Notes from the new front line

The flag debate drags on and on and ...

Political capital is made by both sides in perpetuating it. Easy to whip Romanians into a fury over this treacherous irredentist piece of cloth, and easy to whip Hungarians up into a fury over attempts to ban it.  It is, obviously, a complete non issue, especially at a time when people have far bigger problems to worry about.  But, hey, it's an easy distraction for politicians and media to indulge in.  In both countries.

Yesterday I saw a job advert from the US Embassy in Vienna asking for a Hungarian/Romanian media analyst.  A full time position to monitor the media in both countries and report. If the CIA* are now taking an interest in this, it must mean they are at least slightly worried.

(*It wasn't technically a CIA job, but this hardly seems like a consular need)

This is how it starts though.  Times of great economic stress lead people to seek an easy outlet for their worries/fears/concerns/anger.  In some countries it's immigrants.  Here it's Hungarians (and in Hungary it's dragging up Trianon again).  It will probably blow over, but it's as depressing as fuck though.  Depressing that the electorate in both countries can't just say to their political leaders "No, for fuck's sake, they're not the problem.  You are."

See? Incontrovertible proof

On Tuesday there was a Szekely flag raising ceremony in the main square here.  We've never had one there before, but there are more Szekely flags flying now than there ever were before, and whoever is making them, is doing a tidy business.  Oddly they scheduled the ceremony for exactly the same time as the start of the biggest and most important ice hockey match of the season. And as you will from this scientifically accurate venn diagram I've just made up there's a pretty big crossover between people who would like to attend a ceremony raising the flag and local ice hockey fans. Anyway, the mayor (who I may have mentioned before is something of a  dick) made some speech saying that Hungarian ought to be mandatory in this town.  Which I guess means I need to leave.  This blog will probably have to be closed.  Nonsensical bluster of course, but he managed to get the Romanian press up in arms, so I guess he feels it was worth it.

Anyway, HSC Csikszereda (the ice hockey team) won, you'll be glad to know, and are now in the playoffs and about to face Nove Zamky of Slovakia, with either DAB or Miskolc (both from Hungary) awaiting the winner. It's been an excellent and highly competitive season for the MOL league, and I've thoroughly enjoyed it.  The final of the Romanian championship will follow, and given all this flag and attendant other nonsense, I fear that is likely to be less fun as it will imbued with lots of heavy meaningfulness and the whole sporting contest element will be somewhat lost.

Finally, here is a video aimed at helping Romanians speak Szekely.

My Hopes for Transylvania in 2012

It's the New Year, and I have a dream, and all that...

I have this utopian vision in which people get over their need to be intolerant dicks who see everything through nationalistic spectacles.  (I mean those that are intolerant dicks who see everything through nationalistic spectacles anyway.  The others who are not can just be as they are, safe in the knowledge that they haven't incurred my meaningless wrath).

Anyway, to the idiots who insist on making everything into some national dick waving contest:

Let me let you into a secret: There is absolutely no difference between Hungarians and Romanians, aside from the fact that they speak a different first language (and there are a few nurtured "cultural" differences).  That's it.  In fact anyone who is from Transylvania is pretty much guaranteed to have both Romanian and Hungarian ancestors, that's just the way it is.

The history of Transylvania is one of diversity and different groups. Can't people be proud of that rather than find it as a reason to be irritating intolerant bastards? It makes me so tired.

Can't you celebrate the diversity?  One of the greatest ever heroes of Transylvanian (and Hungarian) history is Matyas Kiraly (Matthias Corvinus). He's a great example of a Transylvanian having (as he did) a Romanian father and a Hungarian mother. Everyone should celebrate him, but instead Hungarians want to pretend that the Romanian side didn't exist and Romanians (or at least Gheorghe Funar) want to dig up his statue. This kind of wankery goes on all the time.

The whole area has been home to Romanians, Hungarians, Szekely, Germans, Jews, Armenians, Rroma, Csango, Serbs, Slovaks, Ukrainians, etc etc etc for centuries.  This seems to me like something to be proud of.  The fact that a lot of these groups have gone or are nearly gone now is the real tragedy.

Romanians: When two people whose first language is Hungarian speak to each other it is entirely normal that they do so in Hungarian. It's not some massive insult to the nation. Swiss people, for example, seem to be able to manage to deal with the fact that some of their countrymen speak a different language from them, why can't you? It's not treason, it's talking.

Hungarians: If a Romanian comes into your shop or your cafe or whatever and wants to buy something, or ask a question or whatever, why can't you just behave like an adult and respond in Romanian? You know you speak it. It's not clever and big to pretend you don't. It's stupid. I speak the world's worst Romanian, but I reckon I could manage to sell someone a loaf of bread. I know you can do it.

Now, I know a lot of people will tell me that I just don't get it.  I just don't get the history, I don't get the pain that one set of people have suffered at the hands of the other.  I don't, in short, carry around some massive nationalistic chip on my shoulder.  That's true.  I don't. I do have my fair share of chips, but I don't have some kind of historical grudge against some people whose only crime is to speak a different language from me.  I know there's history, I know there have been bad things done to people for terrible reasons, but taking it out on your neighbours - who were not involved in any of these crimes - is not really going to solve anything. Let it go.

Hungarians: Transylvania is in Romania. The only way that it won't be in Romania in the future would be through some absolutely catastrophic event which would definitely be a very bad thing. Get used to it, and perhaps even enjoy it.  The land is the same, the people are the same, it's just governed by some people in a far off city beginning with Bu- and ending in -est, so in fact very little has changed.  (And yes I know the current government in that city are utterly shit, but even then they are marginally less bad than the current government in Budapest.  So, on balance you're ever so slightly better off, anyway)

And if somebody Romanian acts like an wanker, it's because they are an wanker, not because they are Romanian.  Likewise if a Hungarian acts like a dick, it's because he's a dick not because he's Hungarian.

To give an example, it seems that the nationalities of the two main protagonists in the story of Basescu vs Arafat are being presented as an issue.  They are not.  Basescu is a twat because he's a twat not because he's Romanian, and Arafat is one of the good guys because he's one of the good guys, not because he's Palestinian. (Or, if you wrongheadedly see things the other way round, nationality still doesn't come into it)

Even in the case when people allow nationalism to drive their thick-as-pigshit-ness, that still doesn't come down to their nationality.  The bloke from here who hanged an effigy of Avram Iancu last March 15th?  Those Noua Dreapta scum who showed up here a month ago on December 1st to spread their poisonous bullshit? Those people are arseholes pure and simple.  The fact that they hang their arseholery on nationalism doesn't make them arseholes because they are Hungarian/Romanian.  It is just because they are braindead fuckwits.

(Romanians: Here's a little test for yourself: Every time you feel the urge to go off on one about Hungarians, first do the following. Imagine the situation in question pertains to Romanians living in Northern Bucovina, and see if this changes your perception. If a Romanian in Cernauti speaks Romanian to his neighbour, or doesn't proudly hang the Ukrainian flag outside his house, do you feel he should be criticised for somehow being anti-Ukrainian)

Basically, nationality is not a factor. You are of course more than welcome to identify yourself as being part of a national group (I don't really understand that either, but I recognise I'm very much in the minority in that), and even if I wanted to I couldn't stop you from making nationality part of your identity, but it's not a factor in anything else.  If someone disappoints you or annoys you or makes you angry or challenges you or arrests you or attacks you or pleases you or intrigues you or says something interesting or turns you on or makes you feel good or whatever, their nationality is not the first thing you should focus on.  It's not even the last thing.  It has no bearing on anything.

I know this sounds like some naive Rodney King-esque plea, but really can't we all just get along? And I'm not talking about tolerance, if that's the best you can do, you probably shouldn't bother.  You, we, are all the same. Celebrate that fact. But if you can't do that, just moan about each other out of range of me.  You're making me really tired.

Politics week - Part 3: Hungary

So, the UK now has a Tory prime minister and basically a Tory government. (On a side note, I discovered yesterday that I am older than both halves of Britain's new conjoined prime-ministers. This is obviously the next stage in feeling ancient, after many others - being older than some professional footballers--> being older than all tennis players--> being older than all professional footballers--> and now being older than not just the PM but the mini-me version too). Who knows how it will all pan out, but looking at the cabinet it looks very dicey. Have you seen Michael Gove's views on education for example? Shudder)

And Romania has a government which seems destined to shatter even the Thatcher government's worst excesses. See Bogdan's comments adding to my post on Monday for more details.

However, these two countries pale into insignificance when we look at Hungary. Like the UK, Hungary also recently had a general election, and like the UK it previously had a very unpopular sort-of-but-not-really-left-wing-party in power. However, whereas in the UK the mainstream right-wing party didn't really take full advantage of this, in Hungary they (FIDESZ) swept to power with a huge majority. Now as I think I've said before I think FIDESZ are a pretty dodgy bunch, with a number of dodgy people involved (not least their leader Viktor Orbán).In common with many other mainstream right wing parties they tend to play the "we're not racist, but" game - not being openly racist or having openly racist policies, but not really speaking out against racism (and as we'll see in a couple of paragraphs time, there is a lot of racism in Hungary that really needs to be spoken out against).

In theory FIDESZ's election ought to be reasonably good news for people round here since they do tend to go in for the "let's support our poor oppressed Magyar brothers isolated from us by the evils of Trianon" rhetoric, and in previous periods of government they funded a fair amount of activity here in Székelyföld. Though with Hungary as bankrupt as everywhere else in Europe seems to be, such financial support looks a bit further off this time. There is a suggestion that as they have such a huge parliamentary majority now which allows them to alter the constitution, that they will resuscitate the attempt in 2004 to award Hungarian citizenship to ethnic Hungarians from outside Hungary. Personally I think that if they do, everyone here ought to reject it, since (a) in theory now both countries are in the EU there is basically no difference which passport you hold; and (b) it seems like it would just play into the hands of hardcore nationalist Romanians who think Hungarian Romanians should "go back" to Hungary. I can imagine it might open doors for Hungarians in Ukraine or possibly Serbia, but for people here it just seems like a poisoned chalice. Still it's not really for me to say. The other possible effect it might have here would be to shake up the Hungarian Romanian political scene, since FIDESZ created and supported the MPP, a party which appears to have all but disappeared recently, and which provides a more right wing nationalist alternative to the nationalist soft right RMDSZ (UDMR) party which represents the Hungarians in Romania (and hence runs essentially a one-party state here in Harghita County). Who knows what will happen there. [One question that does arise with the possible award of Hungarian citizenship to Hungarians from outside Hungary, is that anyone taking the passport will have to have a vote in Hungarian elections, and of course those that accept the passport will likely to be predisposed to the party that gave it to them, which means that one could see the whole thing as a cynical vote buying grab]

The really big disaster of the Hungarian election though is the rise of Jobbik. Now people on the left often (and occasionally with good reason) get criticised for calling anyone on the right a "fascist" or a "nazi", and it is clear that these terms are extremely overused. But Jobbik are genuinely a Nazi party. By that I don't mean they have strong views on immigration or integration a la Le Pen or Bossi for example. By that I mean they are openly anti-semitic, vehemently anti-Rroma with the threat of violence against that community never far from the surface, aggressive, racist bastards. They even have their own paramilitary force the Magyar Gárda, who have been likened to Hitler's Brownshirts. (As an aside you will see from that article, FIDESZ have been pretty complicit in Jobbik's rise).

In this election Jobbik got 16.67% of the vote, which translates into 47 parliamentary seats (just under 7% of the whole). Next to figures like that Thatcherite politics in Romania and the UK seem like merely a small problem.

The only positive to come out of the election (and I mean the only positive) is that a 4th party (basically a green party) called "Politics can be different" (LMP) got 7% and 16 seats.

Some references in case you want to immerse yourself further in this deeply depressing set of results:
Hungary Lurches to the Right (Der Spiegel)
"Hungary has turned into a grubby hive of nationalism" (Der Spiegel)
Hungary party to follow European extremism's move away from fringes (Guardian)
Head of far-right Hungarian party Jobbik vows to wipe out ‘Gypsy crime’ (The Times)

The perils of translation

The president of Hungary, Laszlo Solyom, was due to visit here this weekend, as part of the March 15th (national Day of Hungarians) celebrations. Some of the most well-known battles in the 1848 uprising (which March 15th commemorates) were fought in this region, and there are therefore some important monuments and events that happen round here. He planned to fly in today to Targu Mures/Marosvasarhely, then helicopter down to Csikkozmas just south of here for one of these events, before high tailing it back to Budapest to take part in whatever celebrations go on there.

However, now, as far as I know the trip is off, and it seems the cancellation is down to some translation issues (plus some populists seizing a chance to make political capital out of shit stirring). Solyom was officially invited here by the president of Harghita County Council, and as protocol demands, the Hungarian government sent word to the Romanian government that he planned to visit and set out his itinerary. Now the original invite was in Hungarian, the diplomatic letter between capitals was in English, and the Romanian media and various members of the PSD (part of the governing coalition) are reporting its contents in Romanian. But somewhere along the line what came as an invite from the "Local government of Harghita County" has turned into the "Self-government of Harghita County". This has caused the aforementioned shit-stirrers to get all righteously het up and cancel permission for his plane to land, thus sparking something of a diplomatic incident. They were even whining on TV last night about how he would be flying in on a "Hungarian Air Force" plane - which is of course true, but then all presidential aircraft are actually officially air force planes, including Basescu's (and most famously "Air Force One" in the US), it doesn't actually mean he's coming in on some heavily armed fighter jet. Also they have concluded that he was coming to make a speech in favour of autonomy for the Szekely - on what basis I'm not sure, since nobody knows what the contents of his speech were going to be, but the PSD lackey on TV last night was reporting this as fact.

I have no idea if the translation issue was an honest error in Budapest or Bucharest, or a purposeful bit of shit-stirring by someone in either one of those two capitals, but it's certainly caused a stir. Hopefully it will all blow over in a few days, and the good relations between Budapest and Bucharest can resume, but if the PSD (nominally a left wing party, but in fact a party who love playing the nationalist anti-minority card) have anything to do with it, I suspect not. (And then of course if FIDESZ come to power in Hungary next time out, which the polls suggest they will, this trans-Transylvanian sniping is going to ramp up a few more notches).

[Slightly later update: In this article , Smaranda Enache, who is by far and away the most believable and worthy politician (of any party and any ethnic origin) in Romania, says that the translation issue is an honest mistake because of how Hungarian renders the idea of local government ("önkormányzat" being most directly translated into English as self-government)]

Farewell for another year, Búcsú

Well, it was hot for the pilgrimage. Very very hot. And since the culmination of the event involves climbing up a fairly steep slope in order to take part in the mass in the saddle of a hill, it was quite brutal. Pilgrims are not necessarily athletes, and there were some people who really looked like they were suffering (a couple of very overweight blokes I saw looked like they were about to keel over even before the climb started). At the top, the bloke who was speaking over the PA system pre-mass kept telling people to respect the sanctity of the event and to please not take all their clothes off. But not that many people were paying attention, or at least, they felt the statue of the virgin would understand their need to cool off a tad.

The mass was a bit of a laugh because the priest giving the sermon was such a grumpy old sod. Here he has 400,000 people all there ready for him to fill them with passionate love of the catholic faith and joy at being in the presence of such a huge communcal gathering. But no. Instead he goes off on one about how people (ie his audience) were coming for the wrong reasons and young people were just there to do drugs and party wildly for the weekend and that all those listening were in fact a bunch of miserable sinners who all ought to be seriously penitent and then some.

I guess I really just don't get this strand of guilt and abuse in the Roman Catholic church (and in many others it has to be said). What does it say about human nature that so many people in the world are Catholics? Are we really all just a bunch of masochistic vagrants who are desperate to be taken in hand by a strict father figure who'll give us a metepahorical seeing to with his belt? I suspect I'll never understand humans.

To some extent he wasn't wrong though (though he might need a sense of humour transplant) - this supposedly sacred experience does have all sorts of other extraneous bits attached. Many of these pilgrims, it is true, did not actually come for the opportunity to be especially holy in any way. Yes, there are a bunch of young people who show up and camp out on the hill and have a weekend party (though I suspect most of them who do are fairly religious and partying is done in a low key and catholic way), and yes there are many for whom the weekend is less about religion and more about Hungarian identity and nationalism (witness the presence at this year's event of László Tőkés, who is pretty much the accetable public face of Hungarian nationalism in Romania, but who is a bishop in the Reformed Church - why was he at an RC mass?).

If the priest had been that fussed about people not according the pilgrimage its proper respect, he should have made a point about how it wasn't supposed to be used for nationalistic purposes. But he didn't. Funny that. Not that the church (any church/mosque/temple/synagogue) is ever guilty of siding with nationalists, obviously, no sirree.

The town is still full of cars registered in Hungary - I think today (Monday) is a holiday in Hungary, so people are taking their time going home. Overheard in a cafe yesterday:
Group of young Szekely blokes: Welcome! Where are you from?
Older couple: Debrecen, in Hungary.
Szekely blokes: And you speak Hungarian? Wonderful. You speak it so well.

(This references the possibly apocryphal but often told story about Hungarians from here going to Hungary and having people surprised that they speak Hungarian "so well". The conversation above was all light hearted, though, and ended up with the groups joing for a beer together)

The UDMR

I'm in the middle of writing a long (long) post about nationality and nationalism and identity and all that stuff for my extremely occasional series about Szekely Autonomy, and hope to have it done soon, but in the meantime, I was thinking about the UDMR (political party representing ethnic Hungarians in Romania), and what their purpose is.

You see, in broad terms, I don't really get it. I can see one or two benefits in their existence (which I'll get to in a minute or two) but in general I think they can act (on a national level) against the interests of the Hungarian community rather than for it.

Let me try and explain. Locally, they hold a fair amount of power - county and city authorities in Harghita and Covasna and probably elsewhere are typically run by the UDMR with a virtual lock on power. But why? The Hungarian electorate will tell you that they need to stick together in order to ensure that local government is not taken over by Romanians with a Bucharest agenda. Which, to en extent, makes sense. But as a single issue party (yes, they have economic policies, and so on, and are technically not single issue, but people vote for them not because of their policies on investment or what have you, they vote for them because they are the UDMR and "we have to stick together"), it's a little bit odd to have them in power for years and years.

[At this point I have to say that I think it's quite impressive and amazing that the UDMR has managed to position itself as the sole representative of the entirety of all 1.6 million (ish) Hungarians in Romania, with no major internal political ructions. I mean if I were Hungarian Romanian, who would I vote for? The UDMR is basically centre-right on most things, and I'm not really a big fan of what economic policies they do have - and the fact that they are aligned with the UK Tory party in the "European People's Party–European Democrats" grouping in the European Parliament is all I need to know about their political leanings outside of the national question]

On a national level, I think (aside from one crucial element) their role is even less clear. Their existence actually ensures that the bigger Romanian parties need say or do nothing to appeal to Hungarians. There's no votes in reaching out to the Hungarian population so why bother doing it? If the UDMR ceased to be, or ceased to play on the national stage, presumably the bigger parties would want those votes - 7-8% of the population is a huge voting block, and would represent something that would hugely benefit whichever party could best attract them. Look at the work that parties in the US do, for example, at attracting the various ethnic minorities. Likewise they (the UDMR) don't actually have to achieve anything for people to continue voting for them. They are, in effect, acting against democracy to some degree.

The only way that it does actually work is the way they put forward a candidacy for the presidency, who (obviously) picks up the statutory 5 or 6 % of the vote in the first round and then those votes can be "sold" to whichever of the runoff candidates promises more to Hungarians. (Though once elected there is nothing to ensure that the president will actually do anything for that community)

The exception, the positive side to their existence mentioned above, is presumably unintended. That is, that by controlling the balance of power, they can ensure that the odious PRM are not part of the government. That at least appears to have been the primary function of the (national) UDMR over the past ten years. They become part of the coalition, the coalition does nothing particularly to support or promote the rights of Hungarians, but at least the government doesn't actively target them (as it presumably would if ever Vadim Tudor or Becali or any of those other vile wankers ever got a sniff of power). So, yes, they do have a function, and an important one, but is that all there is to it?

I'd be grateful if anyone out there more clued in than I could offer any suggestions as to what the real purpose of the party is, and what they actually achieve on a national level (other than the above "not being the PRM" acheivement)

Iskola (2)

The mayor of Csikszereda, one Raduly Robert, is basically a cretin. His name is more or less a joke in the town, and I've yet to meet anyone with a kind word to say about his term of office (I think he's been in about 2 years now). When the Hungarian consulate was opened here he managed to get in to a fight on the street with someone at the ceremony, and his ability to do things like fix the shamefully decrepit roads and stuff (you know, the kind of thing a mayor ought to be doing) is apparently non-existent. (They are now being fixed, by which I infer he's up for reelection next year).

However last Friday he surpassed himself - we (the town) were paid a visit by the Minister of Education himself (since it was the first day of school and the country was gripped by a teachers strike, one might be tempted to ask what the hell he was doing here of all places, but anyway..) His plan was to make a speech at the Octavian Goga High School (that's the Romanian one - see previous post), but because everyone there was on strike he instead made his speech at a Romanian elementary school instead (not sure of the name). While there he was asked by the teachers if they could introduce an optional Hungarian language course onto the curriculum as they felt it was important for their students to be able to speak (or at least given the chance to learn) the majority language of the town and area. Very cool. Anyway, subsequently he went to the Marton Aron High School (the most well known of the Hungarian High Schools) to speak there too. There he was met by our esteemed mayor who decided that he would speak to the guest in Hungarian and Hungarian only since this was a Hungarian school (although of course he does actually speak Romanian too, and the Minister doesn't speak Hungarian - there being no real reason why he should). So of course an interpretor had to be drafted in to translate for the minister.

I have no idea why. He probably feels he was striking a blow for Hungarian nationalism, while everyone I've spoken to is just dead embarrassed by the whole thing. I imagine there are some people who think he was right, but I've not met any of them. Sadly, the way politics in this town works, if he is the official UDMR candidate for the mayorship next time round he'll probably get elected again, even though everyone thinks he's a git. It's up to the UDMR to boot him out I reckon.

In more political news, Hungary is racked by riots (if Euronews is to be believed) since the Prime Minister admitted that he lied to get elected (imagine that! a politician lying! Blimey). However, the story on Euronews (which was my source), despite being the lead today, was very uninformative, and instead if anyone's interested, I'd definitely recommend Pauls' post here - it certainly put it all in a different light for me.

March 15th (Part 2)

Just came home from a little tour of the festivities, which basically involved a lot of speeches outside the city hall. Couldn't understand the full text of the speeches, but the themes were all about reaching out between communities in the spirit of brotherhood (In one ten minute spell, I must have heard the word "testveriseg" (brotherhood / fraternity) about 7 times. I think most of the real nagy sajtak were just over the mountain in Udvarhely though so ours was a fairly subdued affair. They even had László Tőkés at their do. (The Bishop from Timisoara who sparked the 1989 revolution which brought down Ceausescu. Because he is a bishop for the Hungarian Reformed Church, whenever they refer to him in print in English he is referred to as a "Reformed Bishop", which amuses me greatly)


The City Hall - notice both Romanian and Hungarian flags

Petofi Sandor - poet, revolutionary, and now, statue

Nicolae Balcescu - also adorned in flags and wreaths

March 15th

Next Wednesday is March 15th, which is a big day here, and this year promises to be a bigger day than normal. March 15th is the national day of Hungary ( I think, though I’ve also heard it referred to as the national day of Hungarians living outside Hungary.) Anyway, it’s marked on all the calendars, and for many here it’s an official holiday. It’s a bit nationalistic, but then all national days are a bit nationalistic, and so in essence it’s not greatly different from December 1st.

This year, however, some Hungarian nationalists have taken it upon themselves to make trouble. They have organised a rally in Udvarhely (Oderheiu Secuiesc) to proclaim the independence of the Szekely region and launch some kind of autonomous entity that presumably will exist only in their heads. This event (as I understand it) has been championed by the Mayor of Udvarhely, who has just been described to me as a Hungarian version of Vadim Tudor (leader of the extremist Romanian nationalist party). [Udvarhely, by the way, is the most Hungarian city in all of Romania, being 98% Hungarian].

Now, frankly, the best way to deal with this kind of provocative rubbish is to ignore it. A few hundred blokes gather in a field, proclaim independence and drink palinka, and go home feeling proud of themselves while the world pays them no attention or at best laughs at their delusions of grandeur. But this, sadly, will not happen next week. Because of course, never shy of taking an opportunity to make himself look important, and full of hysterical rhetoric, Vadim Tudor has sent out a call for action from proud Romanians everywhere, and asked for 100,000 people to descend on Udvarhely to stage a counter demonstration. (Romania has a less than proud tradition of violent outsiders being bussed in to start fights and suppress dissent – In the early months of the post-Ceausescu regime, a group of miners were bussed in by Iliescu (allegedly) to violently bust up a student protest; and in 1990 in Targu Mures a Romanian nationalist group stirred up anti Hungarian feeling in the villages and bussed in an angry mob to attack a group of Hungarian students demonstrating for a Hungarian language faculty, resulting in riots and deaths)

And thus, the situation could become tense, and, in the worst case scenario, violent. And once again the fact that broadly speaking Hungarians and Romanians live together fairly successfully and without rancour, will be obscured by a bunch of nationalist scum – Vadim Tudor will get his publicity, as will the Szekely Autonomists, and everyone on the extremes is happy. Everyone caught in the middle gets screwed. Of course the media will be complicit in the whole affair and will send camera crews to whip the thing up even further. And while it won't start a civil war, it will put the cause of equality and understanding back a good decade. Nationalists, eh? Wankers, all of them.

Wih luck it will be a completely freezing day - two days ago here it was -24 again, only to be back up to zero again the following day, which is an insane temperature swing - and everyobody will stay home and the camera crews can just film the normal people of Udvarhely celebrating their national day with no politics attached.

Our pilgrimage

It’s really weird when the small town you live in suddenly becomes the venue for a huge event. I should have known when I was told there would be 400,000 here. I’ve been to football games with crowds of 100,000 ish. I once lived in a country which had 100,000 total population. In 1987 I was in Coventry town centre for the parading of the FA Cup which attracted 250,000. They were all big crowds. This, the numerically gifted will have already noted, was bigger. It is, I have to admit, a lot of people. A lot of Catholics to be more specific. What is the collective noun for Catholics? A Communion? A Confession? A Host, I suppose. So anyway, there was a whole host of Catholics at this thing. Mostly Szekelys and Csangos, but also people from all over Transylvania and Hungary.

We, too, made the long and arduous pilgrimage the three or so kilometres from our house. I trust Our Lady of Csiksomlyo appreciated it. We flowed along, with a river of people, through the village of Somlyo, along the main street with its embankments of stalls selling wooden handicrafts from Transylvania and plastic handicrafts from China. We stopped occasionally to greet people we knew and eventually, it being a hot sunny spring day (finally), we sat down to have a well deserved beer. Or at least I did, my female companions were all after turd-like barbecued things and soft drinks. But this was where I had my first shock. No beer. Now, let’s recap: This is a warm (by English terms, positively hot) day. It’s about 2pm, and there are huge crowds of people, all of whom are out in the same warm weather. A nice refreshing glass of Csiki Sör is quite obviously the order of the day. But no. This apparently is a dry (in the alcohol-free sense) festival. This is not, as you may now be suspecting, the Hajj. It is not a pilgrimage by some other well known teetotal religion, the 7th Day Adventists, or the Southern Baptists or someone (are the Southern Baptists teetotal? And where do they pilgrim to? The White House?). This is a Catholic pilgrimage. Y’know, the Roman Catholics. The religion that is so sozzled in booze that they even incorporate wine in their holiest ritual. Not this lot. We’d obviously happened upon the Islamic wing of the Catholic Church. I was shocked (and not a little parched). I bet others had come prepared. Nuns with bottles concealed under their capacious habits, monks with tequila in their cassocks, and all those large crucifixes have room, hollowed out, for a few decilitres of palinka I’ll bet. There must have been ways around it.

So, we went without. After the turds had been consumed, we carried on our way, and realised now that we were swimming against the current. Somehow during our stop the river had changed direction. It seemed that the mass, which was the high point of the day, was over, and now, heading up the hill towards the open air valley in which the religious part of the day took place, was the wrong way to be going. But struggle on we did, and fortunately (I was later to realise) we did so against the earlier leavers. The people who leave five minutes before the final whistle/hymn so as to avoid the traffic. They didn’t avoid it, because they were among 50,000 or so who had had the same thought, but they tried.

It was when we got half way or so up the hill that I started to appreciate this event. I mean the place was packed (have I mentioned how many people there were at this thing?). The mass had taken place on a saddle (I think that’s the word, kind of a valleyette between two hills), and as we got half way up the smaller of the two hills, the sheer scale of the event became apparent. There were bloody millions of them. Well, now, perhaps, I’m exaggerating, but y’know, lots. Many of the people were in traditional costume (in Romania it seems to me that many people wear their traditional costume to church on Sundays rather than merely for tourist videos). Groups of them were carrying large banners and flags. As we stopped at a conveniently shady vantage point on the walk down the hill to take photos, we got to see many of them as they walked past. They did so for the most part in village groups, each village carrying a banner announcing their origin. Most were in costume, and many were singing. Not for the first time I got it. What it is that people get out of religion. It’s this sense of community, this sense of togetherness. Now, frankly I have no wish to be part of a community whose leaders are a bunch of misanthropic homophobes who think it’s better that people die of AIDS than use condoms, but I do get why people want and need to be a part of something. And I was moved by it all. Yes, even cynical old me. A little while later as we slowly walked across the hilltop on a different route home we saw in the far distance one of these village groups walking still in formation along a road back home. It was difficult not to get a shiver of humanity from it all.

While we sat and watched the crowds descend from their annual mind-melding with the Madonna (or whatever it is that the true believer gets from the whole shebang aside from the togetherness bit), an older man next to me asked me in English where I was from. As we talked I found out that he was a Hungarian from Budapest who had fled the Soviet tanks in 1956 and spent 48 years living in Los Angeles. He had returned to Budapest last year, and when I asked him about how that was he looked a little pained and eventually said “mixed feelings”. He went on to say how he felt people (in Budapest) were too aggressive and impolite and insincere and unfriendly. It occurred to me as it had never occurred to me before how difficult and painful this transition must be. To flee your home as a refugee as a young person and spend so long away, dreaming of when your people will be free, when your homeland will be open, when you will be able to return to your old haunts and the place you remember so vividly. To spend years reminiscing of your home, slowly but surely building it into an impossible utopia is one thing. But then to go back, late in life to rediscover that dream, and find that it doesn’t (indeed can’t) live up to that fantasy. It must be crushing. I really didn’t know what to say to him, and could only be glad that he was clearly enjoying this day and this feeling of community he was getting on this hillside.

So, all in all, a good experience. It had an unfortunate whiff of nationalism about it – I’ve never seen that many Hungarian flags, and they were doing a roaring trade selling t-shirts with the word IGEN (yes) written in huge letters, a reference to the failed referendum in Hungary last December (see here). which smacked not so much of closing the stable door after the horse has bolted but in doing so after it was made into glue months previously – but I guess that’s understandable, since it must be the biggest annual gathering of Transylvanian Hungarians. (Although I have to say that the linking of religion and nationalism is one of those things that most bother me about most religions and their hierarchy.) And the nationalism of the minority is a nationalism that I can to some degree understand, at least, if not condone. But aside from that and the plastic tat and yu-gi-oh cards on sale in the main street leading up to it, I thought the whole thing was great. And of course, as I was aware all day long, I had beer in the fridge for when I got home


The mass from a distance


These are the people who aren't even at the mass


Some of the massers coming down


More post-massing


someone leaving in style

Hungary and the referendum

It didn't pass. Only 37% of Hungarians bothered to vote on it which means that it didn't have a quorum. Of those who did vote yes beat no by about 51% to 49. While for Hungarian Hungarians (ie those who could vote on it) this was a fairly straightforward political/economic question, for those outside of Hungary (ie those who couldn't) it was much more of an emotional issue.

People here are very saddened by this result. Nobody I know wanted to move to Hungary, but they feel some deep rooted and historical connection to the country. Essentially this poll has been like being slapped in the face by the whole nation. Like having your parents turn their back on you and tell you they don't care what happens to you. It sounds like I'm being dramatic, but truly this is the way that it feels to people here. People have tears in their eyes when they talk about it this morning. It would have been better if this referendum hadn't happened in the first place.

Mind you, had I been a Hungarian citizen presented with this choice, I don't know how I'd have voted either. One side calling back memories of the past, the Hungarian Empire, the glory days of Magyardom, the kind of faux-nostalgic nationalism that I can't stand when British people come out with it. The other side arguing that "we'll be flooded with people, we can't take care of all of them, they'll take our jobs and our welfare and bankrupt the country" - an equally unappetising proposition, and equally despicable when little-englanders use it in horror in reference to asylum seekers and other immigrants. So, the choice facing Hungarian voters was pretty unappetising, and the resultant effect on Hungarian non-voters was pretty unpalatable. A disaster all round.

Oh, and the Mikulas I mentioned on Friday (note correct spelling) is the Hungarian equivalent of Father Christmas (St Nicholas). For whatever reason he shows up on December 5th, and puts things in shoes and boots rather than socks and stockings. Up until recently he left sweets and apples and fruit and nuts and things, but these days thanks to the rise of the glory that is capitalism he is expected to leave toys and games and rubbishy plastic tat.

Which brings me nicely onto ... Lego. What the hell happened to lego? When I was young it was little bricks from which you could build houses and stuff. It was durable and creative and constructive. Nowadays it's "bionicle" and "knight's kingdom" and stuff - weird alien monsters and baffling models of what medieval castles would have looked like if they'd been made of plastic and designed in Denmark. It costs a bloody fortune and all the bits are so specific that they're not really useful in creating other things from. In lego of old you could take your house apart and build a castle. You can't take your Takanuva* apart and build a fluffy bunny rabbit. It's rubbish. (*Takanuva is the name of one of the bionicle characters. No really, it is.)

I fear I may offically be old.