The Eighth Tribe, 1981 (8. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
1981-10-01 / 10. szám
NAPOCA - KOLOZSVÁR KLAUSENBURG- CLUJ The short history of a Transylvanian city. During the second century A.D., the Roman legions stationed in Dacia built themselves a fort and named it Napoca. According to contemporary Roman authors, the territory of Dacia was an empty land in those days, serving as a “buffer zone” to the Roman Empire against enemy invasions from the East. The former inhabitants of the territory, the DAKS, a fierce Scythian tribe, were conquered and completely eradicated. The legions stationed on the territory were the so-called “Barbarian Legions,” which meant that the men serving those legions were recruited from the Western Provinces inhabited by Germanic tribes. Only the commanding officers were Romans. When Emperor Aurelian ordered Dacia evacuated in 271 A.D. due to the invasion of the GOTHS, a Teutonic nation, every fort, every building and all the stored food supply was destroyed, including the Fort of Napoca. When the HUNS entered the land, the former Roman province of Dacia was inhabited by Goths, who joined the Huns under Attila’s leadership. On contemporary maps found in the Vatican archives, the territory is marked as GOTHIA. After the collapse of the Hun empire, Attila’s youngest son, Csaba, retreated into the “Mountains of the East” with the surviving Huns. When, at the end of the 9th century A.D., the Huns “sisternation,” the Magyars (Hungarians), arrived to claim “Attila’s legacy,” the remainder of the Huns, later called “Szekelys,” joined the Magyars, naming their land “Erdőéivé” or “Erdély” which meant “Beyond the Forest” and was translated into Latin, the international language of Christian Central and Western Europe, as “Transylvania.” In the year of 987 A.D., Kolozs, the commander of the Magyar armies in the East, established a fort near the ruins of the ancient Roman fort Napoca and named it Kolozsvár, the F ort of Kolozs. Soon a town mushroomed around the fort, inhabited by Magyar (Hungarian) gardeners and tradesmen supplying the fort. During the 13th century, German settlers located in the town of Kolozsvár, making it into a center of commerce. They translated the name of the town into their own language as Klausenburg - “Klaus” for Kolozs and “Burg” for vár (fort). Due to its central location the town grew into a city and became the cultural, administrative, and later political, capital of Transylvania. The first Vlach immigrants arrived into the region during the fifteenth century as migrant sheepherders and settled on the high mountain pastures of Gyalu. They came from south of the Carpathian mountains, fleeing from the invasion of the Cumans and the Turks as well as from the cruelties of their own landlords and seeking the protection of the Constitutional Government of the Hungarian Kingdom. These immigrants called themselves VLACHS for several centuries until Habsburg political intrigues, in order to “divide and conquer” Central and East Central Europe, set one ethnic group against the other by contaminating the coexisting nationalities with the ideas of extreme nationalism. Totum the Vlach immigrants against their hosts, the Magyars, who were the only serious obstacle in the way of Habsburg expansion, the “Daco-Roman theory” was invented in Vienna. It made the immigrants believe that they were the descendants of the Romans, therefore, the original inhabitants ofTransylvania and the Magyars were the intruders. The name VLACH was changed more and more into RUMANIAN and, though the new theory had no scientific foundation whatsoever and its falsity was proven again and again, it became the slogan of a militant movement which was soon exploited by a new country on the East and South called “RUMANIA” and brought forth by the joining of three Vlach dukedoms under a German king. The new Rumania was eager to annex Transylvania, not so much for its people, but for its rich natural resources and joined forces with those whose aim was to destroy the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy, the only stumbling block of Panslavism. At the end of World War I the plot succeeded and under the Wilsonian Doctrine (the right to self-determination) without allowing a plebiscite, Transylvania was handed over to the Rumanian Kingdom in spite of the protest of the American delegate to the peace conference. Thus, in 1919, the name of the great Hungarian city of Kolozsvár was officially changed into its phonetic pronounciation by the Vlachs : CLUJ. Though the never ceasing efforts of the Transylvanian Magyars to free themselves from the Rumanian yoke was partially successful two decades later and the city of Kolozsvár, center of Hungarian education, art and literature became once more what it used to be, unfortunately the freedom was short lived. Four years later, under the protection of the invading Russian army, the Rumanians returned and changed the name back again to CLUJ. — Continued on page II, Column 2: “At this time ...” — THE RIGHT TO SELF-DETERMINATION SHOULD BE GRANTED TO THE PEOPLE OF TRANSYLVANIA. IV THE TRANSYLVANIAN QUARTERLY
