About the fact that it’s not enough to acquire a territory, you also need to know what to do with it, we Hungarians could tell you a lot. On December 1, 1918, 1,228 Romanian delegates in Gyulafehérvár voted for a resolution declaring the union of Transylvania with the then Kingdom of Romania. MÁV (Hungarian State Railways) provided free trains for them. And when, two weeks later, the Romanian army set out towards the heart of Transylvania, we didn’t resist. This is how they took from the Hungarians a country-sized territory, larger in square kilometers than today’s Hungary. In Trianon, they only said amen to this. Romania was born in Trianon, but it was conceived in Gyulafehérvár, and at conception, the Hungarian power of the time held the candle.
For more than a hundred years, therefore, Transylvania has existed in such a way that it doesn’t, although there would be a need for it. The history of Transylvania since then is the history of Romania. The biggest mistake would be to talk about Transylvania as if it had nothing to do with Romania. Transylvania hasn’t existed for the past hundred-plus years, Romania has. However, the history of Romania for more than a hundred years is a history of robberies. It started with hungry-eyed Romanian politicians stealing Transylvania from Transylvanians. From 1940 to 1944, there was still “a little Hungarian world” when Northern Transylvania and Szeklerland returned to Hungary.
At the end of World War II, the Romanians, who sided with the victors, regained this little for Romania, but they couldn’t enjoy it for long because the communists stole the whole country from them. They began to erase the past forever with the promise of a beautiful new world. The national communists stole it from the comrades, well, really they united Romania, they pounded everyone into the ground from the uppermost tip of Moldavia to the Iron Gates, Romanians and Hungarians shivered under the frog’s bottom in the mine. Ceaușescu and his gang knew exactly that there would be no better future, so they fabricated a thousand-year-old past, mesmerizing the starving people with it. The multilaterally developed socialist man sat in the cold block apartment and saw on his black and white TV that the country has been building and beautifying for thousands of years, then looked out the window and spat. He was glad if his saliva didn’t clank.
Then the country was stolen from the Genius of the Carpathians by his heirs, observe, communists are always devoured by their own children, patricide is their mandatory coming-of-age ritual. So, in 1989, there was practically a change of leadership, one commie killed the other commie to sell out the country by lying about freedom and democracy. They sold everything movable, they sold the immovable too, it’s the same song throughout Central and Eastern Europe. And the God-given people were left with the lie about the thousands of years of history. The problem with lies is that they can be beautiful, but not true. Moreover, in Transylvania, this tale is not the tale that grandparents tell their grandchildren. The Romanians who settled in the second half of the last century are no longer Moldavian, Wallachian or Dobrudjan Romanians, but they haven’t become Transylvanians either. They’re just Romanian.
Being just Romanian means, you reckon with the fact that about five million working-age citizens have left Romania to go abroad in recent years. That you know well over half the arable land is already owned by foreigners, that most of the strategic sectors are also in foreign hands. Being just Romanian means, you accept that the anti-corruption chief prosecutor’s office functions as a political cudgel, with which they smash Romanian politics – no one dares to make substantial decisions anymore. Being just Romanian means, you grumble about the fact that Romania as a state is hydrocephalic, it exists not for the citizens but for the bureaucrats. It might only look like a country from Brussels, and no matter how much they want to love it as a homeland, it’s becoming more and more intangible, more volatile. Being just Romanian means that on December 1st, you’d celebrate Romania’s birthday, and you have to realize that Romania also exists in a way that it doesn’t.
Notes:
Historical context:
Treaty of Trianon (1920): A peace agreement after World War I that defined Hungary’s new borders, resulting in significant territorial losses.
December 1, 1918: The date when the union of Transylvania with Romania was declared.
1940-1944: Period when Northern Transylvania was returned to Hungary during World War II.
Geographical terms:
Transylvania (Erdély): A historical region, now part of Romania, with significant Hungarian population.
Szeklerland (Székelyföld): A region in Transylvania with a majority Hungarian population.
Gyulafehérvár: Hungarian name for Alba Iulia, a city in Romania.
Political references:
MÁV: Hungarian State Railways.
“Genius of the Carpathians”: A title used for Nicolae Ceaușescu, Romania’s communist leader (1965-1989).
Reference to different phases of Romanian political history: pre-communist, communist, and post-communist eras.
Linguistic notes:
The original text uses several idiomatic expressions that are challenging to translate directly, such as “a bányabéka feneke alatt” (below the bottom of the mine frog), meaning extremely low or in a very bad situation.
Homeland Dictionary 