Virgil Gheorghiu; Bishop Was Best-Selling Novelist

Virgil Gheorghiu, the Orthodox bishop whose international bestseller, “The 25th Hour,” described the horrors of peasant life in Romania, died Monday at age 75, family friends said.

Gheorghiu, who denounced Nazism and communism in his book, had been ill for two years. The cause of death was not given.

Gheorghiu wrote more than 60 novels. The most successful was “The 25th Hour” in 1949, which was translated into 35 languages.

It was adapted to the screen in 1966 by French director Henri Verneuil and starred Anthony Quinn, Serge Reggiani and Virna Lisi. It depicts the plight of a Romanian peasant under German and Soviet occupation.

Although he was an outspoken critic of former Romanian dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, Gheorghiu’s politics were marked by contradiction.

In 1944, he denied having written several anti-Semitic texts, then later claimed them as his own. In the early 1950s, he denounced the Korean government as a dictatorship, but went on to glorify it in a later work.

Gheorghiu, who went into exile when Soviet troops entered Romania in 1944, settled in Paris in 1948. He was ordained a priest in 1963 and in 1971 became patriarch of the Romanian Orthodox Church in France.