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Transylvania: truth, myth, perspective
In 1920, Transylvania was removed from its brief union with Hungary and bestowed on Romania. This deed was either the sudden, brutal punishment for being on the wrong side in the First World War if you were Hungarian, or it was the culmination of a long struggle for nationhood (if you were Romanian).
Who was in the country first? Were the Romanians the descendants of the Romans? Or did they arrive centuries later, from the south? Was Transylvania part of Hungary for one thousand years? Or was it an autonomous province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1867? Did the Hungarians oppress the Romanians before 1920? And did the Romanians oppress the Hungarians thereafter?
A representative Hungarian and a representative Romanian are given three chapters each to answer these and other questions from their own points of view. In a further three chapters, the author reviews the place, the peoples, and the problems encountered in present-day Transylvania.
Who was in the country first? Were the Romanians the descendants of the Romans? Or did they arrive centuries later, from the south? Was Transylvania part of Hungary for one thousand years? Or was it an autonomous province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1867? Did the Hungarians oppress the Romanians before 1920? And did the Romanians oppress the Hungarians thereafter?
A representative Hungarian and a representative Romanian are given three chapters each to answer these and other questions from their own points of view. In a further three chapters, the author reviews the place, the peoples, and the problems encountered in present-day Transylvania.
187 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2018
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July 29, 2023
The subtitle is misleading; ‘myth, truth, perspective’ suggests that some attempt is going to be made to separate myths about Transylvania from the truth, and put the resulting truths into perspective. This doesn’t happen, and although the chapters do come in groups of three, there is no attempt to discern 'truth' and the 'perspective' provided is an English one.
Instead, the book consists of three groups of three chapters, the groups focusing on Places, People and Problems. The place is Transylvania, the north-western area of Romania, ceded from Hungary by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. The people are the Romanians and Hungarians still living there. The problem is largely one of historical justice, with both groups claiming to be victims of the other at various points in History. For each topic, then, we are given a Hungarian point of view, a Romanian point of view and an English point of view. The views are intended to be stereotypical. The Hungarian point of view is overly familiar to me – I’ve lived here for nearly thirty years. Likewise the English point of view, in which ethnic difference is not so much the problem as political corruption, which instinctively was my own. The Romanian point of view, however, was new to me, and I discovered that novelty itself can be persuasive. I had to check my enthusiasm and remind myself that there were no chapters dedicated to truth, and that both the Hungarian and Romanian arguments were equally mythic.
These arguments are dedicated to establishing where Transylvania belongs, in Hungary or in Romania. Since both countries gave up any territorial claims on the other as part of the EU accession process, the debate is ultimately theoretical, but remains nevertheless bitter. My own preferred outcome for Transylvania, and more largely on Trianon - which distributed two-thirds of the Kingdom of Hungary’s territory between the emergent nation states of Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia – would have been cantonisation. If that system can create 400 years of peaceful democracy in the Alps, maybe it could have done the same in the Carpathians. Community homelands should be small enough to effectively preclude 'national' minorities whose differing sense of identity can be manipulated by unscrupulous politicians for their own advantage. It’s interesting to note that Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were defunct less than a century later, and the ethnic problem is still killing people in Kosovo. Even that tiny remnant of Yugoslavia is not small enough to secure peace. Despite the bitterness, however, Romania is still going strong.
The arguments made about Trianon by both sides are based on the same assumption that underlined the partition of Hungary, that an ethnic nation state with contiguous territory is the only desirable outcome, the only possible form of political organization. I suspect that one reason Hungary came through the system change of 1989 unscathed was because, along with its territory, its ethnic problems were transferred to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. But the breakup of the Balkans into ever smaller ethnic nation states persuades me that the ideal of ethnic nation state is of limited usefulness. However I think there is a future for the ideal of civic nation states such as the USA, where Americanness is based on loyalty to a constitution, rather than to an ethnic origin story. Large scale immigration is now forcing western European nation states to transform themselves from ethnic to civic nation states, and the EU itself can be seen as a slow process of civic state building.
If this book is to be taken at face value this process is not happening in Transylvania, where Romanian and Hungarian are still more interested in what happened in the past rather than what should happen in the future. We have arguments about events which ultimately stretch back to 106CE and the Roman Emperor Trajan’s conquest of Dacia. The Hungarians point out Romania was created in 1862, whereas their own nation – including the territory of Transylvania - was established in 1000. My own understanding of Carpathian history is that The Realm of St. Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary was not designed as an ethnic nation state but as a Christian Kingdom, and its official language from its inception until 1844 was not Hungarian, but Latin. As the Romanians claim to be Latin speaking since 106CE, you would have thought this could have been a basis for inter-ethnic reconciliation. Alas not so. The proximity of those two dates - 1844 and 1862 - show that it was only in the 19th century that the nationalist genie was firmly out of the bottle and propelling both Hungary and Romania into the disastrous 20th century.
In this context the argument whether King Matthias Corvinus (1458-1490) was Romanian or Hungarian seems wholly irrelevant, though nationalists in either country bicker over it today -"Besides, can you imagine the Hungarians accepting a Rumanian - A Vlach -as their king? And can you imagine them acknowledging his son, Mátyás, (or Matthias) as one of the greatest of all Hungarian kings?" (Page 65). Even if Matthias' father was a Wallachian, his mother was Hungarian. Unlike St Stephen himself, who was pure Magyar himself, but married a German. The whole history of royal Hungary was one of putting diplomacy ahead of ethnicity, and putting dynastic loyalty ahead of ethnic loyalty, to argue otherwise centuries afterwards is simply ahistorical.
This enthusiasm for eternal ethnic nations even spills over into a discussion of British history by way of analogy -"The Romans were in Britain for more than twice as long, but, apart from the priests, English people didn't learn Latin" (page 70). Not least, it must be said, because the people that were destined to be 'English' didn't turn up in any numbers before the Romans had moved on. It is believed that the Romano-British, the people destined to be 'Welsh', however did learn Latin. But neither Welsh, nor English are at root Romance languages - unlike Romanian. This whole argument spirals out of the basic assumption, that language equals ethnicity, and ethnicity equals sovereignty, whichever language community subjugates a place first has a legitimate right to it. Applying this logic to the UK yields tough news for the English, we should hand over our 'green and pleasant land' to the Welsh. Though what that would mean in a Britain where there are more Polish speakers than Welsh speakers is difficult to imagine. The linguistic reality is however that the vast majority of the descendants of the Romano-British are now English monoglots who regard themselves as English, and in a generation or three, most of the descendants of the Polish speakers will too.
There was a very enjoyable historical drama out recently on Netflix called 'The Last Kingdom' set in the time of Alfred the Great. It details how Alfred's response to the Viking invasions was to unite the previously warring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of West Saxons and Mercians into a new Kingdom, one of the English. Alfred saw that he had to create a new identity for his people, one that highlighted what they had in common rather than what they had in difference. Christianity was the commonality, although when the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain, they - like the Vikings - had been Pagan - it was the 'Welsh' who had been Christian. Unfortunately for civic state builders, during the Reformation, Christianity broke, and added new pieces to the ethnic jigsaw puzzle that is the Carpathians, religious ones.
The most surprising piece of information I learnt from this book was that the Edict of Torda of 1568 excluded the Orthodox church. In today’s Transylvania, ethnic Hungarians are generally either Protestant or Catholic, ethnic Romanians are generally Orthodox. In 1568 Transylvania was an independent principality facing the Ottoman Empire to the West, and the Ottoman client states of Wallachia and Moldovia to the South and East. To the North lay the Habsburg power who regarded Transylvania was a break away part of its Kingdom of Hungary (pace Viktor Orbán). When the Reformation arrived in Transylvania, its prince, John Sigismund Zápolya converted to Protestantism. However, to preserve Transylvanian unity he thought it politic not to insist that his nobility do likewise (Unlike Henry VIII in England). The resulting Edict of Torda was one of religious toleration. It’s the reason why today in the parts of Hungary that were under Transylvanian control – my mother-in-law’s village of Tetétlen for example – you can both find both Catholic and Protestant churches dating from that time. In Britain toleration for Catholics didn’t come until 1829. Diarmaid MacCulloch in Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700 describes the provisions of the Edict of Torda as “uniquely magnanimous”, obviously if you are an Orthodox Romanian, you might not be so enthusiastic.
If any of the points of view in this book had been interested in ‘truth’, it would have been a useful exercise to find out why the Orthodox Church was excluded. Was it, as the Hungarian might have it, because Vlachs and their Orthodox religion didn’t have a significant presence in Transylvania in the 16th century: they came later, drifting across the border during the long years of Hungarian partition and war with the Ottomans. Or was it, as the Romanian perspective might have it, because they were victims of Hungarian oppression in their own land. Who knows? Who cares? I think for most English observers, the ethnic question in Transylvania seems quaint, but we need to remind ourselves that we have faced the same questions in our own history, in which we have played a similar role to the one that Hungarians and Romanians played in turns in Transylvania. In Wales, Scotland and Ireland the English tried subject those countries to a ‘British’ ethnic nation state. With Brexit, we have exerted our national sovereignty in a far more assertive form than either the Hungarians or the Romanians have considered. The latter in particular shows we too can equally disregard the truth in political arguments. It’s a mistake, because as the arguments over Transylvania show, without an agreement on the truth, there will be no reconciliation.
Instead, the book consists of three groups of three chapters, the groups focusing on Places, People and Problems. The place is Transylvania, the north-western area of Romania, ceded from Hungary by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. The people are the Romanians and Hungarians still living there. The problem is largely one of historical justice, with both groups claiming to be victims of the other at various points in History. For each topic, then, we are given a Hungarian point of view, a Romanian point of view and an English point of view. The views are intended to be stereotypical. The Hungarian point of view is overly familiar to me – I’ve lived here for nearly thirty years. Likewise the English point of view, in which ethnic difference is not so much the problem as political corruption, which instinctively was my own. The Romanian point of view, however, was new to me, and I discovered that novelty itself can be persuasive. I had to check my enthusiasm and remind myself that there were no chapters dedicated to truth, and that both the Hungarian and Romanian arguments were equally mythic.
These arguments are dedicated to establishing where Transylvania belongs, in Hungary or in Romania. Since both countries gave up any territorial claims on the other as part of the EU accession process, the debate is ultimately theoretical, but remains nevertheless bitter. My own preferred outcome for Transylvania, and more largely on Trianon - which distributed two-thirds of the Kingdom of Hungary’s territory between the emergent nation states of Romania, Yugoslavia, and Czechoslovakia – would have been cantonisation. If that system can create 400 years of peaceful democracy in the Alps, maybe it could have done the same in the Carpathians. Community homelands should be small enough to effectively preclude 'national' minorities whose differing sense of identity can be manipulated by unscrupulous politicians for their own advantage. It’s interesting to note that Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were defunct less than a century later, and the ethnic problem is still killing people in Kosovo. Even that tiny remnant of Yugoslavia is not small enough to secure peace. Despite the bitterness, however, Romania is still going strong.
The arguments made about Trianon by both sides are based on the same assumption that underlined the partition of Hungary, that an ethnic nation state with contiguous territory is the only desirable outcome, the only possible form of political organization. I suspect that one reason Hungary came through the system change of 1989 unscathed was because, along with its territory, its ethnic problems were transferred to Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia. But the breakup of the Balkans into ever smaller ethnic nation states persuades me that the ideal of ethnic nation state is of limited usefulness. However I think there is a future for the ideal of civic nation states such as the USA, where Americanness is based on loyalty to a constitution, rather than to an ethnic origin story. Large scale immigration is now forcing western European nation states to transform themselves from ethnic to civic nation states, and the EU itself can be seen as a slow process of civic state building.
If this book is to be taken at face value this process is not happening in Transylvania, where Romanian and Hungarian are still more interested in what happened in the past rather than what should happen in the future. We have arguments about events which ultimately stretch back to 106CE and the Roman Emperor Trajan’s conquest of Dacia. The Hungarians point out Romania was created in 1862, whereas their own nation – including the territory of Transylvania - was established in 1000. My own understanding of Carpathian history is that The Realm of St. Stephen: A History of Medieval Hungary was not designed as an ethnic nation state but as a Christian Kingdom, and its official language from its inception until 1844 was not Hungarian, but Latin. As the Romanians claim to be Latin speaking since 106CE, you would have thought this could have been a basis for inter-ethnic reconciliation. Alas not so. The proximity of those two dates - 1844 and 1862 - show that it was only in the 19th century that the nationalist genie was firmly out of the bottle and propelling both Hungary and Romania into the disastrous 20th century.
In this context the argument whether King Matthias Corvinus (1458-1490) was Romanian or Hungarian seems wholly irrelevant, though nationalists in either country bicker over it today -"Besides, can you imagine the Hungarians accepting a Rumanian - A Vlach -as their king? And can you imagine them acknowledging his son, Mátyás, (or Matthias) as one of the greatest of all Hungarian kings?" (Page 65). Even if Matthias' father was a Wallachian, his mother was Hungarian. Unlike St Stephen himself, who was pure Magyar himself, but married a German. The whole history of royal Hungary was one of putting diplomacy ahead of ethnicity, and putting dynastic loyalty ahead of ethnic loyalty, to argue otherwise centuries afterwards is simply ahistorical.
This enthusiasm for eternal ethnic nations even spills over into a discussion of British history by way of analogy -"The Romans were in Britain for more than twice as long, but, apart from the priests, English people didn't learn Latin" (page 70). Not least, it must be said, because the people that were destined to be 'English' didn't turn up in any numbers before the Romans had moved on. It is believed that the Romano-British, the people destined to be 'Welsh', however did learn Latin. But neither Welsh, nor English are at root Romance languages - unlike Romanian. This whole argument spirals out of the basic assumption, that language equals ethnicity, and ethnicity equals sovereignty, whichever language community subjugates a place first has a legitimate right to it. Applying this logic to the UK yields tough news for the English, we should hand over our 'green and pleasant land' to the Welsh. Though what that would mean in a Britain where there are more Polish speakers than Welsh speakers is difficult to imagine. The linguistic reality is however that the vast majority of the descendants of the Romano-British are now English monoglots who regard themselves as English, and in a generation or three, most of the descendants of the Polish speakers will too.
There was a very enjoyable historical drama out recently on Netflix called 'The Last Kingdom' set in the time of Alfred the Great. It details how Alfred's response to the Viking invasions was to unite the previously warring Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of West Saxons and Mercians into a new Kingdom, one of the English. Alfred saw that he had to create a new identity for his people, one that highlighted what they had in common rather than what they had in difference. Christianity was the commonality, although when the Anglo-Saxons arrived in Britain, they - like the Vikings - had been Pagan - it was the 'Welsh' who had been Christian. Unfortunately for civic state builders, during the Reformation, Christianity broke, and added new pieces to the ethnic jigsaw puzzle that is the Carpathians, religious ones.
The most surprising piece of information I learnt from this book was that the Edict of Torda of 1568 excluded the Orthodox church. In today’s Transylvania, ethnic Hungarians are generally either Protestant or Catholic, ethnic Romanians are generally Orthodox. In 1568 Transylvania was an independent principality facing the Ottoman Empire to the West, and the Ottoman client states of Wallachia and Moldovia to the South and East. To the North lay the Habsburg power who regarded Transylvania was a break away part of its Kingdom of Hungary (pace Viktor Orbán). When the Reformation arrived in Transylvania, its prince, John Sigismund Zápolya converted to Protestantism. However, to preserve Transylvanian unity he thought it politic not to insist that his nobility do likewise (Unlike Henry VIII in England). The resulting Edict of Torda was one of religious toleration. It’s the reason why today in the parts of Hungary that were under Transylvanian control – my mother-in-law’s village of Tetétlen for example – you can both find both Catholic and Protestant churches dating from that time. In Britain toleration for Catholics didn’t come until 1829. Diarmaid MacCulloch in Reformation: Europe's House Divided, 1490-1700 describes the provisions of the Edict of Torda as “uniquely magnanimous”, obviously if you are an Orthodox Romanian, you might not be so enthusiastic.
If any of the points of view in this book had been interested in ‘truth’, it would have been a useful exercise to find out why the Orthodox Church was excluded. Was it, as the Hungarian might have it, because Vlachs and their Orthodox religion didn’t have a significant presence in Transylvania in the 16th century: they came later, drifting across the border during the long years of Hungarian partition and war with the Ottomans. Or was it, as the Romanian perspective might have it, because they were victims of Hungarian oppression in their own land. Who knows? Who cares? I think for most English observers, the ethnic question in Transylvania seems quaint, but we need to remind ourselves that we have faced the same questions in our own history, in which we have played a similar role to the one that Hungarians and Romanians played in turns in Transylvania. In Wales, Scotland and Ireland the English tried subject those countries to a ‘British’ ethnic nation state. With Brexit, we have exerted our national sovereignty in a far more assertive form than either the Hungarians or the Romanians have considered. The latter in particular shows we too can equally disregard the truth in political arguments. It’s a mistake, because as the arguments over Transylvania show, without an agreement on the truth, there will be no reconciliation.
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