Bessarion of Lainici (in Romanian, Visarion Toia) was a Romanian monk and abbot of the twentieth century, numbered among the monastics who suffered under the communist regime. He was born on May 28, 1884, at Secuieni in Bacau County, the son of Gheorghe and Ilinca, and is commemorated by the Romanian Orthodox Church on November 10.
After training as a church chanter, he entered the Frasinei Monastery in Oltenia, where he was tonsured a monk under the name Bessarion and where, by the sources, he contributed to the cultivation of psaltic (Byzantine) chant. He was ordained to the priesthood in 1922, and in the spring of 1929 he was appointed abbot of the Lainici Monastery on the Jiu Valley, charged with rebuilding the monastery, which had been damaged in the war, and with fostering the hesychastic life of prayer among its monks.
His abbacy at Lainici fell within the period of the communist takeover of Romania. The sources relate that in 1950 soldiers occupied the monastery and that he was severely beaten and cast from his cell, breaking his leg; the injury became infected and the leg was amputated below the knee. He reposed in 1951, his death attributed to the suffering that followed this assault.
He was glorified by the Romanian Orthodox Church in 2025, when the Holy Synod canonized a group of sixteen twentieth-century figures recognized collectively as Confessors, Martyrs and Spiritual Fathers. He is ranked as a Venerable Martyr and is buried near his predecessor at Lainici, Saint Irodion.
