Ciubotă, Viorel - Nicolescu, Gheorge - Ţucă, Cornel (szerk.): Jurnal de operaţiuni al Comandamentului Trupelor din Transilvania (1918-1921) 2. (Satu Mare, 1998)
Istorie şi Geografie Istorică / Geschichte und Landeskunde / Történelem és országismeret - Regiuni de frontieră şi zone de contact / Grenzreionen und Kontakträume / Határvidékek és kapcsolódási területek
Australia (MAGOCSI 1994; MARUNCAK 1969). Their history, anyhow, is quite homogeneous until the XXth century, since they lived within the boundaries of the Crown of St. Stephan (BONKÁLÓ 1940; MAGOCSI 1974, 1988, 1992b; UDVARI 1992), except the Lemko of Poland, which lived within the borders of Poland and followed the fate of the Crown before and after the partitions (CALVI 1997b). Therefore, from a socio-political point of view, the Rusyns are strictly linked with the history of Hungary and Austria-Hungary, but it is from their ethnonym that we can trace their real peculiarity: they belonged to the ethno-sacral system of Rus ’, which meant being part of the Eastern Rite Christianity, which acknowledged the primacy of Constantinople and then of its legitime heir, the Car’ of Moscow and then of Russia. In this sense, being Rusyn meant being part of the Orthodoxy, not being part of an ethnolinguistic group (KUTEL’MACH 1993; PACHL’OVS’KA 1994; SEVCENKO 1984;). As an example, the famous polemist M. Andrella wrote that a Rusnak has “duch і dusja Rusyn, toéiju jazyk ugorskij”, and to express this used Old Church Slavonic mixed with local prosta mova, Hungarian, and often Romanian, Polish, Slovak, Greek and Latin words (CALVI 1999c). As a result, the Carpatho-Rusyns can be considered the synthesis of the meeting of two imperial and sacral inheritances, the Slavia Romana and Slavia Orthodoxa, at the border between the Habsburg and the Russian Empires. This encounter, and the attempts to override it from outside can be traced in what has been perhaps the most important identity factor of the Rusyns, within the Hungarian vármegyek as well as in Poland, i.e. the forced introduction of the Greek Catholic Church with the Union of UChorod- Ungvár (BARAN 1968; BOYSAK 1963; LACKÓ 1975, 1976; PEKAR 1967). There is no doubt that the birth of the Uniate Church founds its origins in politics and not in theology, but nowadays, as already expresses some decades ago by Frantisek Dvomik: «There is a growing conviction that we have far too often neglected the historical method and insisted too heavily on the dogmatic and theological side of the many problems that keep the Churches apart» (DVORNIK 1944: 5-6) We unconditionately subscribe this expression of the Czech historian, since the factors that led Hungary to introduce the Union among the Orthodox Slavs of their Crown are quite clear and refer to the need of stopping the increasing j>ower of the Rákóczi, and the evenements that followed the Union of UChorod cannot but confirm our opinion. Anyhow, the belonging to the Eastern Rite, even if united with Rome, is one of the most important features od this identity, the one which preserved them from all the assimilation attempts made regularly during the history by Hungarians and Poles first, then by Romanians and Czech-Slovaks, and nowadays, since 1946, by all of them and the Ukrainians. This identity found its factor in the juxtaposition to the Others, for instance, using their belonging to the Eastern Rite to distinct themselves from Catholic or The Carpatho-Rusyn Particularity As A Model Of Borderland 289
