Chernivtsi: the legacy of a multicultural city

I spent a couple of days in Chernivtsi in the summer of 2026, on my way out of Ukraine through Moldova. I had first visited the city ten years earlier, in the spring of 2016. Situated in the southwest of the country, close to the border with Romania, Chernivtsi has a complicated history, having changed hands repeatedly over the course of the 20^th century. Chernivtsi is the main city of Bukovina, a region which straddles the border between Ukraine and Romania. While today it has a significant Ukrainian majority, for much of its history it also had large Romanian and Jewish populations, as well as Poles and Austrians. With its various names, Czernowitz in German, Cernăuți in Romanian, Chernivtsi is one of those many cities in eastern and central Europe that were once notable for their rich multicultural diversity, but which in the upheavals of the 20^th century succumbed to the logic of the largely mono-ethnic nation-state.

The region had been part of the Principality of Moldavia, which was under Ottoman suzerainty from the 16^th century. After the Ottoman defeat in the Russo-Turkish War of 1768-1764, Austria annexed a slice of territory in the north-west of Moldavia, which came to be known as Bukovina. Following the collapse of Austria-Hungary at the end of the First World War, Chernivtsi was briefly under the control of the short-lived West Ukrainian People’s Republic before the town, together with the rest of Bukovina, was taken over by Romania.

Chernivtsi National University

Chernivtsi in all its multicultural colour and disorder in the years after the First World War was the subject of An Ermine in Czernopol, a novel by the Austrian writer Gregor Von Rezzori, a native of the city. The novel’s name only thinly disguised its location in Chernivtsi. It depicts the tragicomic efforts of a rigid Austrian officer in Romania’s post-war army to maintain his honour and the virtue of his conspicuously unvirtuous sister-in-law in a riotously chaotic city where he is out of time and place. His confusion is unsurprising. Someone born in Czernowitz before the First World War who lived a long life in the city and survived all its population shifts would have been a subject of successively Austria-Hungary, Romania, the Soviet Union and independent Ukraine.

The city’s greatest architectural glory is the building of the Chernivtsi National University. Built in the late 19^th century, it was originally the residence of the Orthodox Metropolitans of Bukovina and Dalmatia, whose ecclesiastical jurisdiction encompassed the Romanian and Ukrainian Orthodox believers of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, as well Serbian Orthodox believers in Dalmatia. Under Soviet rule, it was transferred to the city’s university. It is a wonderfully eclectic combination of styles, including Byzantine, Gothic and Moorish. Since 2011, it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site. When I visited in 2016, the building was hosting a conference, under cover of which I was able to wander around its grounds and the magnificent interior. It is surely one of the most beautiful university buildings anywhere.

Chernivtsi Synagogue, then and now

As a result of the holocaust and emigration to Israel, Jews form a small part of Chernivtsi’s population today. They had once been the largest population group in the city, reaching nearly 40 per cent in the 1930s. There are several reminders of their once significant presence. Chernivtsi was an important centre of Jewish culture. In 1908, the Czernowitz Conference was held there, which promoted the Yiddish language. This was despite the fact that much of the Jewish elite of the city had assimilated into the German-speaking population by the end of the 19^th century. In the centre of the city is a former Reform Synagogue which has, since Soviet times, served as a cinema. German and Romanian soldiers burned the building in 1941, and the Soviets tried to blow it up after the war. But while the dome of the building was destroyed, the walls stayed standing, and the building was repurposed as a cinema.

Jewish cemetery, Chernivtsi

In the outskirts of the city is a sprawling Jewish cemetery. Today it is neglected, overgrown with tall weeds and bushes, its gravestones tilting at different angles. While most of the graves are from the heyday of Chernivtsi’s Jewish community, a few are more recent. I find such run-down cemeteries, monuments to once thriving communities that have subsequently whittled away, strangely moving. I had similar feelings walking around the Saxon cemetery on the hill overlooking Sighişoara, in Romania, among the graves of a German community that has largely disappeared (see post of 15 September 2022). The Karaite cemetery in the woods next to the abandoned cave city of Chufut Kale in Crimea is especially moving, the simple headstones higgledy-piggledy among the tree roots, dappled by the sunlight through the trees (see post of 28 July 2011).

The devastation of the holocaust was preceded in Chernivtsi by the brutal Soviet occupation in 1940-41, when thousands of intellectuals and prominent and wealthy citizens, including many Jews, were deported to Siberia and Central Asia. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, Romanian rule returned to Chernivtsi, now under the dictator Ion Antonescu. The Jewish population faced severe repression, forced on Antonescu’s orders into a ghetto. Today there is a monument to the Chernivtsi Ghetto near where its main entrance had been. In 1941 and 1942, the majority of the Jews of Chernivtsi, more than 30,000 people, were deported to Transnistria, where it is estimated around 60 per cent of them perished. The city’s Romanian mayor, Traian Popovici, interceded with Antonescu, and managed to save some 20,000 Jews from deportation. More than 3,000 Jews were killed in Chernivtsi itself, by German SS Einsatzgruppen as well as Romanian troops and police. Later in the war, many who had survived the deportation to Transnistria returned to Chernivtsi, but most subsequently emigrated to Israel or elsewhere.

Kamyanets-Podilsky: Bastion of Europe

Kamyanets-Podilsky, a small town in south-west Ukraine, close to the borders with Moldova and Romania, is one of the most beautiful in the country. Its geographical position, on a plateau surrounded by a deep gorge cut by the Smotrych river as it loops around the old town, explains its longstanding strategic importance. The castle, linked to the old town by a bridge across the gorge, dates to the period when the region, along with much of present-day Ukraine, was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. In its heyday, it was one of the Commonwealth’s most important fortresses, defending against repeated Tatar and Ottoman invasions.

Kamyanets-Podilsky Castle

Kamyanets-Podilsky holds an important place in Polish literature, portrayed as a bulwark of Christian Europe. The final part of Polish Nobel Laureate Henryk Sienkiewicz’s historical trilogy, “Fire in the Steppe” features the Ottoman siege of Kamyanets-Podilsky in 1672. The fall of the town was followed by nearly three decades of Ottoman rule. The period of Ottoman rule was brief, but it left its mark on the Roman Catholic Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. Following the Ottoman conquest, the cathedral was converted into a mosque, and a minaret was added near the entrance. When the town was returned to Poland in 1699 under the Treaty of Karlowitz (present-day Sremski Karlovci, in Vojvodina, Serbia), the mosque was converted back into a cathedral. The minaret was retained however, and a few decades later was topped by a statue of the Virgin Mary, a quirky and incongruous sight.

Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul, with minaret

The fortress has undergone restoration, but is quite well preserved. The arches of the bridge were completely encased in thick stone walls during the period of Ottoman rule, so that it looks like a solid causeway across the gorge, linking the town with the fortress. The castle, with its towers, sitting on its rocky plateau, is a fine sight from across the bridge. Walking around the gorge surrounding the old town, with its steep rocky escarpments and its profusion of greenery, one comes across the remnants of other medieval fortifications, stone towers and gates. This was once a strongly fortified town. In the 18^th and 19^th centuries the castle served as a prison, first under Polish rule, and then under Imperial Russia, which took possession of the town in 1793 as part of the second partition of Poland.

Historically, Kamyanets-Podilsky was an ethnically diverse town, with significant populations of Jews, Poles and Armenians as well as Ukrainians. In the Middle Ages, the Armenian community had played a central role in the commercial life of the town. Shortly after the Ottoman conquest, the Armenians were expelled. Some of them returned after Kamyanets-Podilsky was restored to Poland, but they were a diminished community. Over time, the wealthy Armenian merchants assimilated into Polish society. Traces of the community remain, however, in the names of landmarks such as the Armenian Market Square and the Armenian Bastion, echoes of a time gone by.

The Smotrych Gorge and fortifications

The Polish population of Kamyanets-Podilsky and the surrounding Podillia region was devastated by Stalin’s purges in the 1930s. Suspected of being a potential fifth column, ethnic-Poles were targeted by the NKVD’s “Polish Operation.” Thousands were executed and tens of thousands more deported to Central Asia. As many as a hundred people per night were shot in the basements of the former Dominican convent. As in other such operations, the NKVD had quotas to fill, and the killings and deportations had no connection with any concrete actions by the victims. Poles who survived Stalin’s purges and the Second World War often chose to assimilate with the Ukrainian community in order to preserve themselves, although a small Polish community has re-emerged since Ukraine’s independence. I noticed that many of the Masses at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul are conducted in Polish.

For much of the town’s history, Jews had faced restrictions on their residence and commercial activities in Kamyanets-Podilsky. But under Imperial Russia, the town was part of the Pale of Settlement, where Jews were permitted to reside. In the 19^th century there were flourishing Jewish communities in the town and the surrounding region. By the early 20^th century, Jews made up nearly half of the town’s population. In the late-19^th and early 20^th centuries, many left the town for America. For those that remained, Kamyanets-Podilsky was the scene of one of the first mass-killings of Jews of the Holocaust. On 27-28 August 1941, 23,600 Jews, including people who had recently been deported from Hungary as well as locals, were shot over pits by German SS Einsatzgruppen as well as Hungarian soldiers and Ukrainian Auxiliary Police. The Ukrainian Auxiliary Police had been formed that month, largely out of member of the Ukrainian People’s Militia. The Ukrainian people’s Militia had been formed in June by the Bandera faction of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN), and had already played a leading role in the massacres of Jews in Lviv immediately after the German invasion of the Soviet Union. Today there is a street in Kamyanets-Podilsky named after Stepan Bandera, the leader of the OUN, as in many other towns and cities in Ukraine.

Living with Russian terror in Kyiv

A couple of days before my arrival in Kyiv in July 2024, a Russian missile had hit a children’s hospital in the centre of the city. Amid Russia’s campaign of terror against Ukrainian cities, missile strikes, the deaths of innocents, of children, have become all too common place. But this attack struck a new low. It was Ukraine’s foremost children’s hospital. News reports showed pictures of children with bald heads, there to receive cancer treatment, sitting outside. Rescue workers desperately pulled through the rubble looking for survivors. Volunteers brought water for those labouring in the hot summer sun. How could the Russian attackers do such a thing? What possible explanation could they give for a missile strike on a children’s hospital?

The world was shocked by the terrible images. But after all, the world had been shocked by Russia’s brutal attacks many times before. Each time there are expressions of horror, and then the news cycle moves on. And still spineless Western leaders debate whether to send Ukraine the weapons that could counter Russian terror, and whether to allow Ukraine to use those weapons to strike the places in Russia from which the attacks are launched with impunity. Simply put, some Western leaders do not put a high enough value on Ukrainian lives. President Zelensky has repeatedly pleaded with the West to give Ukraine the means to defend itself. And in return more words “condemning in the strongest possible terms” Russia’s terror, and support for Ukraine “for as long as it takes.” To Ukrainians facing the continuous barrage of Russian missiles, such words sounded like empty “bla bla”.

Kyiv is always lovely in summer. The café terraces, the parks, Trukhaniv island, with its bucolic views, lily pads, bathers, rowing boats. So tranquil, despite the violence that is never far away, the air raid alerts, the almighty bangs when missiles strike or are intercepted by air defence.

Trukhaniv Island, Kyiv

This summer, there were power cuts much of the time. This was not new. There had been power cuts since Russia started targeting the energy infrastructure in the autumn of 2022. But they were more frequent now, and lasted longer. They were not constant. During my stay in Odessa shortly before arriving in Kyiv, they were not too bad. A few hours each day, typically two hours at a time. There had been longer cuts before my arrival. In Dnipro, there were four-hour cuts, two or three times a day. That made it difficult to get on with normal life. In Kharkiv, despite all the wreckage, my stay was free of power cuts almost the whole time. I was lucky. But in Kyiv, when I arrived, there were cuts of up to seven hours, twice during the daytime. Some days there would just be a couple of two-hour windows with power. This was disruptive. Most cafes and restaurants in the city centre had generators, so it was possible to get a coffee and a croissant, to check my emails and social media. And then one day, after a couple of weeks of that, it was all much better. Power cuts few and far between, whole days with no outages at all.

I suppose, I hope, the electricity providers were using the warm summer months, with their long hours of daylight, to carry out repairs, to bolster capacity before the winter. This has been the story each year since Russia’s full-scale invasion; anxiety, fear about the coming winter. Would there be power? Would there be heating? So far, the country had done remarkably well. But the relentless Russian attacks continued, with the aim of making Ukrainians freeze, of making their cities uninhabitable, of breaking their spirit.

More than two years into the war, spirits were frayed. On the surface, Kyiv could appear quite normal. People went about their business. They went to work. They drank coffee with their friends. They went to bars, although, admittedly, the midnight curfew put a dampener on the city’s nightlife. But it was hard to escape the sombre mood. The disappointing failure of the previous summer’s offensive, the realisation that there would be no speedy end to the war, the relentless Russian attacks, the deaths, the tragedies, the streams of lies from Trump-supporting politicians and journalists who cynically blamed Ukraine for Russia’s aggression. It all took its toll.

On 28 July, the second anniversary of the mass-murder of more than 50 Ukrainian prisoners of war at Olenivka, in Russian-occupied eastern Ukraine, there was a rally in the central Maidan square in Kyiv. Several hundred participants included family members of Ukrainian prisoners, as well as soldiers of the Azov Brigade, formerly known as the Azov Battalion, whose members had been among those killed at Olenivka. Olenivka was the site of a POW camp where Ukrainian prisoners were kept who had defended Mariupol during the early weeks of Russia’s full-scale aggression against Ukraine.

Azov torches on the Maidan

It had not been possible to carry out a proper independent investigation of the explosion at Olenivka during the night of 28-29 July 2022, as the Russian occupiers and their local proxies did not allow access to UN investigators. However, Russian claims that the explosion was the result of a Ukrainian rocket attack did not seem to stand up to scrutiny. Rather, it appeared that it was caused by an incendiary device within the prison. The Ukrainian authorities, based in part on intelligence findings, concluded that the explosion had been caused by members of the Wagner group, a private military company responsible for numerous war crimes in Syria and Africa, as well as Ukraine. It was suspected that the motivation was to cover up evidence of the torture and murder of Ukrainian POWs that had taken place there.

The crime at Olenivka was a terrible trauma for Ukraine, prompting despair at the helplessness of international agencies such as the United Nations and the International Committee of the Red Cross to protect Ukrainian prisoners. The heroic defence of the Azovstal plant in Mariupol in the spring of 2022, as well as the brutal destruction of the city and the mass slaughter of thousands of its inhabitants, is a source of both pride and immense pain for Ukrainians. The murder of so many heroes of Azovstal at Olenivka redoubled that pain. While the release of prisoners brought back from Russia in prisoner exchanges is always a reason for joy, the evidence of their mistreatment intensifies the anger. That anger among the crowds on the Maidan on 28 July was palpable.

Following a speech by an Azov commander who had been among the Azovstal defenders to have been released in a prisoner swap, the ranks of Azov soldiers recited the Prayer of a Ukrainian Nationalist, and then held aloft flaring torches. Seeing these displays, I could not help but be reminded of the controversies that, despite the undoubted courage of Azov soldiers, have surrounded Azov from its inception. Azov was set up by far-right, neo-Nazi figures at the outset of Russia’s aggression in 2014. And despite claims that the unit has put its extremist origins behind it and become a regular, professional unit, shorn of the ideological baggage, displays such as this suggest that the brigade has not transformed itself as much as is claimed. For a start, the Azov soldiers still wear the modified Wolfsangel arm patch, a symbol associated with the Nazis. And then there is the so-called “prayer” of a Ukrainian nationalist, with its references to Ukrainian fascist leaders from the 1930s and 40s. And the holding aloft of torches looked more like a Nuremburg rally than a military parade.

The glorification of Stepan Bandera and the OUN fascists who resisted Soviet occupation in the 1940s, but also massacred tens of thousands of Jews and Poles, as well as Ukrainians who did not subscribe to their extreme nationalist vision, had at one time only had marginal appeal in Ukraine, mostly in the far west of the country. But the Maidan Revolution and Russian aggression have seen acceptance of the historical legitimacy of Bandera and the OUN, together with its symbols, spread to the mainstream. Russian propaganda makes preposterous claims about the supposedly Nazi leanings of Ukraine, with its Jewish president. But the normalisation and acceptance of the veneration of murderous fascists of the past, the erection of statues of them, and the naming of streets after them, is only grist to the mill of Russian propaganda. And there is no need for it. Bandera and his ilk have nothing in common with today’s democratic, European Ukraine. The courage of Ukrainians resisting Russia’s brutal aggression owes nothing to the warped heritage of such extremists.

Life amid the terror of war in Odessa

I had last visited Odessa in the summer of 2022, just a few months after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine (see post of 2 August 2023). The city had felt half-empty, with little traffic, and many shops, restaurants and cafes closed. There had been checkpoints manned by armed men all over the place. Returning in June 2024, the city had somewhat revived. Some people, at least, had returned. And some of the gaps had been filled by people displaced from war-torn places further east. A bit more life had returned to the streets. The roadblocks had mostly gone. The seaside boulevard close to the Potemkin Steps, Odessa’s most celebrated landmark, was open to the public again. There was a greater air of normality. The agent from whom I rented a studio apartment told me there were even a few visitors from other parts or Ukraine, come to enjoy the summer season in Odessa, even in wartime.

The Potemkin Steps and the wrecked Hotel Odessa

But new scars had appeared on the city as a result of Russia’s terror strikes. The high-rise hotel at the end of a promontory at the bottom of the Potemkin Steps had been wrecked, as had the marine terminal next to it. It had been an ugly hotel, as even its owner acknowledged, and had been disused for several years, a dreadful blot on the view from the top of the famous steps. If its destruction would not be entirely mourned, the same could not be said of the strike on the Transfiguration, or Spaso-Preobrazhensky Cathedral in July 2023. During an attack that also saw strikes on residential buildings, a missile blew a hole in the cathedral’s roof, collapsing the altar. The shocked population came out to clear up the rubble caused by the explosion. In the afternoon, the Archbishop and the head priest of the cathedral led prayers outside the building. The city’s controversial mayor, who had been seen by many as pro-Russian, made an emotional statement, switching to Russian to speak directly to the Russian people, to tell them how much Odessans hated and despised them, calling them people without morals or values.

Damaged Transfiguration Cathedral, Odessa

In a dreadful irony, the cathedral belonged to the part of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church that had remained affiliated to the Moscow Patriarchate up until the 2022 full-scale invasion (a rival Orthodox Church of Ukraine, inaugurated in 2018 with the blessing of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople, unambiguously stood with Ukraine’s struggle for its survival). The original cathedral had been destroyed by the communist regime in the 1930s. Having been rebuilt in independent Ukraine, it was consecrated in 2010 by no less a figure than the Patriarch of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Despite the Ukrainian Orthodox Church having broken with Moscow in 2022, many Ukrainians still regarded it with suspicion, and some of its clergy had been accused of collaborating with the invaders. The Russian Orthodox Patriarch had given his forceful backing to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. He blessed Russian troops and declared that those who died in battle would be cleansed of their sins. For his part, following the attack on the cathedral in Odessa, the head priest was unequivocal in denouncing the Moscow Patriarchate and the Patriarch himself. A year after the attack, the cathedral was closed, its windows boarded up. Renovation work was already under way. At the front of the cathedral, which had been undamaged by the blast, it was possible to step just inside the entrance. Notices outside the church were now in Ukrainian, no longer Russian.

Odessa’s Ukrainian identity had long been in question. Historically multiethnic, and with a large Jewish population, it was Russian speaking and, before the onset of Russia’s aggression in 2014, part of its population had identified as Russian. When I lived in Odessa in 2015-2016, one almost exclusively heard Russian in the streets of Odessa. Only in summer, when visitors from other parts of Ukraine flocked to the city, did one hear much Ukrainian. War had changed the character of the city, just as it had changed Ukrainian society in general. Under the onslaught of a brutal invader, few wanted to identify with Russia anymore. Waiters and waitresses, as well as shopkeepers, spoke to their customers in Ukrainian, as required by law. While Russian was still widely spoken, Ukrainian was now much more frequently heard in the streets. Shop signs were in Ukrainian.

Catherine the Great, off her pedestal

Outward symbols of the old Russian connection are also disappearing. The statue of Catherine the Great, the founder of the city, had been removed from its pedestal close to the Potemkin steps, replaced for the time-being by a Ukrainian flag. Little flags commemorating people who had been killed fighting for Ukraine had been placed around it. The bust of the great Russian poet, Pushkin, close to the city hall, was still there, as was the statue of Prince Mikhail Vorontsov, a governor of New Russia in the early 19^th century, with his seat in Odessa, next to the Transfiguration Cathedral. Pushkin had lived in Odessa for a time, and reputedly had an affair with Vorontsov’s wife. But such associations with the city’s Russian history are out of favour now. Not all Odessans were happy with such attempts to re-write the city’s history, even among those who were 100 per cent loyal to Ukraine. A couple of my Odessa friends were sorry about the removal of the statue of Catherine. But in the present climate, such views tend not to be voiced publicly.

In the early weeks of the full-scale invasion, Odessa had been in Russia’s sights. But Russian forces had been beaten back before Mykolaiv, to the east of Odessa, and then pushed out of Kherson and across the Dnieper river in the autumn of 2022. A series of Ukrainian strikes against Russian warships, and on the naval base at Sevastopol, in Crimea, had effectively pushed the Russian navy away from the western side of the Black Sea. While Odessa, like everywhere else in Ukraine, was not safe from terror attacks by Russian missiles and drones, Russia’s attempts to capture the city had failed. Whatever its history, Odessa’s future is as a Ukrainian city.

Summertime in Odessa

Odessa in summer is always delightful, even in wartime. People sit in the city’s well-tended gardens, eating ice creams, listening to street musicians. Children play. Delivery cyclists flit about with their boxes of hot food on their backs. Yet the mood in 2024 had a sombre edge. As throughout much of Ukraine, there were power cuts, the result of Russian attacks on the country’s energy infrastructure. There were frequent air-raid alerts, ignored by many, but threatening nonetheless. Sitting with a friend on a café terrace one lunchtime, we were startled by a loud bang. It turned out it had come from the port city of Chornomorsk, more than 20 kilometres along the coast. It often surprised me how loud the bangs were from explosions quite some distance away. Many Ukrainians had become used to air raid sirens and loud bangs, even blasé about it. For others, it was a constant strain on the nerves. But after more than two years, it was becoming exhausting. The failure of the previous summer’s much heralded Ukrainian counter-offensive had dampened spirits. The prospect of a long-drawn out war, with the uncertainty of continued western support, was draining. The need for ever more recruits for Ukraine’s army was stretching the commitment of some.

At the beginning of the full-scale invasion, volunteers had flocked to the army. Young men queued up at recruiting offices. Techies used their expertise to send drones against the columns of Russian armour. Elderly ladies prepared Molotov cocktails and knitted socks for the soldiers. Two years on, all those who wanted to volunteer had done so. Now the army was having to draft people who did not want to go to fight. Walking in Ukrainian cities, one all too often passes men (and some women) walking with prosthetics, or with an arm missing, an all too vivid reminder of the dangers involved in going to war. In Odessa, I heard stories of men being pulled off the street and forced into the army. Most men between the ages of 18 and 60 were not allowed to leave the country. The age at which men could be drafted had recently been reduced from 27 to 25 (younger men could volunteer). But some had either bribed officials to let them cross the border, or slipped out of the country illegally. Close to the Moldovan border, one could see abandoned vehicles. I was told they were left by men who had sneaked across the frontier. I was also told of police officers offering to let men evade the draft if they paid a bribe, otherwise they would be sent to the army. Probably such tales of corruption were rare. But they were widely believed.

The impression that the sons of rich or influential families could escape the draft, that the longstanding poison of corruption continued to afflict the country, even in wartime, had a corrosive effect. There had been scandals concerning military procurement, of defence officials on the take, even at a time when the country was fighting for its very survival. A defence minister had been sacked, reportedly for having failed to get to grips with such shaming dishonesty. The sense of a united country, of shared sacrifice, had been degraded by such stories. The very fact that life in Odessa, even with the air raid alerts, the bangs, and the nightly curfew, appeared so normal was surreal. Was this really a country locked in an existential struggle? I had heard that many soldiers, returning on leave, were disturbed to see the extent to which normal life continued. President Zelensky, with his regular addresses to the population, tried to sustain a sense of purpose, of pride, and of optimism. But in a drawn-out war with little good news, it is not always easy.

Historical memory in Lviv

Lviv is a beautiful city in western Ukraine. In many ways it has a distinct spirit, reflecting its different historical heritage from the rest of the country. Lviv, together with the eastern Galicia region of which it is the most important city, had spent much less of its history under Russian or Soviet rule. As part of the partition of Poland in the 18th century, Lviv had been annexed to the Austrian Hapsburg Empire. After an attempt to establish an independent Ukrainian state at the end of the First World War, Lviv and the rest of western Ukraine was incorporated into the restored Polish state. But while Lviv itself had a predominantly Polish and Jewish population, with Ukrainians in a minority, in the surrounding territory of eastern Galicia Ukrainians were in the majority.

Dissatisfaction with Polish rule was strongly felt among the Ukrainian population, and radical nationalists of the Organisation of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) carried on a violent campaign of terrorist attacks targeting the Polish state as well as Ukrainians who they regarded as traitors or collaborators. The onset of the Second World War seemed to offer them another chance to establish an independent state under their exclusivist, totalitarian rule. After the invasion and dismemberment of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939, most of the OUN leadership took refuge in the German occupied west of the country, where they established close ties with the Nazis. Following a split in the organisation, a more radical faction, the OUN-B, so-named after its leader, Stepan Bandera, made plans for a national revolution they hoped to carry out in Ukraine with Nazi support.

The OUN-B was a typical fascist organisation of its day, in its totalitarian ideology, its intolerance towards other nations in the territory it claimed, and its vicious antisemitism. Its members adopted the outstretched arm fascist salute, and drew inspiration from other fascist movements in Italy, Slovakia and Croatia, as well as Germany. Bandera, as “providnyk” (leader), throughout his life insisted upon the leadership principle (“führerprinzip” in German) of unswerving submission to the leader’s will.

When the Germans launched Operation Barbarossa in June 1941, they did not allow Bandera to cross into the newly occupied territory. But other OUN leaders were quick to take up the opportunity. When the German army reached Lviv, one of Bandera’s key subordinates, Yaroslav Stetsko, proclaimed a new Ukrainian state on 30 June. The arrival of the German army was followed by a bloody pogrom against the city’s Jewish population, in which a militia organised by the OUN-B took a prominent part.

Lviv’s brief experience of Soviet rule in 1939-41 had been brutally repressive. Tens of thousands of people were arrested, and frequently tortured, and hundreds of thousands were deported. Before the hasty Soviet withdrawal from the city in the face of the German advance, the NKVD secret police were ordered to shoot all remaining political prisoners. Thousands were murdered in NKVD prisons in Lviv.

Memorial to the victims of communist crimes, Lviv

I visited the National Museum - Memorial of the Victims of the Occupying Regimes “Prison on Lonsky Street”, located in one of the prisons where the NKVD murders took place. While the museum depicts the harsh prison regime during periods as a Polish, Soviet and Nazi gaol, its particular focus is on the NKVD murders, during which, according to the information provided, 1,681 were killed, or 41 per cent of the NKVD murders carried out in prisons in Lviv. However, as the historian John-Paul Himka has described, the museum gives an incomplete account of the bloody events at Lonsky prison in the days before and after the Soviet withdrawal from the city in June 1941.

Upon the arrival of the German army in the town, the bodies of the murdered prisoners were brought out into the prison yard, where shocked Lviv residents came to identify their loved ones. As the English-language text at the museum acknowledges, Jewish residents of Lviv were rounded up and forced to carry out the bodies, which were already decomposing in the summer heat. What the museum does not relate is how these Jews were savagely beaten and murdered, and how this developed into a full-scale pogrom, during which Jews were dragged from their homes, beaten and humiliated in the street, raped and murdered. This is a serious omission, made worse by the emphasis that during the Nazi occupation it was mainly Ukrainians, members of the OUN, who were victimised at the prison. Thus while the museum’s account glosses over the massacre of Jews that took place inside Lonsky Prison as well as elsewhere in the city, it presents the organisation whose members actively participated in that massacre as the primary victims of Nazi repression.

In line with typical Nazi propaganda, the OUN conflated Jews with communism. Supposed “Jewish Bolshevism” and the Jewish population were held responsible for the NKVD murders in Lviv, despite the fact that Jews were among the NKVD’s victims. Ukrainian newspapers at the time played up this association, whipping up passions against the city’s Jews. Of course, those newspapers were produced under the supervision of the German occupiers. But the conflation of Jews and communists and hostility to Jews as an enemy of the Ukrainian people were key aspects of OUN ideology.

The English-language text in the museum states that among its aims is “to encourage patriotism among the citizens of Ukraine.” As has been described by Himka, as well as by Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe and other historians, this is in line with a practice among OUN apologists in the Ukrainian diaspora and in western Ukraine to rewrite history so as to glorify the role of the OUN and to minimise, deny or ignore the fascist nature of the organisation, its collaboration with the Nazis and the terrible crimes its members perpetrated. It is a narrative which in recent years been pressed upon the rest of the country as well.

As it became clear that Nazi Germany would lose the war, the OUN tried to distance itself from its earlier fascist associations, and presented itself as resisting both Nazi and Soviet occupation. In fact the OUN-B’s initial overtures to the German occupiers in 1941 had been rebuffed, as the latter had no interest in supporting Ukrainian aspirations to establish an independent state. Several OUN-B members, including Bandera himself, were arrested by the Germans. Nevertheless, many members of the OUN-B militia joined the Ukrainian police force established by the Germans, which participated extensively in the holocaust. And when in 1942 the OUN-B established the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), many members of the Ukrainian police deserted to the new organisation. While the OUN-B tried to downplay its earlier fascism and Nazi collaboration, the UPA continued to murder Jews, as well as massacring tens of thousands of Poles in a genocidal campaign to cleanse the Eastern Galicia and Volhynia regions of Poles.

OUN apologists claim that the organisation was not responsible for the Lviv pogrom in July 1941, for which they blame the Germans and criminal elements in the Lviv population. But as numerous Jewish survivors attested, the OUN-B militia was extensively involved in rounding up the Jewish victims. Furthermore, photographs of the events taken by Germans show that many perpetrators were wearing the OUN-B militia’s armbands. The museum at the prison on Lonsky Street claims to bear witness to the terrible events that took place there. But its omission of the pogrom and silence about the role played by members of the OUN-B, whose members it presents as heroes and victims, is an unconscionable distortion of history.

Close by the Lonsky prison museum is a monument to the victims of communist crimes. It is marked by the Ukrainian trident, and does not indicate that there were also non-Ukrainian victims. However, elsewhere in the city, a monument to the NKVD murders commemorates Ukrainian, Polish and Jewish victims.

Rossoliński-Liebe’s book, “Stepan Bandera, the Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist: Fascism, Genocide and Cult”, describes how, as the Soviet Union collapsed, monuments glorifying the OUN and Bandera began to be erected in western Ukraine. A large statue of Bandera was unveiled in Lviv in 2007. The rehabilitation of Bandera and the OUN was stepped up during the presidency of Viktor Yushchenko, from 2005-10, who designated Bandera, as well as another leading OUN-B figure, Roman Shukhevych, as heroes of Ukraine. This move was reversed under Yushchenko’s successor, Viktor Yanukovych, but the rewriting of history to glorify the OUN as fighters for Ukrainian independence, while glossing over or denying their crimes and their Nazi collaboration has gathered pace since the onset of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine in 2014.

The designation of Bandera as a hero was denounced by the European Parliament as well as by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organisation which promotes remembrance of the holocaust. The Simon Wiesenthal Center also sharply condemned the decision of the Ukrainian parliament in 2018 to mark Bandera’s birthday on 1 January. The glorification of Bandera and the OUN is also widely denounced in Poland. The noted historian of the holocaust and of Ukraine, Timothy Snyder, in an article in the New York Review of Books in February 2010, described Yushchenko’s rehabilitation of Bandera as ethically unsound and as casting a shadow on his political legacy.

None of this deters the OUN’s Ukrainian apologists. There is a widely held perception today in Ukraine that their history has too long been seen through a Russian or Soviet lens, and that they should now tell their own story. There is considerable justification for this view. In the Soviet Union, the OUN and Bandera were denounced as Nazi collaborators and criminals, but the immense crimes of the Soviet regime, its savage repression of resistance to Soviet rule in western Ukraine, and the mass executions and deportations, were covered up. In response to any who criticise the glorification of Bandera and the OUN or denounce their record, a stock reply from Ukrainian OUN apologists is to claim that they are spreading Soviet and Russian propaganda. However, such inferences do not hold weight in light of the clear historical record of the fascist nature of the OUN, its Nazi collaboration and the horrendous crimes committed by many of its adherents.

I also visited the Memorial Museum of Totalitarian Regimes “Territory of Terror”, which is located in what was during World War II Lviv’s Jewish ghetto. This was also the location of a Soviet transit camp from 1944-1955, for deportations to the east. The museum’s exhibits and accompanying texts commemorate the mass murder of Lviv’s Jewish residents, both in the city’s ghetto and at the Janowska slave labour camp on the outskirts of the city, as well as the deportations by the Soviet regime. In general, it gives a much fuller account of the horrors inflicted by both the Nazi and Soviet regimes than is the case at the Lonsky prison museum. That said, it does not document the crimes committed by the OUN and the UPA, whose members are depicted as victims. Notably, a series of displays in front of the museum when I visited, about individual victims, mostly concern Ukrainian victims rather than Jews, many of them OUN and UPA, or members of their families.

This troubling lionisation of people with such an unsavoury record is likely to continue to stain the country’s reputation. Ukraine has rightly received enormous international support for its heroic struggle against Russian aggression. Yet key allies, notably Poland, are among the countries that are particularly offended by such historical revisionism. What is especially baffling is that modern Ukraine, a democratic state aspiring to membership of the European Union, with a Jewish president and a Crimean Tatar defence minister, has nothing to do with the intolerant, totalitarian fascism espoused by Bandera and the OUN. Yet it is very hard to find Ukrainians who are willing to push back against the nationalist narrative, at least in public. In recent decades much has been done to uncover Ukraine’s painful history of Soviet repression. A more serious, honest and frank discussion of other aspects of the country’s difficult 20th century history is also needed.

Museums and monuments in Warsaw

As the Russian invasion of Ukraine had stopped all air travel to the country, my journeys to Kyiv in the autumn of 2022 and again in the summer of 2023 passed through Warsaw. With events in Ukraine very much on my mind, I took the opportunity to visit a couple of the monuments to the resistance in Poland during the Second World War.

The Warsaw Uprising Monument commemorates the battle of Poland’s resistance to seize control of the capital from the retreating German occupiers before the arrival of the advancing Soviet forces. The uprising, which began on 1 August 1944, was both heroic and tragic, as the Soviet army stopped short of the city and waited while the Germans brutally suppressed it and then destroyed the city in its aftermath. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died, as Stalin refused to allow any meaningful supplies to the resistance. The uprising may be seen as the beginning of the Cold War, as the Polish Home Army’s vision of a pro-Western Polish state clashed with the Soviets’ determination to crush any independent Polish spirit and to subsume the country into its expanding empire of proxy states in central Europe. The people of Warsaw paid the price for the Nazi brutality and Soviet callousness.

The Warsaw Uprising monument

The monument depicts Home Army soldiers in action amid the ruins of the shattered city, as well as a group emerging from the sewers, which had been an important way for the insurgents to move around. It was only erected in 1989, at the very end of communist rule in Poland. Until then communist Poland had downplayed and distorted the importance of the uprising. Home Army veterans were disparaged and, in the immediate post-war period, even arrested. No commemorations of the Home Army or the uprising were permitted. The cynicism with which the Soviet army stood back and watched as the Germans destroyed Warsaw meant that the uprising was an uncomfortable event for the communist regime.

The Warsaw Rising Museum opened in 2004, to mark the 60^th anniversary of the uprising. A big, sprawling museum over a number of floors, it is packed with artefacts, weapons, photographs, displays, videos and audio. The subdued lighting and a loud background noise, like a beating heart, produced a forbidding atmosphere. The museum was crowded, with large school parties rushed around. Disturbing impressions were thrown at me, but the thread of events through that terrible two months was hard to follow. I picked up some printed flyers that seemed randomly distributed around the museum, but which explained the course of events. I left with the feeling that they had tried to pack in too much, and that coherence had been lost along the way.

The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising monument

Another monument commemorating the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was unveiled in 1948, in the area where the ghetto had been. It consists of a large stone wall representing both the walls of the ghetto and the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, with two large menorahs to either side. Inset in the wall are, on one side, insurgents of the uprising, and, on the other, a depiction of the Nazi persecution of the Jewish people. Next to the monument is the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which was opened in 2013. This striking postmodern building has become a considerable landmark in Warsaw. The name Polin means both “Poland” in Hebrew, as well as “rest here”, which relates to the legend about the first Jews’ arrival in Poland. The museum relates a thousand years of Jewish history in Poland, once the largest Jewish community in the world, from its beginnings in the Middle Ages up to the holocaust and beyond.

The Polin museum, Warsaw

The museum’s layout draws visitors through the different phases of Jewish history in Poland. That Poland attracted such a large Jewish community reflected its exceptional tolerance among European states. Although Poland was not immune to antisemitic violence, its Jews were in general protected by the Polish Kings, who valued their contribution to the economy of their realm. As elsewhere, Jews in Poland thrived as traders. The Polin museum does not shy away from presenting uncomfortable aspects of Jewish history in Poland, including their engagement in the slave trade. It explains that, despite the Catholic Church’s objections to the enslavement of Christians, Poland’s kings were loath to act against it, because they profited from the trade. Catholic clergy in general opposed the tolerance shown towards Jews, but their objections were largely ignored by the country’s rulers.

With my mind on Ukraine, an especially striking section of the museum concerned the Bohdan Khmelnytsky rebellion of 1648. Ukraine was at the time part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Khmelnytsky’s Cossack rebellion against Polish rule especially targeted Jews, as well as Polish landowners and Catholic priests. Jews were seen as allies of the Polish landed aristocracy as they frequently acted as tax collectors. Tens of thousands of Jews were massacred. The museum explained how, for the Jewish community in Poland-Lithuania, the Khmelnytsky rebellion was a cataclysmic event that ended their feeling of safety and security in Poland. Furthermore, from a Polish perspective, the Khmelnytsky rebellion was an important stage in the weakening of the Commonwealth, leading to its eventual demise and partition among the neighbouring states. For Poland’s Jews, the demise of the Commonwealth was also negative, as it meant that they lost the protection Poland had offered them, and were left at the mercy of rising antisemitism in the Russian and Austrian empires.

In Ukraine, Khmelnytsky has usually been seen as a positive historical figure. One of the country’s regions is named after him. A banknote bears his image. And there is an equestrian statue of him in the centre of Kyiv. However, some Ukrainians have seen him unfavourably, especially because, with his rebellion failing, after initial success, he turned to the Russian Tsar for support, which led to the incorporation of eastern and central Ukraine into imperial Russia. For Russia, Khmelnytsky was seen as a heroic figure, for his role in, according to the Russian view, uniting Russian lands. Indeed, the statue in Kyiv was erected in the 19^th century, under Tsarist rule.

Since independence, Ukrainians have been reassessing their history, a process that has been accelerated by Russia’s aggression. There is a widespread feeling that Ukrainian history has for too long been written from a Russian perspective. This feeling has considerable justification. The point is relevant for western historians as well, who all too often had a largely Russo-centric view of imperial Russia and the Soviet Union, which did not give sufficient weight or importance to the non-Russian peoples under Tsarist and Soviet rule. But in addressing their history, Ukrainians need to take a critical look at uncomfortable episodes and historical Ukrainian figures whose records were far from unblemished. Polish-Ukrainian relations, as well as the treatment of the Jewish community, present difficult topics, and Ukrainians need also to consider the perspectives of others on their shared histories. As the Polin museum makes clear, Khmelnytsky is far from a heroic figure for some of Ukraine’s neighbours.

Histories and Legends in Transylvania

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.

St Michael's church, Cluj

While Cluj expanded in the 20^th century, its historic centre has nevertheless retained its charm. The central square is dominated by the 15^th 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 15^th century Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus, which was erected at the beginning of the 20^th 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 15^th 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.

Clock tower, Sighişoara

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 18^th 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.

Tinsmith's tower, Sighişoara

A steep covered wooden staircase, the Scholars’ Stairs, dating from the 17^th 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 20^th 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

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 19^th century the Bulgarians had been Romanianised. There, in the grounds of the 15^th century Orthodox Church, the first school to teach in the Romanian language was established. Built at the end of the 15^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 14^th 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.

Bran Castle

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.