Petrache Lupu is connected in all the senses with Maglavit. Who heard of Maglavit definitely heard also of Petrache Lupu, and the ones who heard about Petrache Lupu, most definitely heard also about Maglavit. The story from Maglavit is belived by many people. Very briefly, this is the following: it was the day of Friday, the 31st of May 1935, when Petre Lupu (17 years of age) was on the field, with the sheep.
He had many deficiencies even from the birth, especially in terms of speaking. He would have seen God, under the shape of an “old man”, near a willow tree. He told the shepherd that the people must repent, and that he must deliver the message to the priest from the village. The vision repeated three times, in three consecutive Fridays. Starting from that moment, the life of the shepherd and of the commune was going to be another one. Thousand of people came in pilgrimage at Maglavit. The crippled would throw away their crooks, the blind recovered their sight, the mute people started talking, etc.
Decades after decades later, the name of Petrache Lupu, namely the one of the commune from Dolj Maglavit, were synonymous with the “divine miracle” and with the miraculous heeling which happened here, but also with the affluence of the multitude of pilgrims. In the summer of the year 1935, in only one day, ten additional trains overloaded left for Craiova in order to transport the pilgrims to Maglavit situated at 15 kilometers from Calafat.
After the entering of Romania in the war with the Russians, together with the German allays, Petrache Lupu was taken by plane until the bend of Donului, to consecrate the troops, from the personal order of the marshal Ion Antonescu. It is said that the fortune teller would have said to the army that the war will be lost by the Romanians. After the communists arrived at the power, Petrache Lupu was marginalized, and the people continued to visit him, because of hear, only secretly. In the night of the 1st of August 1952, a car entered in the locality in which the saint carried on his days. This waited for them in the yard, changed and dressed in clean clothes. They put him in the car, but the car engine wouldn’t start, only after Petrache prayed for this to happen. Returned home in the month of October, the security men picked him up again in a couple of times, without being able to find him any kind of guilt in order to send him at the canal. Petrache Lupu was married with Veta, who died in 1966. He got remarries, living until the year 1998, in a house which wasn’t more special than the other ones from the village. Interesting is the fact that the shepherd who became a saint never took the money from the donations made by the ones who visited him at Maglavit. The neurologist Gheorghe Marinescu and the professor Constantin Parhob, who consulted the shepherd, gave the verdict that he was perfectly healthy.
Petrache Lupu lived between the 14th of October 1907 and the 14th of December 1994. Petrache Lupu lived almost 90 years. It is said the fact that on the time of the communists he would have been lifted up many times. The former shepherd was seen by the people as a messenger from God. Although the Orthodox Church remained reluctant with regards to the story of Petrache, the villagers managed to build a monastery on the place where Petrache would have had the visions.
