Constantin Virgil Gheorghiu (Romanian pronunciation:[konstanˈtinvirˈdʒilɡe̯orˈɡi.u]; September 15, 1916 in Războieni, Romania – June 22, 1992 in Paris, France) was a Romanian writer, best known for his 1949 novel, The 25th Hour, first published by Plon in France.
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He traveled and stayed in Saudi Arabia to learn the Arabic language and the Arab culture, before writing the biography of Muhammad. The book was translated from Romanian to French and to Persian in Iran and in Urdu in Pakistan; unfortunately, this book was never translated into English. Its Hindi translation was being printed in India and was expected to be available by January 2020, with the Hindi title saying "A prophet you do not know".
Between 1942 and 1943, during the regime of General Ion Antonescu, Gheorghiu served in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Romania as an embassy secretary. He went into exile when Soviet troops entered Romania in August 1944. Arrested at the end of World War II by American troops, he eventually settled in France in 1948. A year later, he published the novel Ora 25 (in French: La vingt-cinquième heure; in English: The Twenty-Fifth Hour), written during his captivity.
Gheorghiu was ordained a priest of the Romanian Orthodox Church at the Saint Archangels Church[fr] in Paris on May 23, 1963. In 1966, Patriarch Justinian elevated him to the rank of iconom stavrofor[ro] and in 1970 he was named archpresbyter of the Patriarchate of Constantinople at the Orthodox Center of the Ecumenical Patriarch in Chambésy, Switzerland.[1][2] In 1971 Gheorghiu became Patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church in France.[3]
Gheorghiu's best-known book depicts the plight of a naive Romanian young farmhand, Johann Moritz, under German, Soviet and American occupation of Central Europe. Johann is sent to a labor camp by a police captain who covets his wife, Suzanna. At first, he is tagged as "Jacob Moritz", a Jew. Then, he and fellow Jewish prisoners escape to Hungary, where he is interned as a citizen of an enemy country. The Hungarian government sends its foreign residents as Hungarian "voluntary workers to Nazi Germany". Later, "Moritz János" is "rescued" by a Nazi officer who determines he is a perfect Aryan specimen, and forces him into service in the Waffen SS as a model for German propaganda. Imprisoned after the war, he is severely beaten by his Russian captors, then put on trial by Allied forces because of his work for the Nazis. Meanwhile, Traian, son of the priest Koruga who employed Moritz in their Romanian village, is a famous novelist and minor diplomat whose first internment comes when he is picked up as an enemy alien by the Yugoslavs. Once imprisoned, the two heroes begin an odyssey of torture and despair.
Traian Koruga is deeply unsettled because what he sees as the machinism and inhumanity of the "Western technical society", where individuals are treated as members of a category. Meanwhile, Koruga is writing a book, "The 25th Hour", about Johann Moritz and the ordeal awaiting mankind. In the end, Traian takes his own life in an American-Polish concentration camp, while Johann is forced by the Americans to choose between either enlisting in the army, just as World War III is about to start, or to be interned in a camp (as well as his family) as a citizen from an enemy country.
The book was published in French translation in 1949 and was not published in Romania until 1991 (first time published in Romania by Editura Omegapres, Bucharest, 1991).
La jeunesse du docteur Luther (translated from the Romanian by Livia Lamoure), Éditions Plon, 1965
De la vingt-cinquième heure à l'heure éternelle, Éditions Plon, 1965. Éditions du Rocher, 1990 ISBN2-268-01038-4
Le meurtre de Kyralessa, 1966. The Death of Kyralessa (translated from the French by Marika Mihalyi), Regnery Publishing, Chicago, 1968 ISBN0-8371-7991-2
La tunique de peau, Éditions Plon, 1967 OCLC299584844
La condottiera, Rombaldi, Collection Le Club de la Femme, 1969
Pourquoi m'a-t-on appelé Virgil?, Éditions Plon, 1968
