Visarion Puiu

Visarion Puiu (Romanian pronunciation: [visariˈon ˈpuju]; sometimes Bessarion in French; born Victor Puiu on 27 February 1879 in Pașcani, Romania – 10 August 1964 in Paris or Viels-Maisons, France) was a metropolitan bishop of the Romanian Orthodox Church. During World War II, at a time when Romania was an ally of Nazi Germany, he served as the leading Eastern Orthodox clergyman in occupied Transnistria, a territory where several hundred thousand Jews were murdered. In August 1944, when Romania switched sides, he took refuge in Nazi Germany.

After the war, he lived in Italy and Switzerland before finally settling in France. In 1946, he was sentenced to death in absentia by the Bucharest People's Tribunal. He created the Romanian Orthodox Diocese of Western Europe under the authority of the Russian Orthodox Church Outside of Russia, and for a few years played an important role in the Romanian diaspora. The Holy Synod in Bucharest defrocked Puiu in 1950, but posthumously restored him among its clergy in 1990. Puiu's connections to the Iron Guard, as well as his responsibility in the Holocaust, have been the subject of scholarly publications in the post-communist era.