page_title: N. Crevedia
section_title: Iron Guard sympathizer
hierarchical_section_title: N. Crevedia / Biography / Iron Guard sympathizer
caption_attribution_description: English: Site where the Romanian shepherd Petrache Lupu claimed to have met with God, on several occassions in 1935. Still revered by some Romanian Orthodox as a holy ground, it was the center of Charismatic worship for much of the interwar period. Located on the outskirts of Maglavit Commune, near Romania's border with Bulgaria, on the northern shore of the lower Danube.Author invokes de minimis on the inclusion of a landmark (votive cross) which may have been erected after 1990, given that Romania does not nominally allow "freedom of panorama", but noting that it would have been impossible to photograph the historical site without also including said monument.
context_page_description: N. Crevedia was a Romanian journalist, poet and novelist, father of the writer-politician Eugen Barbu. Of Muntenian peasant roots, which shaped his commitment to agrarian and then far-right politics, as well as his dialectal poetry and humorous prose, he preferred bohemian life to an academic career. As a writer at Gândirea, Crevedia became a follower of Nichifor Crainic, and worked with him on various other press venues, from Calendarul to Sfarmă-Piatră. Turning to fascism, he sympathized with the Iron Guard, and, in the late 1930s, contributed to the press campaigns vilifying ideological enemies, while also putting out novels, reportage pieces, and anthologies. His affair with the Iron Guard muse Marta Rădulescu was at the center of a literary scandal, and was fictionalized by Crevedia in one of his novels.
  Fluent in Bulgarian, Crevedia became press attaché in the Kingdom of Bulgaria under the National Legionary State, serving to 1946. He was sidelined by the Romanian communist regime in the late 1940s and early '50s, when he was employed as a minor clerk. With his mentor Crainic, Crevedia contributed to the propaganda review Glasul Patriei.
context_section_description: This period also brought him and Crainic into contact with the radically antisemitic Iron Guard. In December 1933, Crevedia was one of the intellectuals who protested in Axa magazine against the government's decision to ban the Guard. During 1935, he was present at Maglavit, one of several Guard sympathizers claiming to have witnessed the religious miracles performed by shepherd Petrache Lupu. In Porunca Vremii, he claimed that Lupu had cured his own uncontrollable blinking. He penned panegyrics to the Guard's Captain Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, an "extraordinary organizer" and "profound thinker who reflects on the current issues facing our nation." In his words, Codreanu, an example of "virility, faith, and sacrifice, [had] managed to make us believe that this Nation has not disappeared." He alternated this cult with that of King Carol II and his "Prince Charming" son, Michael I. Nonetheless, Vizirescu accused him of being a disloyal "servant" of Crainic and an inconsistent, corrupt, ally of the Iron Guard. Reportedly, Crevedia complained to his peers that Crainic was exploiting him.
  Crevedia had another publicized row with the literary critic and historian George Călinescu—later, he acknowledged Călinescu as a "titan of his generation" and "one of our great prose writers", but still criticized him for "work[ing], year upon year, for the Jews". He also applied his polemical energy to more personal causes, for instance attacking a putative former lover, Marta Rădulescu (daughter of the author Dan "Justus" Rădulescu), with a lampoon piece in Viața Literară. A resident of Cluj, she was locally famous as the editor of Revista Mea, a mouthpiece of the Iron Guard. They had allegedly been due to be married, and Rădulescu even wrote a short novel on the topic, but she eventually rejected him. In such texts, Crevedia accused Marta of having stolen his writings—a claim dismissed by Vizirescu and later also by researcher Ion Chinezu. In some of his notes on the scandal, Crevedia also claimed that Marta's ghostwriter was her father "Justus".
  Crevedia took his final revenge on Rădulescu by having her satirized in the 1936 novel Buruieni de dragoste ("Love Weeds"). Some two years after the scandal, Crevedia married Maria Mutu, in a religious ceremony with Crainic as godfather. Maria was a niece of the Gândirea novelist Gib Mihăescu, in whose house she lived before marriage; she worked as a professor of French and Romanian. The couple had two daughters, Ioana and Diana. A flight enthusiast, Crevedia continued to travel throughout Europe, and announced by 1937 that he was planning to publish a travelogue of his trips through the Balkans, a theatrical version of Bacalaureatul lui Puiu, and an anthology of Bulgarian poetry, alongside a new novel, Mămăligă—referencing the folk dish. His play was reportedly finished, and Crevedia failed at convincing Camil Petrescu to include it in the National Theater program. Two other volumes of his poetry appeared around that time: Maria (1938), named after his wife, and Dă-mi înapoi grădinile ("Give Me Back My Gardens", 1939).
  Still at Porunca Vremii, Crevedia responded to left-wing adversaries of Crainic, primarily the novelist Mihail Sadoveanu, director of Adevărul. During the far-right's anti-Masonic campaign of 1936–1938, he mocked Sadoveanu's obesity and urged him to shoot himself. In early 1937, at the height of the Spanish Civil War, he contributed to Iron Guard martyrology, depicting Romanian volunteers as "killed for Christ and the Latin race", seeds of "the iron phalanx of tomorrow." However, later that year he and Porunca Vremii had switched their allegiances to the National Christian Party (PNC), which took fourth place in the December elections. On January 1, 1938, Crevedia published an editorial calling for the PNC to take over and inaugurate a "new era" of antisemitic conservatism.
  Before World War II, Crevedia was mainly contributing to Universul, which was increasingly favorable to fascism. In its literary supplement, he issued calls for a nationalist art, purified of "unhealthy, importe
caption: Site of Petrache Lupu's reported miracles, in Maglavit
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