Un caiet-jurnal inedit: Întâmplările mai însămnate observate în timpul păstoriei mele (1915), aparținând preotului Ioan Popa din Bucerdea Vinoasă
An Unpublished Diary: the Most Important Occurrences from my Pastorate (1915), Belonging to the Priest Ioan Popa from Bucerdea Vinoasa

Summary/Abstract: A diary identified in the holdings of the Orthodox Parish Bucerdea Vinoasa, preserved at the Alba County Directorate of the National Archives, depicts the events immediately after the ordination happened to the local priest, Ioan Popa. The 23 page text was entitled by the curate the Most Important Occurrences Recorded during my Pastorate . Although he proposed to write continuously, other duties determined him to interrupt for days on end the notes concerning his activity, so that only 13 days from 1915 are noted in his diary. The first account, three pages long, is an autobiography that records all the landmarks of his career: the German school from Aiud, the Greek-Catholic gymnasium from Blaj, the military service accomplished at the 59 Regiment from Salzburg, the period as a trainee in the office of a lawyer from Vintu de Jos, years spent at the Theological Seminary from Arad, then that from Sibiu. He was ordained as a priest of Bucerdea Vinoasa Parish (Alba County), with an old church and 757 believers, a part of them conscripted in the army of the Austrian-Hungarian Empire. In only two months he endowed the church with the ritualistic objects necessary for the religious service, replacing the old ones, worn out, that were in the church, only with the money from donations, delivered sermons and searched for finance to support the school. He interrupts the Written Accounts on 22 November 1915. Other sources record that the priest was arrested and admitted to hospital in Sopron (Hungary), between September 1916 and February 1917, that in November 1918 he was elected president of the National Local Romanian Committee and that he participated, next to 600 people from Bucerdea, in the National Assembly from Alba Iulia, he built a new church between 1923 and 1925. He did not write anymore in his notebook, or if he did leaves were lost from the holdings of the parish. A complete biography of the curate from Bucerdea Vinoasa, retraced from the perspective of the times he lived in and events that he got involved in, would be a necessary retracing approach. For now, the archive leaves, transcribed in the Annex, only told the story of his accommodation in the new parish and his deeds, the way he wanted and knew to put them down in his notebook, ” Notebook 1”, started on 1 January 1915.

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