Trying to make sense of history

The relationship between Hungarian, Romanian, and Transylvanian identities, language, ethnicity, and nationality is incredibly complex - and thus confusing to this relatively ignorant North American. Any one telling of history is but a piece of the truth. Indeed, this afternoon I spent nearly an hour with Erika Orban and her brother unraveling and retelling two paragraphs of 16th history from a cookbook with has historical/gastronomical essays.

That said, I found the following excerpts from Robert Kaplan's 1994 book Balkan Ghosts, A Journey through History to be quite helpful.

Part I: Hungarian rule

"The mass of native peasants - the Orthodox Romanians, that is -- did not enjoy the benefits of [the] Enlightenment. They labored at the bottom of a medieval apartheid system, in which Hthe Hungarians and the Saxon Germans, whether Protestant or Catholic, enjoyed all the rights. (Count Dracula had a Romanian name because he was from Moldavia. in Transylvania, the Hungarian elite never permitted the formation of a Romanian nobility.) Romanians, therefore, are not impressed with Tranylvania's historical role as an eastern beacon of the West and of Central Europe; no more than black South Africans are impressed with the white community's role as a beacon of Western progress and efficiency on the African continent.

The cultural conflict has been further poisoned by Transylvania's particular importance in both Romanian and Hungarian tradition. For Romanians, Tranylvania (Ardeal, "the land beyond the forest") is the birthplace of their Latin race, since the ancient Roman colony of Dacia was situated in present-day Transylvania. For the Hungarians, Transylvania (erdely) was the site of their most famous viotires over the Turks and of the democratic uprisings against Austrian rule that led to the creation of the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy in 1867. Janos Hunyadi, who defended Central Euopre against the Ottomans; Matthias Corvinus, the greatest king in Hungarian history who brought the Renaissance to Hungary; Janos Bolyai, one of the independent inventors of non-euclidean geometry; and Bela Bartok, the composer, were all hungarians from Transylvania." (Kaplan, 150)

Part II: Hungary gets divided up

At the end of WWI, the vast lands of Hungary were divided among 7 nations, and Transylvania went to Romania (though its landmass is larger than modern-day Hungary).

Part III: Fast forward to the late 20th century, Kaplan continues:

[communist dictator] Ceausescu forbade all public use of the Hungarian language and of Hungarian names for cities and towns. He sut down Hungarian newspapers. he closed hundreds of Hungarian schools and completely Romanized the Hungarian faculties at the university in Kolozsvar-Cluj, which nineteenth century hungarians had developed into one of the world's finest universities...To alter the demographic balance, Ceausescu prohbitied abortions and the use of birth-control devices among Romanian women, and he forbade Hungarians from giving their children Hungarian names at baptism. finally, he moved hundreds of thousands of Moldavian and Wallachian farm and factory laborers into Transylvania, while forcibly relocating Hungarians from their territory to other parts of Romania. the border between Hungary and Romania was for decades the meanest frontier crossing in Europe, certainly scarier than the Berlin Wall. Travelers would be stopped for hours in the middle of the night, no matter what passport they carried, while suspicious Romanian police searched every suitcase for Magyar (Hungarian language0 publications, among other subversive items...

The 2.1 million Hungarians in Romania consituted non-Soviet Europe's largest ethnic minority and were double the number of West Bank Arabs living under Israeli occupation. But while ethnic Hungarians during the Ceausescu years suffered repression as bad as or worse than that endured by Palestinian Arabs --the 120,000 Jewish settlers on the West Bank were few in comparison to the numbers of Romanians that Ceausescu settled in Transylvania -- the American media establishment's knowledge of Transylvania until the December 1989 revolution was limited to an image of Count Dracula." (Kaplan, 151-2) {and I would argue that it still is! Hence, the name of this blog}