Adrian Buck’s Reviews > Transylvania: truth, myth, perspective > Status Update

"...Orbán delivered his much-quoted speech about building an illiberal state in Hungary, in imitation of Singapore, China, India, Turkey and Russia..." - it's an odd list...

"She was a little surprised when I asked her whether Romanian students learn Hungarian: "It's too difficult, and English is far easier. They see it and hear it everywhere from childhood..." - English or Hungarian?

"The fatuous notion that the Rumanians were direct descendents of the Romans in Dacia had been around for some time in the 1600s and 1700s. It gave people humiliated by Turks, by Hungarians, and by Austrians, a certain self-importance" - pot, kettle, black. Was the remark about Romans and the English meant to be ironic?

"The Romans were in Britain for more than twice as long, but, apart from the priests, English people didn't learn Latin"... possibly because 'the English' didn't arrive in Britain until after the Romans left. The Romano-British did speak Latin, and maybe if the German tribes hadn't turned up, we'd all be speaking a Welsh version of Romanian.

"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?" - as in Britain, relatively few monachs have shared their ethnicity with their people. A monarch isn't legitimised by his ethnicity.

"It can't be said that the Hungarians made any secret of their aims: they'd declared in 1873 that 'our primary obligation is not be liberal; our first duty is to ensure that Hungary endures and survives" - long before Trianon, when did Hungarians first sense that their state was under existential threat?