Criss-crossed by migrations over millennia, settled by successive waves of nations and tribes, many regions of Europe have been the subject of conflict among different claimants, each advancing their own historical assertions to ownership. Few lands in modern times have been the subject of such intense competition as Transylvania. Dominated for centuries by Hungarians, many of its towns islands of German settlement and culture, and, until its incorporation in Romania in 1918, with a downtrodden Romanian majority, Transylvania’s history has been a battlefield in the clash of national claims.
My journey through Transylvania in the summer of 2022 began in Cluj, known as Kolozsvár in Hungarian and Klausenburg in German. Settled in the Middle Ages by German “Saxons”, the city became the centre of the Hungarian landed aristocracy in Transylvania, and of Hungarian national and cultural life in the region. The city retained its ethnic-Hungarian majority well after Transylvania’s unification with Romania after the First World War. However, industrialisation under the post-1945 Communist regime, which transformed Cluj into one of Romania’s largest cities, led to an expansion of its Romanian population and the steady dilution of its Hungarian character. For many Hungarians this process of Romanianization has been deeply painful.
As a student in 1989, I attended a conference on Romania at Cambridge University. We didn’t know at the time that the violent end of the regime of the communist dictator, Nicolae Ceauşescu, was only a few weeks away. As we arrived at the lecture hall, men at the entrance photographed every one of the participants. We supposed they were officers of Ceauşescu’s dreaded Securitate secret police, sent by the Romanian embassy. The affect for any Romanians attending must surely have been intimidating. A large part of the audience was made up of Hungarians, mostly emigres. For these Hungarians, the overwhelmingly important issue of the day was Ceauşescu’s rural systematization programme, which had got under way the previous year. Under this programme, thousands of villages were to be razed, and their inhabitants resettled in agro-industrial towns. Hungarians saw this as an attack on Hungarian communities, aimed at their assimilation into the wider Romanian society. At that conference in Cambridge, their anger was boiling over. Some of the British speakers, specialists on Romania, reacted with irritation, pointing out that the problems facing Romania went beyond the tribulations of its Hungarian population. One of them gave a presentation on the ideological motivation of the programme, to eliminate the differences between rural and urban societies. But this cut little ice with the Hungarians. What they could see was that Hungarians in Transylvania were under attack. As I walked towards Cluj’s city centre that morning, this history was on my mind.
While Cluj expanded in the 20th century, its historic centre has nevertheless retained its charm. The central square is dominated by the 15th century Gothic church of St Michael. Built when the city was under Saxon control, it became a protestant church for a time following the reformation, firstly Lutheran and then Unitarian. Cluj was a centre of Unitarianism. However, the church was later returned to Catholicism with the support of Hungary’s, and Austria’s Hapsburg rulers. Next to the church stands an equestrian statue of the great 15th century Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus, which was erected at the beginning of the 20th century, when Transylvania was still part of Hungary.
Outside the house in Cluj where Matthias Corvinus is thought to have been born is a plaque put there during the tenure of the controversial city mayor, Gheorghe Funar. It states that Matthias Corvinus, Hungary’s greatest King, the son of the great Voivode (military leader) of Transylvania, Iancu de Hunedoara (János Hunyadi in Hungarian), was in fact Romanian. This assertion is based on the Wallachian ancestry of Hunyadi’s family, although an improbable legend has it that Hunyadi was actually the illegitimate son of King Sigismund of Hungary. Funar, who was mayor from 1992-2004, was an extreme nationalist who took a petty delight in baiting the city’s Hungarian minority. He was famous for having objects such as park benches, pavements and rubbish bins painted in the colours of the Romanian flag. Funar was also responsible for the rather grotesque statue of Avram Iancu, a leader of the Romanian revolution against Hungarian rule in 1848, that towers above the square in front of the city’s Orthodox cathedral, an archetypal example of nationalist kitsch. The Orthodox cathedral itself, built between 1923-33, after Transylvania’s incorporation into Romania, was a triumphal statement in the centre of Hungarian life in the province, that this was now Romania.
The nationalist agenda can be seen even in the name of the city, which, since 1974, is officially Cluj-Napoca. The addition of Napoca by Ceauşescu was intended to draw a link with the pre-Roman Dacian settlement of that name on the site of modern-day Cluj. In the competing narratives about Transylvania, Romanian nationalists claim a continuity between ancient Romano-Dacian civilisation and modern Romanians, as opposed to a counter-claim preferred by some Hungarians that modern Romanians are descended from Vlachs who migrated northwards from the Balkans at a later date.
Excavations of Roman remains in Cluj, some of which can be seen covered by glass on the central square, did not escape from this modern competition over history. For Romanian nationalists the finds bolstered their claim to have preceded Hungarians in the region, while some Hungarians retorted unconvincingly that the remains were fake. In any case, the whole debate is sterile. Our knowledge of the historical ethnic-make-up of this and other regions is limited. What can be said with certainty is that numerous peoples have settled in the region, including Goths, Huns, Avars and Slavs, as well as both Romanians and Hungarians. Both nations have been present in Transylvania for centuries, and Romanians were in a clear majority well before the region’s unification with Romania.
From Cluj, I travelled to Sighişoara (Segesvár in Hungarian, Schässburg in German), and then on to Braşov (Brassó in Hungarian, Kronstadt in German). Along with a number of other Transylvanian towns, Sighişoara and Braşov were settled by the German Saxons in the Middle Ages. The Saxon elite enjoyed a privileged position in Transylvania, as one of the three estates recognised in the 15th century Unio Trium Nationum (“Union of the Three Nations”) together with the largely Hungarian nobility and the free military Székeleys, a Hungarian sub-group mainly residing in eastern Transylvania. Thus the Romanian population, as well as the Hungarian peasantry, were excluded from political life.
Sighişoara and Braşov were both fortified towns, with city walls and defensive towers at regular intervals. Each of these towers was assigned to one of the city’s craft guilds, which were responsible for their upkeep and defence. Sighişoara’s beautifully preserved hilltop citadel, with its cobbled streets and brightly coloured buildings, is a UNESCO World Heritage site. Nine of the fourteen defensive towers remain, as well as the imposing clock tower at the citadel entrance. I particularly liked the tinsmiths’ tower, perched on a steep bank on the edge of the citadel, which still carries traces of shots fired during the last siege of the town, at the start of the 18th century. Inside the clock tower, there is a museum which includes many of the instruments associated with the crafts of the various guilds that were so central to the town’s life.
A steep covered wooden staircase, the Scholars’ Stairs, dating from the 17th century. leads up a hill to the Bergschule (School on the Hill), and the Saxon Church on the Hill, another of Transylvania’s impressive Gothic churches. A graveyard slopes down the other side of the hill. Most of the German Saxons have left Transylvania. Having already declined in numbers during the 20th century, most of those who had remained left after the fall of the Ceauşescu regime. Sighişoara is now a mainly Romanian town, with a sizeable Hungarian minority, a smaller number of Roma, and very few Germans. But the graveyard bears witness to the town’s Saxon past, almost all the graves bearing German names, testament to a bygone age.
Sighişoara’s most famous son was Vlad the Impaler, who is thought to have been born in a house close to the town’s main square. Vlad’s bloody career as ruler of Wallachia, and his notorious brutality, may have inspired Bram Stoker’s famous novel, Dracula. Vlad’s family name was Dracul, derived from the chivalric Order of Dragons, of which his father had been a member. But although Romania and the wider region had a long tradition of belief in vampires, there is no evidence that Vlad was ever believed to have been one. That has not stopped Transylvania’s tourism industry from milking the connection for all it is worth.
In the middle of Braşov’s beautiful central square is the Casa Sfatului, the old town hall, now a historical museum. The broad square is lined with what were once the houses of wealthy merchants, now lively cafes and restaurants spilling their terraces out on to the square. Braşov’s situation, close to the Carpathian passes, was important for defence and also for the trade between Austria-Hungary and the Ottoman Empire, which enriched the town’s Saxon merchants. As in Sighişoara, the town’s defensive towers were maintained by the craft guilds. Some of them remain, although less of the city’s walls are preserved than is the case in Sighişoara. Two of the city’s gates, the Şchei Gate and Catherine’s Gate, remain. Viewed from the surrounding hills, the old town is dominated by the huge bulk of the medieval Black Church (the name relates to its colour, which was at one time black, some say due to a seventeenth-century fire that destroyed much of Braşov). Built in the Gothic style, it is now a Lutheran church, the faith of the dwindling numbers of Saxons.
Braşov holds an important place in the history of Romanians in Transylvania. As a lady at the town tourism office explained to me, in the past Romanians had not been allowed to reside within the city walls. They could enter the city at certain times to sell their wares, but only through Catherine’s Gate. Romanians, as well as Bulgarians, lived outside the city walls, in the Şchei district, although by the 19th century the Bulgarians had been Romanianised. There, in the grounds of the 15th century Orthodox Church, the first school to teach in the Romanian language was established. Built at the end of the 15th century, it had switched to Romanian-language teaching a century later, from the Church Slavonic that had hitherto been used. It was also in Braşov that Transylvania’s first Romanian-language newspaper was established, in 1838.
Today the square at the heart of the Şchei district is a pleasant, quiet refuge from the much more touristy centre of the old walled city. I enjoyed a supper in a very good traditional Romanian restaurant. In the 19th century, Braşov was a centre of the Romanian national movement in Transylvania. For many Hungarians, the loss of Transylvania continues to be painful. In Hungary, one can still see maps of pre-1918 Greater Hungary, and hear people lamenting how the country lost two-thirds of its territory. Yet in an age of nation states it would surely have been anomalous if the Romanian majority, which had for centuries suffered an inferior status in Transylvania, would not have been able to assert its right to unite with Romania. To have continued to maintain that this was Hungarian land would have meant disregarding the Romanian population. That they simply did not count. To be sure, having been subjected to Magyarization pressure during the 19th century, Romania was far from a model of respect for the rights of national minorities, including Hungarians, during the 20th, including under Ceauşescu and afterwards, as exemplified by the Funar period in Cluj. During my travels, I was told more than once that relations between Romanians and Hungarians are now much more comfortable than had previously been the case. Hopefully that will continue.
On the other side of the old town from the Şchei district are signs of more recent strife. At the end of 1989, I watched with mixed excitement and horror as the drama of Romania’s uprising against the Ceauşescu regime played out on our television screens. The media focused largely on events in Timişoara, where the revolution started, and in Bucharest. But the violence afflicted many other towns, including Braşov. On the side of a building not far from the city centre, a scattering of bullet holes have been framed, with a plaque commemorating the revolution. In a little park nearby, a row of graves commemorates those who died in the revolution in Braşov, including a six-year old girl caught in the crossfire.
A short distance from Braşov, in a pass linking Transylvania with Wallachia, is Bran Castle. The castle was built in the 14th century by the Saxons of Braşov, to defend the pass. Perched high on a rocky crag, with its towers and ramparts it looks just the part to be a vampire’s castle, and indeed the tourism industry has made much of the Dracula story and the vampire legends of Transylvania. In fact it appears the castle was built purely as a fortification and a garrison for troops defending the pass. There is no evidence of any connection with either Bran Stoker or Vlad the Impaler, although Vlad did travel through the pass on many occasions. The description of Dracula’s castle in Stoker’s novel is quite different.
The castle today looks much as it did in the 1930s, when it was a favourite residence of Queen Marie of Romania, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria. Having been built for defence rather than luxury, a warren of small rooms and narrow staircases, the castle is perhaps an unusual residence for a Queen. But it has considerable charm, and it is easy to see why Marie loved it. Having spent her childhood largely in England and Germany, Marie became highly popular in Romania. Having persuaded her husband, King Ferdinand, a member of the German Hohenzollern family, to enter the First World War on the side of the western Triple Entente in 1916, she won admiration for her work as a nurse treating wounded soldiers. Following the war, she attended the Paris Peace Conference and, using her international connections, proved to be a highly effective lobbyist for recognition of Romania’s enlargement into neighbouring territories.
