Magyar Egyház, 1977 (56. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1977-01-01 / 1. szám
MAGYAR EGYHÁZ 9 TRANSYLVANIA, THE DISPUTED LAND Shortly after he ascended to the Communist throne of Rumania, party secretary (later also head of state) Nicolae Ceausescu, in one of his numerous public addresses, refferring to the province of Transylvania as a “Rumanian land.” Whatever he meant to say with that, and why he thought he had to say it may have various interpretations. It may be more relevant, however, to determine how true (or untrue) Ceausescu’s statement was. In an attempt to come to a conclusion about this, a brief inquiry is here directed to some of the viewpoints pertaining to the intrinsic identification of a land by some attributive adjective. The inquiry will consider geography, geopolitics, history, culture, demography and present political realities. 1. Taking first the highest authority, Nature itself, we find that Transylvania is a part of a closed geographic region — the Carpathian Basin — well defined by its natural borders, the Carpathian mountain chain which encircles the entire area. The barely penetrable 30—40 mile wide forest-covered mountain range of 5-6,000 foot average height, with few passes for railroad and narrow highways, virtually closes off Transylvania, the land within the Carpathians, from the original Rumanian provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia situated on the outer rim of the mountain chain. But easy connections with Hungary, the center of the Carpathian Basin, are provided by valleys, low mountains and hilly areas. Most of Transylvania’s major rivers rise in the Carpathians, flow toward the center of the Basin and discharge into the Tisza (the second largest river of the Basin) which is in turn flows into the Danube, the main waterway of the Carpathian Basin. (See map on front page.) Nature created this land to be a single closed region, a geographic unit, but what’s more, mankind has seen to it that the Carpathian Basin has been and will continue to be a key area with imminent geo-political and strategic significance which must not be overlooked. The Soviets appreciate the importance of the area; this is one reason why they keep Hungary occupied since 1945 while Rumania is free from Russian troops. The fact is that Transylvania is an integral part of the Carpathian Basin. Since the territory of historic Hungary had been the entire Basin before the peace-treaty concluding World War I, it seems evident that in geographic and geopolitical terms Transylvania is not a “Rumanian,” but rather a “Hungarian” land. 2. Transylvania’s past is clearly stated by the historic fact that it had been part of Hungary from the beginning of that country for more than one thousand years until the end of World War I when it was detached from Hungary and given to Rumania by the European Allied Powers. During the Hungarian centuries Transylvania’s history was Hungarian history. According to the Rumanian official theory the Rumanians are descendants of Roman soldiers and the Dacians. In 261 A.D., after 150 years of Roman rule, when emperor Aurelian gave up Dacia (which included Transylvania), the Romans, thoroughly evacuating the area “led away both soldiers and provincials” (as the historian Vopiscus writes) and resettled them in northern Bulgaria. That the nearly extinct Dacian peoples survived the next seven centuries of invasion and destruction by migrating peoples, among them the Carps, Slavs and Avars, without leaving any trace of their alleged further existence in Transylvania, is not history, but is rather a legend, which cannot stand up to the historical facts that Hungarians had preceeded Rumanians in settling in Transylvania, and that the province was an integral part of Hungary in the last ten centuries prior to the Trianon peace-treaty. Also the gradual but steady migration of Rumanian tribes from the Balkan peninsula north into Transylvania during the Hungarian centuries cancels the so called Daco-Roman theory which was developed and propagated by Rumanian historians at a time all too conspicuously coinciding with the creation of the Rumanian state only one hundred years ago. The same self-serving theory was used to support subsequent Rumanian claims to Transylvania. In the course of history it happened only once that a Rumanian ruler controlled Transylvania and that also only for one year. That Rumanian, Michael the Brave of Wallachia, was called in by Moses Szekely in 1599 in conjunction with a civil strife against the (reigning prince, Sigismund Báthory. This short episode is being explored and glorified now by the Bucharest communist propaganda machinery as the great “Rumanian connection” with Transylvania’s past. But even the Rumanian propaganda publications fail to mention other historical events of Rumanian relations with Transylvania, likely because there was none worth mentioning. This must be also the reason that while trying to give an impression of Rumanian-controlled history of Transylvania to the reader, the texts conveniently jump over hundreds of years of Transylvanian history without any Rumanian reference to those centuries. But the truth is there in the Rumanian periodical, Tribuna Romáméi, published in Bucharest for Rumanian-Americans. In an article devoted to the memory of one of the oldest Rumanian settlements in Transylvania it is stated that the town of Fogaras is “old Rumanian land” mentioned for the first time “in the records of the chancery of the Hungarian king, Endre II in 1222.” And, indeed, the first written document mentioning the presence of Rumanians in Transylvania (the south-transylvanian district of Fogaras) is from 1222. This settlement at the foot of the Carpathian mountains might well have been the first stop of Rumanians wandering into Transylvania (then Hungary) from the Rumanian Wallachia just over the Carpathians. 3. As part of Hungary, Transylvania has always been the land of Hungarian culture and Western cultural orientation. As St. Stephen, Hungary’s first king established the Roman Catholic Church in the
