Magyar News, 1992. szeptember-1993. augusztus (3. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)

1993-07-01 / 11-12. szám

LOOKING AT A STORY CREATED BY HOLLYWOOD

by Roger Borgersen

We are used to reading articles by youth of Hungarian background on matters relating to Hungarians. This article was written by a Scandinavian-American student. We appreciate his interest and effort and welcome him to the Magyar News.

(Editor)

When we were told to do this assignment I had a few ideas on what to write about. Being a history major my instincts led me to do something that was based on history. I was curious about the place called Transylvania, so I decided to research part of it’s history. When most of us hear the name Transylvania, we think of a dark, stormy land that is inhabited with packs of wolves, undead creatures and a strong sense of evil invoking fear into all living things. After reading Anne Rice’s book Interview With the Vampire. I became more interested about Transylvania. One of the characters in her book described Transylvania, Hungary and Bulgaria as a place where “the peasants know that the living dead walk, and the legends of the vampires abound.”

Transylvania is part of Rumania today but it used to belong to Hungary. The word Transylvania means, the land beyond the forest, it came from the Romans when they controlled the land. In the New Columbia Encyclopedia. It says this province is separated in the south from Walachia, another province of Rumania, by the Transyl vanian Alps and in the east from Moldavia and Bukovina by the Carpathian Mountains (of which the Transylvanian Alps are a continuation.) In the north and west Transylvania borders on the Crisana- Maramures (Maramaros) region, and in the southwest on the Banat region.

I went to the school library to see what I could find out on Transylvania’s history. To my surprise I didn’t find much. I basically found books on the history of ethnic problems in Rumania between the Transylvanian Hungarians and the Transylvanian Rumanians. Acoupleof days later a friend let me borrow three books. In these books I found some information that was very useful to me.

In a book called Transylvania and the Theory of Daco-Roman-Rumanian Continuity. Andre Du Nay says, “the first known inhabitants of Transylvania, described by Herodotos, in the 6th-4th centuries BC, were the Agathyrses, probably an Iranian people.” Reading this made me even more curious about Transylvania’s history, so onward I went. In the third and second century BC a large “population of Celts” lived in the Transylvania and Banat regions, until they “disappeared towards the end of the second century BC,” when the Dacians entered this region. I had never thought the Celts, a people that came from around Ireland, had explored that far into

6

Europe. I had always figured that they had stayed around western Europe.

So who were the Dacians, I asked myself. The Dacians were a people who were “advanced” in material culture and were a “tribal” type people. The Dacians controlled Transylvania and it was the center of their kingdom.

I found that the Dacians were united under a King Bucrebista who “organized the Dacians and several other populations into a powerful empire.” Nay also says, “Towards the end of the 1st century AD, another strong ruler, Decebal, united the

Dacian tribes again into a centralized empire. He fought the Romans with some success, but they defeated him finally and made him to pay tributes.” The Dacians were invaded again in the first ten years of the 2nd century AD by emperor Trajan who this time came to take possession of Dacia entirely. Trajan succeeded and the defeated Decebal “committed suicide and his army was dispersed.” Trajan’s invasion succeeded and the new territory came to be known as Dacia Traiana.

After reading this I wondered, why did Decebal commit suicide? He could have fled into the Alps and tried to do something later. Transylvania sure was full of wars, invasions and the like. You’d think that most of the inhabitants of Transylvania would be dead by now. Entire generations must have been wiped out, why didn’t they make peace? Unfortunately I wasn't able to find any info on this. The Romans occupied this area until 275 AD. Why then?

Here’s your answer. Another writer in the book Transylvania and the Theory of Daco-Roman-Rumanian Continuity by the name of László Réthy, explains it nicely. He says, “in the 3rd century Dacia was

threatened by the Goths. These people had come from the Baltic, and traversing Lithuania and Poland, eventually arrived in the Crimea, surrounding Dacia in the process. The Huns followed the Goths preceded by displaced German elements who thus were forced to invade Dacia.”

At times I found myself confused at trying to keep all the different names and their time periods in chronological order, not to mention trying to pronounce all these names correctly.

Doesn ’t it seem like this territory is Grand Central Station. I wondered what it was like

to live there with a new people invading your land just about every other day. When the Romans left the entire Roman population left also. This was the end of Roman Dacia, end of a hundred and fifty year occupation. With the invasion of the Germans “the entire Roman civilization was destroyed. The very names of cities were lost, as no one stayed in Dacia to remember.”

The only people to remain there were peasants of the Roman era. “This Population, however was Slavic. This can be seen from the fact that the names of Dacian towns completely disappeared but the S lavic names of rivers continued, and flourished down to modem times.” Well, at least something finally became permanent in this everchanging land. I was beginning to think that when a new conquering people took over they wiped the slate clean and started over.

In the years between the 3rd and 10th centuries Transylvania was invaded by several peoples. Some of these people were the Visigoths, Huns, Gepidae, the Avars and the Slavs. The first of the Magyar tribes, a people of Hungary, “entered the region in the 10th century, but they did not fully