Istoricul Episcopiei Clujului
History of the Diocese of Cluj

Summary/Abstract: The diocese of Vad, Feleac and Cluj was founded in the summer of 1921 and its first bishop was Archimandrite Nicolae Ivan (September 26th, 1921), ordained in the metropolitan cathedral of Sibiu (November 21, 1921), invested by King Ferdinand I of Romania (December 8th 1821) and installed in the Holy Trinity church in Cluj (December 6/19th, 1921), on the feast of the Holy Hierarch Nicolae. The project of establishing an Orthodox diocese with residence in Cluj was launched by Bishop Andrei Şaguna, in July 1863, in the context of negotiations with the government in Vienna on the re-establishment and organization of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolitan Church in Transylvania, Banat and Hungary. Vienna did not approve the project, but Metropolitan Şaguna left its realization in the care of the national church congresses, making available to the future diocese, by will, the amount of 25,000 florins. In the following decades, the issue was discussed and postponed several times, in 1909 it was finally decided to establish the Diocese of Cluj, which would include the Transylvanian Orthodox believers who lived north of the Mureş River. The decision was materialized only after the end of the First World War and the union of Transylvania with Romania, in September 1919 the nucleus of the new diocese was organized in Cluj. The founders wanted to show that although it is a new diocese, it actually renews the medieval tradition of the diocese of Vad (XVI-XVII centuries) and the metropolia of Feleac (XV-XVI centuries), so they named it the Diocese of Vad, Feleac and Cluj. The text of the historical priest and publicist Sebastian Stanca, originally published in 1923, is the first historiographic synthesis that presents the itinerary of the modern history of the Diocese of Cluj.

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