,” or “Sorosists,” ethnic and sexual minorities are, in their eyes, the ones who bear the brunt of the threat in contemporary society. Some of the invited speakers accuse ethnic minorities of siding with the aggressors during communism and claim that the communists attempted genocide against ethnic Romanians.
“The Judeo-Bolsheviks hid behind the mask of class struggle, fighting to destroy the Romanian ethnic elite, and the greatest patriots were the legionaries,” says former university professor Corvin Lupu at the 2019 memorial service at the Brâncoveanu monastery, gesturing with his palms outstretched. Corvin Lupu was then a professor at the Faculty of Social and Human Sciences at the Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu, in the Department of International Relations, Political Science, and Security Studies, where he was also a member of the scientific committee. He also writes for the magazine of the Romanian Intelligence Service reservists.
From the same department comes Professor Tiberiu Costăchescu, another speaker who portrays the legionaries as victims and minorities as aggressors. “It’s fashionable now to address each other with so-called politically correct language. I have never done so and never will,” he said in Sâmbăta de Sus, also in 2019. He gazes intently at the audience, but does not look anyone in the eye. “I speak with Christian language, with the language of this country where ethnic groups may have suffered, but the vast majority of those who had to endure pain and sacrifice were Romanians.” Costăchescu was prefect of Sibiu for a year, during Victor Ciorbea’s term as prime minister, then ambassador of Romania to Zimbabwe and Zambia. In the meantime, the two professors have retired and no longer teach at the Lucian Blaga University in Sibiu.
“We did not oppress anyone. We did not knowingly harm others. We were the oppressed,” says Dumitru Flucuș, mayor of Șinca Nouă at the time, in 2022. This politician migrated from the PNL to the AUR, adding another brick to the denial of the crimes of the last century. The former mayor also boasts that, for 12 years, he met regularly with students and told them about the local legionary nests.
Last year, at the initiative of the Bucharest Prefecture, the Bucharest Municipal School Inspectorate banned the activities of two NGOs of Legionary descendants in schools because they promoted “activities and messages specific to the far-right ideology.” The lecture, which was supposed to take place in classrooms in 2024, was held at the headquarters of the “Ion Gavrilă Ogoranu” Foundation, where several of the teachers who had facilitated access to the children were also invited. Cristina Tudose, one of the participating teachers, thanked the hosts and then recited a verse from Îndemn la luptă (Call to Battle), a poem written by Radu Gyr, who was officially declared a war criminal:
“You are not defeated when you bleed,
nor when your eyes are filled with tears.
True defeat
is giving up on your dreams.”
“Let us be active and pray!” adds Alexandrina Mihail, another teacher and founder of the Peace Movement, which campaigns, among other things, for Romania’s withdrawal from NATO.
Lectures aimed at young people, designed to clean up the image of the legionaries and present them as moral role models, continue to be held in public institutions and are initiated not only by the legionaries’ descendants, but also by extremist priests and researchers.
In March 2025, the I.C. Brătianu Hall of the Metropolitan Center for Education and Culture in Bucharest, which belongs to the City Hall, hosted the conference “Young people in communist prisons, a model of moral resistance.” Three legionaries were featured on the poster: Gafencu, priest Calciu Dumitreasa, and Ioan Ianolide.
“The Romanian family is under extreme attack today from divorce, pseudo-relationships, and cohabitation. Not to mention the alterations between men and women, who claim to be families,“ said priest Tudor Peiu to the nearly two hundred young people who filled the hall to capacity. ”We must seek the state that will lead us to sacrifice”—this is his antidote to today’s consumerism and comfort.
The event was organized by the nationalist association Neamunit and the Facebook page “Sfinții închisorilor” (Saints of the Prisons). On paper, Neamunit includes former and current public officials such as Matei Damian, director of the General Directorate of Urban Planning and Land Use at the Bucharest City Hall and former supporter of the Coalition for the Family, and Vlad Miriță, former tenor at the Bucharest National Opera. The wife of president Aurelian Surulescu, Aurelia, was a lawyer at the Romanian Road Authority.
Writer and theologian Danion Vasile, who is launching a book about legionnaires seen as martyrs at the same event, begins his speech with verses from Radu Gyr’s “Crezul” (Creed), and the young people stand up with the conviction that they are hearing the creed recited in church. Vasile clutches a large wooden cross in his hand. “The superheroes known to the Church beat any superhero in stories. Let us not be seduced by the virus of political correctness. Let us have a dignified and courageous attitude, even if we end up in prison!” he shouts. “The saints of the prisons want us to take their place, not just honor them with memorial services!”
Hip-hop singer Sișu, known for his work with the band La Familia, whose biggest hit is “Tupeu de borfaș” (Thug’s Guts), and who was arrested in 2003 for drug trafficking, is also invited. He says he was driven here by the legionnaires Valeriu Gafencu and Radu Gyr. He compares the country to a tree that bore fruit in the interwar period and left them to rot in prisons.
Some of these “saints” being honored, however, were not simply Christians who went to church and believed in God. They supported, either explicitly or implicitly, a political movement based on hatred and violence. Priests and fascists, as well as fascist priests, were welcomed with open arms after the Revolution by the Romanian Orthodox Church, simply because they had fought together against communism, a regime under which all religious cults had suffered. It is important to remember, according to historian and researcher Adrian Cioflâncă, that “joining the Legionary Movement in the interwar period was, and remains today, an act of individual will. Unlike during the communist period, when all individuals were forcibly absorbed into the state party and mass organizations controlled by the PCR, membership in the Legionary movement was and remained a personal choice. Those who are part of an extremist organization and promote anti-Semitic ideas choose to do so.”
Almost a century later, Legionary propaganda is still alive and strongly supported by revisionist historians, researchers, and professors who take care to normalize fascist messages and figures among the younger generations, even in classrooms or through an active cultural life, with book launches and conferences.
The text was first published in Romanian by Scena9.
Cover photo: Corneliu Zelea Codreanu conmemoration, 2024.
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