A 100 year old mirror

Recently, I started reading what seems to be widely regarded as "The Great Transylvanian Novel", which is Miklos Banffy's Transylvanian trilogy (or Banffy Miklos's if you prefer). Period literature is not really my thing, usually, and especially period literature which features as its main context the lives of aristocrats and the privileged.  But, so far, (I'm mid way through book 1) it's an absolutely cracking read. I'm - to my surprise, actually - really enjoying it.  And so many things are familiar to me, in a way which I could never have expected. (Which is precisely why everyone tells me that I shouldn't overlook such novels. So, I have been foolish.  As usual.)

So, anyway, I'm guessing I might write again on this subject as I devour the 3 books, but yesterday I came across a passage which was just so perfect I felt I had to share it.

The hero, Balint Abady (I'll just stick with the translated version's ordering of names rather than the original Hungarian), who is a count and a politician (and one assumes not a million miles from Banffy himself), is travelling on a train from Maros-Ludas (Luduș) to Kolozsvar (Cluj) where he meets a Romanian lawyer, Dr Aurel Timisan.  They start talking and...

It was all such nonsense: Romanians were Romanians and would remain so eternally, no matter what new names were invented for them. "Nobody expects anything else," said Balint, "but you must admit that the country in which you live has a right to demand that you learn its language!"

"Naturally, I'm not against that," said Timisan, and once again a barely perceptible mockery lurked in his smile, "That's to everyone's advantage. As you see I've learned it myself, even becoming a Doctor of Law at a Hungarian university and serving in the Hungarian army, both with tolerable success, though I say it myself. [...] "But you must admit, too," he went on, "that it is most unjust that the public notaries, high sheriffs, tax-collectors - indeed all public servants - are not obliged to speak the language of the people they serve. It is really absurd that the people cannot explain themselves in court in their own language, but they have to use an interpreter.  the Nationality Bill was supposed to grant us this...but of course it's been drawn up by Hungarians without us being consulted!"

This passage actually made me laugh out loud because I feel like I've had this conversation over and over, or overheard it time after time.  Except now of course, the roles are reversed, and Romanian and Hungarian have changed places. This part of the novel is set in the early part of he last century, around 1906 I believe.  100 years later and we have exactly the same conversations about more or less exactly the same things, just in reverse.  First time tragedy, second time farce?

Abady changes the subject at this point, and sounds a bit like a more erudite version of me..

"It's my view," he said, "that we should try and find the means to draw closer spiritually and economically.  here in Transylvania we are both at home. It is your country and it is my country. It is common ground to both of us. We could learn a great deal is we paid more attention to what really matters, and did not allow ourselves always to be sucked into the whirlpool of Budapest politics"

(Here you have to replace Budapest with Bucharest, but you knew that)

plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose

It's a great book.  I'd really recommend it.

Miccsoda?

What can you learn from a single line on a menu?  Well, at times, quite a lot...

The picture is the specials at the "grill" by the swimming pool at a hotel in Hungary.  Each day a different location is represented (though actually the US managed to get on twice in the 7 available days).  On Saturday (Szombat) as you will see the region of choice is Transylvania (Erdely)  Now the first thing to notice is that to represent Transylvania they've chosen the Szekely flag, which  neither sums up Transylvania as a whole, nor even the Hungarian element of the Transylvanian population, but never mind, let's move on.

The first item on the menu is "Csevapcsicsa", which anyone who has ever been to anywhere in the former Yugoslavia will recognise as a Hungarianised spelling of a word from Serbian/Croatian/etc.  Ćevapčići, are small turds (frankly the most descriptive word) of minced meat with herbs and stuff which are barbecued or otherwise grilled.

Now it is very true that in Romania a version of Ćevapčići are indeed eaten.  They are called mititei or more commonly, mici. You see them absolutely everywhere, at every outdoor event.  Occasionally on a Hungarian language menu or board you might see "mici" written as "miccs" to phonetically render this Romanian word in Hungarian.

So what we glean from this word is that (a) mici are being sold as a Transylvanian speciality.  From a Hungarian perspective this may not be far removed from the truth, I suppose, since the average Hungarian traveller, brave enough to enter Romania at all, is never likely to venture south of Brasov; (b) they are implicitly (with the flag and all that) being sold as a Szekely food.  Even the most hardened psychotic Szekely nationalist would not think of suggesting that mici were anything other than Romanian;  (c) it is assumed that a Hungarian clientele would not recognise the word miccs (or mici), and so they are offered the serbian/croatian word instead.  This is probably because most Hungarians seem to have been on holiday to Croatia at some time or other, but have probably not dared venture into the wilds of Erdely.

Onwards. These mici are being served with kemences burgonya, or ( I presume) roast potatoes. Literally "oven potatoes", anyway.  Could be jacket, I suppose. Anyway, the only time I've ever eaten either roast or jacket potatoes in 9 years living in Transylvania have been the times when I've cooked them. So, again, not an especially local speciality.  Mici, as everyone from here knows, are served with a massive glob of mustard and some bread.  If potatoes are involved at all, it would be as chips.

The final part of this very Transylvanian dish is tepett salata. That translates literally as "torn salad". No, I don't know either.  I have two possible theories here - one is that in the quest for your authentically rustic, peasant, and hence Transylvanian, experience, they have elected to make a salad that involves the lettuce being torn, authentically and rustically.  The other is that in Hungary they believe that the poor Transylvanians, can't actually afford knives.

This restaurant wasn't actually that far from the border either. Still, I guess this happens all the time, and Hungarians would likely point to the weird things called "goulash" on menus worldwide, or what passes for "chicken paprikash", in similar establishments as being proof that no-one is immune from this sort of thing.

This has been today's textual analysis lesson. 

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.

Katalin Varga (film review)

So a couple of weeks ago we watched Katalin Varga, a film made by a British director, set near here and filmed in Hungarian (mostly) and Romanian.

There are actually quite a few similarities between this film and "Along the Enchanted Way" (which I just reviewed here), though they may not be immediately obvious. Essentially both are clearly made (written/produced/directed etc) by Britons who obviously came to Transylvania and fell in love with the whole mediaeval vibe thing here - the scything, the horse carts, the natural beauty, the wildness, all that stuff. This is overt in Blacker's book, and perhaps less so in Strickland's film. However, so lacking in action and events is much of Katalin Varga, that you can only assume that it must have been a vehicle for Strickland to indulge his desire to show long slow shots of Transylvanian landscapes, and storks lazily flapping over remote villages, and men in fields cutting hay, and horsecart journeys across wide open fields with mountain backdrops.

In addition both feature very much a local cast of characters - "Enchanted Way" with your actual real people, though some are pseudonymised, and "Katalin Varga" with local crews and actors (and as I mentioned here, some of whom are actually based in Csikszereda).

There are two major differences though. Firstly that Katalin Varga is fiction (at least I bloody hope it is), and secondly that while life in these pastoral villages in "Enchanted Way" is idyllic and romantic and somehow beautiful, in "Katalin Varga" it's nasty, brutish, and short.

It's difficult to describe the plot of Katalin Varga at all without giving half the film away (primarily because very little actually happens in it), so I won't bother trying. It's mostly filmed in Covasna county (in the town of Kommando/Comandau in case you're interested), and I guess it is somewhat atmospheric. But because the film appears to be actually a showcase for the scenery rather than the scenery forming a backdrop for the film, and because I live here and see all this scenery every day, I have to say it left me feeling a little bit ...well, bored, frankly.

But, I guess this is my problem rather than the film's. I've just started reading another book "Blue River, Black Sea" by Andrew Eames, in which he says, while he's explaining what brought him to this part of the world:

The final catalyst for the book was a trip I made to Transylvania, where I stumbled into an almost medieval landscape that I never dreamed still existed in Europe, of scything farmers and their fruit-collecting children, of horses and carts, of wells in the villages, wolves in the woods and bears in the hills. The storybook detail was captivating. The storks on the chimney stacks, clapping their beaks when their youngsters stood up. The chicks in homemade chicken runs on the roadside verges. the little smoking huts in every yard, breadmaking ovens for summer use. And the daily cow parade, when all the villagers' cattle brought themselves back from the fields punctually at milking time and wandered down the main street until the reached their owners' houses, where the gates would be standing open to welcome them home. Transylvania seemed a mythical place, one where you literally didn't count your chickens until they hatched, and one where you made sure you made hay while the sun shone

And he's right in that very evocative and very real description. That is, more or less, exactly how it is. And it is beautiful. But somehow living here, I have sort of forgotten. I no longer notice any of these things, so utterly normal are they. And that does make me slightly sad I think, that I live in this place which to an outsider seems almost impossibly exotic (in a very retro sense of exotic), but which has ceased to make me swoon on a daily basis as it obviously did Eames, and Blacker, and Strickland.

I haven't really reviewed "Katalin Varga" have I? To sum up, beautiful and evocative and atmospheric if you don't live in Transylvania, with a fairly slight (and very dark) plot.

[By the way, Katalin Varga, is actually the name of a famous Transylvanian woman who led a miners' movement. I presume the choice of her name for the lead character of this film is significant in some way, but I'm not sure what the significance is]

Along the Enchanted Way (book review)

William Blacker is an Englishman who lived in Romania for 8 years from 96-04. This book is part travelogue, part autobiography, part love story and part elegy for a dying way of life. It takes place partly in Maramures in the village of Breb, not far from Sighet, and partly in the village of “Halma” in the Saxon lands. Halma is not its real name, as Blacker elects to keep the village anonymous for fear of what might happen there if he names it (I have a pretty good idea of which village “Halma” actually represents, but I’ll not speculate here).

The first half of the book mostly takes place in Maramures, where Blacker delights in the lifestyle of the Romanian peasant. He lives with an older couple, almost as their son, and learns the ways of the country – sharpening his scythe, cutting the grass, dealing with the seasons, travelling to market, wearing local clothes, drinking copious amounts of horinca (Maramures version of palinka). He bemoans the fact that this lifestyle is not long for this world, as modernity creeps along the valleys and through the forests, but marvels in it and delights in it and the discovery of this lifestyle existing in late 20^th Century Europe.

Simultaneously he is falling in love with a Gypsy girl in “Halma”. This is the love story part of the book, though in fact the passion he has for the village life in Maramures comes through much clearer than the passion he has for Natalia. Perhaps it is a reluctance to expose his true feelings or just his Englishness coming to the fore, but it’s hard to really feel that he is actually in love with her. He just seems somewhat interested. This to me was the weakest point of the book. Almost like it’s a section he has to tell to make the story hang together, but he does so reluctantly and without any great willingness to do so.

The second half of the book sees Blacker move away from Maramures and take up residence in Halma with Natalia’s sister Marishka. This section of the book deals with the challenges and difficulties they face as well as describing the community problems that exist – a nearly extinct Saxon population, reduced to just one or two older people, with the village now taken over by Romanian and Rroma families (and a single Hungarian, Blacker’s new “father-in-law”). For me this was the most engaging part of the book, as the inter-group prejudices and struggles come to the fore, and Blacker is sort of forced into the role of reluctant peacemaker and champion of the downtrodden.

It is a fascinating book, and is beautifully written. The slow and easy pace of the Breb sections, matches the life of the village, and in a sense this is the love story of the book. As the action intensifies in Halma, the pace of the writing picks up too. He describes wonderfully and with a great deal of gentleness the peasant way of life, in an almost bucolic writing style, if there is such a thing. It’s clear he see the Maramures village life as something beautiful and is deeply saddened by its impending passing, which may (or may not) mean he is slightly guilty of overromanticising it, but that, I suspect is a subject for another blog post...

That time of year again

This Saturday is the Pünkösdi búcsú the biggest pilgrimage in Eastern Europe, where Hungarian Catholics from wherever you might find Hungarian Catholics (ie Hungary, mostly) descend on Csikszereda to be pious or some such.

A couple of years ago my friend Denes made a video of me covering it which was almost shown on Duna TV (Hungarian channel), but ultimately wasn't. Anyway here it is (again):

Part 1:


Part 2:


Any TV people who actually want to use this should contact Denes via the you tube page :-)

I'm trying to run a hotel here

This is typical. Absolutely typical... of the kind of... ARSE I have to put up with from you people! You ponce in here, expecting to be handwaited on hand and foot while I'm trying to run a hotel here! Have you any idea of how much there is to do? Do you ever think of that? Of course not! You're all too busy sticking your noses into every corner, poking around for things to complain about, aren't you? Well, let me tell you something - this is exactly how Nazi Germany started! A lot of layabouts with nothing better to do than to cause trouble! Well, I've had fifteen years of pandering to the likes of you, and I've had enough! I've had it! Come on, pack your bags and get out!

-Basil Fawlty

Last weekend, Mrs H decided to take me away on a romantic weekend as an early celebration of my birthday. We went to one of Romania's top spa hotels, which has 4 stars (how do these star rating work? Is it self-assessment, or something more complex? I'm never really sure).

Anyway, the whole weekend was very enjoyable, and romantic, and celebratory. Though sadly this was despite, rather than because of the hotel itself, which was, to be honest, utterly farcical rather like a 4 star, large chain, Fawlty Towers. Much of the weekend was spent laughing about the whole incompetence of the experience.

We were booked in on a special Valentine's Day weekend package (though we actually went a week after Valentine's Day, but the package was still available). This included a number of extras. Chocolate, champagne and a rose in the room, romantic aromatherapy bath for two, breakfast in bed, etc etc

Some "highlights" of this experience:

1. The rose in our room was dead. And I don't mean it had been cut and put in a vase, I mean that it had been cut and put in a vase some days (possibly weeks) earlier.
2. The breakfast in bed involved extremely cold coffee, the wrong food, and no cutlery. We called to ask if we might get a knife and fork, perhaps, and a little while later there was a knock at the door, and when I opened it, the apologetic waiter bustled past me and handed the cutlery to Mrs H - who was sitting, naked and uncovered, in bed. (He did have the presence of mind to apologise and say "I'm not looking")
   
3. The special romantic aromatherapy bath took place in the "wellness centre". the room was absolutely brilliant and I wish I had got a picture. It was in a curtained off area of the treatment area. I think I've mentioned before that "spas" here are not into all that relaxation stuff that tends to be part of the "spa experience" in the US and increasingly other places, rather they are the sort of health concentration camps beloved of Victorian Britain. So this romantic bath took place in what was basically a hospital room, with a large plastic tub in the middle. To make it a bit more conducive for its Valentine inspired purpose, some strings of cheap red heart shaped balloons with "I Love You" written on then had been hung from the ceiling. And there was CD player with soothing music. That's it. It was still not exactly the most romantic place I've ever been, and in fact would not really make the top thousand. It would, however, probably make it in the top ten of most comical places I've been, and the top 50 of least romantic places I've ever been.

These problems were all, as you can see, actually pretty amusing in their own way, and as we're not exactly the world's sappiest couple, they didn't really dampen our weekend, as much as provide us with a selection of amusing stories to tell on our return to the real world.

One or two other things were a little bit more annoying, however. The hotel website clearly advertised that there was a swimming pool, something which we were both quite looking forward to. We looked everywhere for this mysterious swimming pool, but it was not to be found anywhere. When questioned, the staff looked a bit sheepish and confessed that actually there wasn't a swimming pool at all. In addition, it was all but impossible to get a drink of water in the whole spa area. This seemed a bit off to me since there were saunas, steamrooms, a hot salty bath, massages etc going on, and you'd think that water to drink was a fairly essential commodity. But no. Even the taps in the sinks in the changing rooms were turned off. The only real option was hanging around the "snack bar" for 15 minutes while someone was found to serve us, and buy a bottle of mineral water at (wait for it) a 2000% mark-up (from the retail price I pay for the same water in the shops).

It was, in short, the Eastern European customer care experience writ large. The hotel was nicely renovated, well decorated etc. but the details were, shall we say, not really taken care of. At all. The attitude often seems to be "We've done the place up, and it looks really good. Isn't that enough?"

So anyway, I complained, and received a couple of emails telling me how sorry they were (and they've now removed the phantom swimming pool from the website), but not really satisfied my complaints (in fact, each new email that arrives makes me more pissed off for what it doesn't say and the apparent lack of understanding why I might be a tad peeved about this).

[Since I often seem to be read as having some kind of nationalist agenda vis-a-vis Hungarian/Romanian issues, I'll point out here that while the hotel is in Romania, it's in a very Hungarian town, and is actually part of a large Hungarian chain of hotels. I wondered whether I ought to keep the actual name of the hotel out of this, but in the end, have decided that there is really no reason why I need to protect them from anything, since I am increasingly regarding them as a bunch of dishonest chancers who really couldn't care less, so I feel my message of (extremely) limited reach can go ahead and warn people away from the Danubius Hotel Sovata/Szovata. Based on this experience, I'd go as far as to warn people off any of the hotels in the Danubius chain]

Between the Woods and the Water

Ages ago, a friend of mine urged me to read “Between the Woods and the Water” by Patrick Leigh Fermor, which is the second volume of a three part book describing the author’s journey walking to Istanbul (from the Hook of Holland) in the 1930s. I had understood that the book was written in the 30s and therefore assumed it was really difficult to get hold of. However last time I was back in the UK I noticed it in a bookshop, bought it, and discovered that it had actually been written and published in the 80s.

So, anyway, my knowledge about the back story to this book is a bit limited because I haven’t read the first one of the series, just this one, the second of three (and I think I understand that the third has still to be written). This book begins with the author crossing the Danube from Slovakia into Hungary, and finishes up with him, again on the Danube, at the “Iron Gates” in southern Romania. In the meantime he crosses Hungary and spends most of the book in Transylvania - hence the reason it had been so highly recommended to me.

As I understand, the 18 year old Fermor set out to walk as much as possible all the way (only accepting lifts in really foul weather), and (I think) to mostly camp out as he did so. However, somehow he has managed to hook into a network of mittel-European aristocrats and he in fact seems to stay far more often in opulent luxury than he does under the stars. I have to confess that my inner class warrior was greatly challenged by this, and by the idea that here we are in the 30s and Fermor is able to put off his Sandhurst/Oxford schooling and take a proto-gap year staying with counts and other landed gentry as he goes. But, pretty quickly, I found myself discarding this struggle and instead allowing myself to be carried along on the enthusiasm, incredible range of knowledge, and wonderful writing style that Fermor has. It is, I’d say, impossible to do otherwise. He’s an absolutely superb travel writer and manages to effortlessly weave into his story vast tracts of history, observations on people and fascinating conversations, as well as seemingly being able to recognise and catalogue every tree and bird that he passes as he goes. It’s an epic achievement. He does all this with such infectious enthusiasm and such conciseness, that I am left somewhat in awe (He manages, for example, to sum up the historical Hungarian/Romanian debate over the history of Transylvania in two pages. Something it has taken me 4 years of writing this blog to not even come close to managing)

Indeed it is one of those books which leaves the reader wishing he had a fraction of the skill that Fermor has in conjuring things up so effortlessly. I have, at occasions in the past, allowed myself a small passing fantasy that I could one day take some of the bits of this blog and form a narrative out of it that might make a reasonable book in the “A Year in Provence” mould, but after reading this book, I feel that I couldn’t even start to do justice to such an endeavour. Perhaps I need to re-read “A Year in Provence” which memory tells me did not quite demonstrate the same level of literary mastery, so that I could remember you don’t have to be an absolutely superb (and absolutely superbly well-informed) writer to get such a thing published.

What’s even more incredible that having walked through this world in the 30s as a late-teenager he doesn’t end up writing the books until fifty years later, based on his notes and memory. I can only observe that this is a man with a superb memory and amazing notes.

After what sounds like a spectacular summer in Transylvania, he eventually crosses the Carpathians and ends up at a place called Orşova on the Danube. To be honest this area of the country had never really crossed my consciousness before – we know someone from Drobeta Turnu Severin, but aside from that it was just that bit of Romania near Serbia that was further east than the Timisoara-Belgrade road/rail link. But he makes it sound incredibly spectacular and worth visiting – the Iron Gates (Porţile de Fier / Vaskapu) in one direction and the Kazan in the other, which are both fast moving narrows (relatively speaking) of the otherwise (by this point) incredibly wide river. Off Orşova he describes the fascinating island of Ada Kaleh, which was kind of a last remnant of the Ottoman empire, mostly Turkish in population (though politically part of Romania). As I was reading I was mentally making plans that this must be the next place in Romania on my visiting wish list. And then you reach the epilogue in which he bemoans the fact that it’s all gone now, thanks a hydroelectric dam constructed as a joint project by the Romanian and Yugoslavian governments in the communist era. Crushing. (Though Mrs H has been since then and hiked around the valleys and canyons nearby and she says it’s still incredibly spectacular)

Spring springs

Spring made a brief appearance here back in early February, decided it didn't really like being out so early and went back in to hibernation for a while. This Saturday, March 21st, the date when it's actually supposed to show up in the temperate northern hemisphere it decided once again to poke its nose outside and have a look-see. It did so in a very flamboyant way, unusual for this normally reticent season, which prefers to dip its toe into the year bit by bit*. Last week there was more snow and some fairly cold nights (and by fairly cold here I mean sub -10). On Saturday, though, we headed up to spend the weekend in Vármező (Campul Cetatii), a small village in the middle of nowhere, of which a little more later.

There is still a lot of snow on the mountains on the way, and even as late as Friday night it had been snowing in Sovata/Szovata, the nearest place of any size to our destination. But on Saturday morning it was sunny and crisp and beautiful. We chanced upon a meadow full of snowdrops, and by a stream there were as-yet-unblooming crocuses (or is the plural croci?). The next day (yesterday) they had all burst into purple and orange life. Then on our way home we saw a stork. There is no clearer sign of spring in Transylvania than seeing a stork. So all is good. Spring has sprung, and I imagine fauna all over the region are frantically trying to get off with each other (I'm imagining that this is what is happening, not actually conjuring up scenarios in my own fevered perverted imagination, just in case you wondered)

In other nature news, there seems to be a glut of eagles this year. Driving along, you see loads of them, sitting in the still bare trees by the roadside, floating lazily over the fields, swooping menacingly. When I say eagles, I mean birds of prey really, since most of them are not, I think, actually eagles, but some kind of hawks, or buzzards, or what have you. I think the technical ornithological way of distinguishing them is that eagles are "really fucking massive" whereas other birds of prey are just "very very big". I presume this means that there are also loads of mice and voles and shrews and that, but I haven't actually seen any of them. Or it could just be that the smorgasbord of small rodents was laid on last year, causing all these young raptors to make it through their first year, but now having feasted heartily last year, this year will see slimmer pickings and they'll all start buggering off to somewhere with more food in it (or die).


*I understand that winter hates mixed metaphors, so I'm attempting to force it to stay away with all that. It's not that I'm a bad writer, at all , no sirree.

[A few short hours later after posting this... It's only frigging snowing now.] Bloody weather.

Csikszereda in the Indepedent

Just got the following link thanks to Lucy Mallows (who wrote it, and has a fascinating blog on Budapest here) - it is a potted version (I presume) of her book Transylvania: The Bradt Travel Guide (I say I presume because I have yet to get hold of a copy of the book.)

Anyway, there we go, a very useful potted guide to travelling in Transylvania. I reckon the book is probably great too. When I actually get one I'll let you know for sure.

Going for a song

Who among us has not pondered listlessly on what a traditional Szekely peasant house looks like? Who can honestly say that they haven't lain awake at night wondering if there would ever be someone, anyone, who might assuage their thirst for this gap in their knowledge? Well, fear not because help is at hand. No longer will you need to feel that emptiness in your soul, no longer will you contemplate the days stretching unending before you without knowing what the Szekely paraszthaz resembles. Because, here, with only a mere paragraph of bush-beating to precede its unveiling, is one:The roof is shingles, and there are basically two rooms. As with all old houses round these parts there is no bathroom (as there is rarely running water).

Why, you may now be asking (having slaked your thirst for knowledge re images) is he showing us this house at this juncture? Well, it's because it's ours. We bought it this week. It's ace. I mean it's utterly knackered and would be politely described as a "fixer upper" by a British estate agent, but we fully intend to fix it up (slowly and surely bit by bit as we have the money to do so). It's in the small village of Csikbankfalva (Bancu in Romanian) which is about 15 kms from here (but on good roads). It is surrounded by 11 ares of land. I had never actually heard the term "are" before I came here, but it's always used for describing the area of properties here (and I have discovered that we do have the term in English, we just don't use it - one are is 100 square metres if you can't be bothered to click on that link).

Anyway, this week, in between apocalyptic rain storms we started cleaning out the barn - didn't I mention the barn? It has a barn. We intend to make the barn something we can live in on weekends while we use the garden, and next year work on the house. It's in better shape than the house and looks like this:As we cleaned it out, we happened upon loads of bizarre antiques which would go well in a museum (somebody suggested we should sell them on ebay). Things like old milk pails, knife grinders, various kit for weaving stuff, and a few things that I had no idea what they were. One of them was made from a hollowed out horn and had a hook on it - this turned out to be something you fill with water and hang on your belt, then you put your sharpening stone in it and when you are out in the fields with your scythe, you can sharpen it without going home. Fascinating stuff, hey? (He says, trying to wake everyone up). What would Arthur Negus make of that? (I expect Arthur Negus is dead these days, so he probably wouldn't make much of it, but what would he have made of it when he was alive? Huh? HUH?)

Oh, and it has an outdoor bread oven too. It's mint.

Anyway, our new house. I'm in Barcelona now, but I'd much rather be in Bankfalva. I'm guessing that is the first time in the history of human thought that that particular sentence has ever seen the light of day.

Milking it

A couple of years ago, I pondered on the impact that EU membership would have on the small farmers of Romania. Just to clarify, the farmers of Romania are not, to my knowledge, any smaller than farmers anywhere else - many are of average height and build, while some are even quite tall. There are just rather a lot of them (farmers of all sizes) and they mostly have very small farms. In fact many of their farms would not actually be described as farms by most people and more like "having a cow or two in their back garden". In fact, I think I should probably go with smallholder, so as to not delude you as to the scale of their operations.

Anyway, I have recently learned a little bit more about what EU membership means for these smallholders (and indeed what having all these smallholders means for the EU). Specifically in the dairy sector.

You see, the way things work around here is that people in villages own a cow or two. Every morning people open their gates, and the cows wander out on to the street and follow each other and the village cowbloke who escorts them all to a field where they all spend the day quietly pondering the scenery, rambling, and painting watercolours of the tranquil countryside. At the end of the day, they are led back through the village, during which walk they all peel off and go into their own homes. Really, they do that, they don't need to be guided or anything, and the cowbloke doesn't need to recognise all the cows, they just go home of their own accord. I mean cows may not be the most actively intelligent of animals, but they are not, well, sheep.

[By the way, and I have no idea whether this is true or not, but the joke around these parts is that the one place that it doesn't work like this is in the Ploiesti area, in which everybody has so little to do, that they all take care of their own cows. Sort of a one-cow town]

Anyway, before they all go out for the day to their alfresco creche (Kühegarten?), they get milked by their owners. The aformentioned owners then take the milk to the village collection point, where it is deposited and cooled and then at some point picked up by the tanker which takes it all to the dairy. I think in the past, much of this dairy activity happened in the village itself, or at least in some villages, but with the changes brought upon by the EU, the only dairies that remain are the large ones which can afford to ensure all procedures and tests are met, and which are usually situated in the major population centres. So a fleet of tankers is despatched every morning to the collection points in the villages, where the milk is transferred to the tanker and brought back to the dairy, where it is tested and pasteurised and what have you (ie converted into good things, like butter, or crimes against humanity, like cheese).

Now this process is pretty much the only way that the old system of lots of people with few cows each can sustain itself (and not morph into the agribusiness model of very few people owning all the cows), but it obviously has a number of problems inherent in it. The main one is that it takes a long while to isolate a problem. If one cow is receiving antibiotics, for example, that cow's milk cannot be sold (because milk cannot legally contain antibiotics). But if the owner and the village vet keep it secret (because obviously you lose income for a while), then the antbiotics show up at the dairy, meaning that the whole tanker full is unusable. At that point, all of the villages on that tanker's route are under suspicion, and the next day the milk of all those villages will be checked at the collection points to determine which village it is. From that point, I guess the guilty cow can be identified, arrested, and charged, but it's at least a three-day process. The other problem is that there are an awful lot of people who have been milking cows for a awfully long time who now have to re-learn some things to ensure that the milk they obtain is cleaner (in terms of bacteria content).

I also learned that each of these producers has to have a quota to sell the dairy issued by the EU (or I presume issued more locally, under EU rules). Because of Romania's smallholding culture, there are 250,000 of these quota holders in this country. That is one half of all the quota holders in the whole of the EU. That's one of those statistics that sounds like it should be really interesting, but when you delve deep down into it, it's kind of hard to see why. A bit like this post, I fear.

Spelunking Today

Well, yesterday, really. We spent our May 1st holiday underground in a cave not too far from here called Sugo Barlang (where barlang means cave) or Pestera Sugau in Romanian. Romania has loads of really interesting caves, I'm told, many of which are more dramatic than the one we went to yesterday, but this one was pretty interesting all the same. Some pictures (as ever, click on them to view full size)



This effect is apparently called "Leopard Skin":

For some unaccountable reason back in the 70s some part of the Romanian army was billeted in this cave, so many of the stalactites and stalacmites got snapped off, which is a shame, but it does mean you get to see the cystalline stuff in the middle:

More broken bits, but still pretty cool.

A bat. A cat? No, a bat.

A pair of brave cavers

Two legs better

There's a famous story, or parable I suppose, which I'm quite sure you've heard before, but I'll repeat it anyway, because I've obviously got too much time on my hands.

So there's this rich successful retired businessman wandering along the beach in some tropical paradise one afternoon. He sees a young man lying in a hammock and goes over to talk to him. I'll tell it in dialogue since it makes slightly more sense that way:

Rich bloke: "How come you're lying around in this hammock and not working?"
Local layabout: "What for? I went out this morning, caught some fish for my family and others in the village, and now I'm relaxing"
RB:"But you could go out and catch more fish"
LL: "Why would I do that?"
RB: "You could sell it"
LL: "Why?"

(from this point onwards the story becomes a bit repetitive so bear with me. There is a punchline. Honest. Do parables have "punchlines"?)

RB: "So you could buy a better net"
LL: "But the net I have is good enough to catch all the fish I need"
RB: "With a better net you could catch more fish, and when you've caught and sold enough you could buy a bigger boat"
LL: "I don't need a bigger boat"
RB: "With a bigger boat you could go further out, catch more and bigger fish and make even more money. Eventually you'd be able to buy a second boat, and employ someone to work for you catching even more fish"
LL: "Yes, yes, get to the point will you? Why would I be bothered with all this? Why would I go to all this trouble?"

(In the original parable he doesn't actually say all that, but I am already desperate for RB to get to the point and allow me to therefore get to mine - which, I'll warn you now, is probably not worth it)

RB: "Well, after you've made enough money, hired enough people to keep your business running successfully for you, you'll be able to retire"
LL: "And what would I do then?"
RB: "Well you could spend your days lying around on the beach"

I'm sure I could have told that better, but you get the general idea.

Anyway, he says, finally reaching the long overdue point of this blog post, I was reminded of this story on our recent trip to the UK. On December 30th we, along with my parents, my brother and his family went along to "Wimpole Home Farm" which is kind of a touristy attraction type thing near my parents' house. Specifically it is a working farm in which various animals are kept and can be viewed/touched/groomed/fed etc, as children tend to like that kind of thing. It was all very nice, and we got to have fun, and eat a nice lunch, and be with the family and all that kind of thing - as well as see some piglets born that day, some goats, sheep, donkeys, horses etc etc. Paula, for whom animals are incredibly exciting and wonderful, was particularly happy.

But it occurred to me that the whole concept was kind of peculiar, and that anyone from a Transylvanian village (for example) would find it laughable that people in England would pay money (and we did pay money in not-to-be-sniffed-at quantities) to wander round a farm looking at animals. Since this is precisely what normal life offers for free here. [Another example comes from the time that Erika and I first met, which was in the town of Brattleboro, Vermont, USA. She happened to be there - where I worked - attending a course which took place during the weekend when Brattleboro offered up its annual "strolling of the heifers" festival - the local tongue-in-cheek response to Pamplona's "running of the bulls". When offered the chance to go downtown and watch a bunch of cows walk through the streets she laughed disbelievingly saying she could do that any day of the week here. And she was right.]

So is economic development like the parable of the rich industrialist on the beach? You slowly get rid of all your small scale agriculture, swallowed up and sold off to agribusiness so that vast warehouses full of battery chickens, concentration camps full of pigs, and factory farmed cows hyped up on steroids and antibiotics can supply your food needs cheaply and efficiently, and in this way your country/region becomes more and more "developed", until such time as you have enough money that you can set aside smallholdings where you can revive the lost art of animal husbandry and charge tourists large sums to come and groom a donkey or collect eggs from real live free range chickens? Your fresh food tastes like rubbish and is full of chemicals and hormones, but at least you've entered the 21st century.

Transylvaniara

When one arrives at Luton airport to take the plane to Cluj, there is no mention of the city to which the plane flies - the departure boards and the check in lines all read "Transylvania" - I am struggling to think of any other place one could fly to in which the city is not mentioned. Malta is one, but then Malta is a small island which is (to all intents and purposes) one city with lots of bits. Transylvania is very large, and, well, you could be landing anywhere from Oradea to Brasov, two cities that must be getting on for 500 kms apart.

Anyway, it turned out to be a very good thing that we were flying back to Transylvania on Thursday, since, if we'd tried to fly to Bucharest we'd have been up shit creek without a paddle, as it appears the entire south of Romania was blanketed in a blizzard of epic proportions that day, and both of Bucharest's airports were shut for hours (and hours) . So, hurrah for Transylvania, in which the roads were clear, the sky was blue (though it was - and still is- colder than a witch's tit) and the parking was miraculously free at the airport (and the car started first time despite sitting outside in sub -10 degree temperatures for a week).

The upshot of this is that I am now back home and will resume blogging in a 2008 stylee very shortly.

Dracula

I had been meaning to re-read Dracula for ages. It was probably 20 years ago when I first read it, and ever since I moved to Transylvania I thought I should probably re-read it since it is basically the only reason that anyone from outside of Hungary and Romania has even heard of Transylvania.

So anyway I read it again last week, and it's bloody brilliant. I remember enjoying it and thinking it was a cracking read when I read it before, and I'm not usually a fan of literature from before 1900 (though to be fair Dracula was written in 1897 so it's not that far off).

Anyway, on to my first major surprise of the book - that is when we first meet Count Dracula in his castle on the Borgo pass between Bistrita and Bukovina. Jonathan Harker (our hero) journeys from Budapest to Cluj and on to Bistrita before heading into the pass, passing as he does various ethnic groups on the way - Saxons, Szekelys, Magyars, and "Wallachs" in the main, but he also mentions "Slovaks" who actually sound very much like the Gabor clan of Rroma from his description, and Szgany (obviously a corruption of Cigany/Tigani) . Anyway, we meet Count Dracula, who is in fact a Szekely! This is not something I had remembered (to be honest when I read the book before, I'd never heard of the Szekely and it would have flown right over my head). He launches into this big speech about the heroism and bravery of the Szekely. He comes up with some curious historical explanation of the Szekely as being some kind of cross between the Vikings and the Huns, and then launches into a list of the invaders and foes they had beaten back - Magyars, Turks, Bulgars, Lombards, Wallachs, and Avars (whoever they are).

"Ah, young sir, the Szekelys - and the Dracula as their heart's blood, their brains and their swords - can boast a record that mushroom growths like the Hapsburgs and the Romanoffs can never reach"

Just in case there are Szekelys reading this (and I know there are) who are now getting a tad upset that this infamous anti-hero is a Szekely, I should point out that he it was because he was such a great leader, and a strong and intelligent warrior when he was alive that he is so powerful and successful a vampire once he became un-dead. At least that's what it says in the book.

So anyway, I'm not going to retell the book, but I thought I'd do a little bit of digging into how Stoker came to write this novel and set it where he did, with the characters that he did. Firstly it's not thought that he ever visited Transylvania, he just spent a lot of time in the library doing research. He apparently first thought about setting the novel in Austria, but was told that it might be too close to another vampire novel called "Carmilla" set in France, so he decided to relocate it to Transylvania. (Though in fact very little happens in Transylvania in the book - just the opening and closing. The rest is in Whitby and (mostly) London).

The character of Dracula himself is often thought to be have been based on Vlad Tepes ("the Impaler") who was also known as Vlad Dracula (son of Dracul). It is now thought that the only thing the character owes to Vlad is the name, and that probably Stoker knew nothing about Vlad Tepes. Another historical character who may or may not have provided some inspiration is a Hungarian countess named Elizabeth Bathory. "The most infamous serial killer in Hungarian and Slovak history".

The tourist industry of Romania seems to rely very greatly on this one story, which is quite impressive in a way, though extreme lengths are gone to - Bran Castle, which I read somewhere is Romania's most visited tourist attraction, markets itself as "Dracula's Castle", based on the disputed possibility that Vlad Tepes may once have spent the night there. Don't get me wrong, Bran Castle is a nice place, but it has about as much connection to Dracula as the Sydney Opera House does. Sighisoara, which is Vlad Dracula's birthplace, is littered with Dracula Internet Cafes and Vampire Coffee Shops. There was even going to be a Dracula themepark outside Sighisoara, which thankfully got nixed. Apparently someone has even built a castle cum hotel on the Borgo pass where they think the castle might have been in the book.

I reckon the Szekelys need to grab a slice of this lucrative pie and set up some "Real Dracula" attractions. There's money in this myth.

Csikszereda's annual moment in the sun

Once again it's that time of year, the weekend when Csikszereda briefly takes centre stage and becomes the most vibrant city in Eastern Europe. Well that may be overstating it a tad, but having half a million people descend upon a town of 45,000, is a big deal whichever way you slice it. It is, as I was told last year, the biggest pilgrimage in Central and Eastern Europe. Already the town is filling up with Magyarorszagiak (people from Hungary) on safari, come to see in what squalor and poverty their poor cousins live. "Look Istvan, they don't even have Tesco here".

Here are the things I wrote a couple of years ago at my first experience of the event - before and after.

I don't want to overstate how big this whole thing is, because, y'know I'm not all that into hyperbole and exaggeration, but it's really really a big deal (I think in Romania as a whole it's hardly commented on, and probably very little known outside the Romanian Roman Catholic world - I remember seeing a news report on Pro TV last year on the day itself but aside from that it basically is a non-event). People come from all over the world. Obviously this creates some problems within the town, in coping with all these vast numbers of people. This afternoon, for example, my father-in-law is arriving by train. I am going to meet him at the station and bring him back to our house, but I am already planning to do so by walking to the station and coming back in a taxi - experience has taught me that once you drive anywhere this weekend you will never again find a place to park.

The big news is that I am going to make a film about it. Well, to be honest, my friend, neighbour and director/producer/editor/cameraman Denes is going to make the film, I'm just going to be the front man. I have no idea what will happen with this film, which is planned to be the first of a number of films of life in Csikszereda based loosely on the blog, but we'll see. If we can't flog it to anyone I'll end up just posting it here I suppose. This new creative direction for Csikszereda Musings comes through what I imagine is a very modern new way of building relationships. You see, Denes (or Gömbi báci as we knew him for a while in our house, named after his dog Gömbi) is my neighbour, who lives across the hall in our apartment building. We were on friendly terms, exchanging hellos and brief chats in the hallway, but we were eventually connected properly through this blog, when someone he knows in Paris pointed it out to him, and he began reading it, quickly connecting it to that strange English bloke who lived across the hall. So there you go - want to connect with your neighbours but are not sure how? Then start blogging and hope they find you through Google or some other convoluted method. O r you could just go and knock on their door and say hi. I suppose.

Random links, tags, and swearing

While I think about all the things I should write about (the Basescu suspension, more on Autonomy, the Rosia Montana gold mine, blah blah etc etc and so on and so forth), I instead will fill in the morning with a couple of unrelated and trivial observations and links

Firstly, from this weekend's Guardian, a piece about tourism in the Saxon area of Transylvania, and more specifically the village of Viscri. It's actually the second article in two years about Viscri (here's the first) so someone in that small village must have some kind of hotline to the paper. It's all a bit suspicious if you ask me.

Ages ago I was tagged to write something about a favourite computer game. Since I rarely have time for computer games - the other day I managed to spend the day watching a DVD in small bite sized pieces while Paula slep fitfully in my arms, the first DVD/video/film I've watched for ages, such is the lack of actual time to do these things - I can't really comment on anything very modern, but I do remember playing Football Manager on the ZX Spectrum for hours and hours back in the day, and playing it on that link brought back one or two vague flashbacks of those far off days. You try telling kids today that computer games used to be issued on cassette and they won't believe you. Before that I remember that magazines used to print the BASIC code for you to type in your own games. None of this DVD stuck to the front cover nonsense. (Thanks to 200 percent for the link)

Romania got creamed in this weekend's Eurovision song contest, which I didn't watch, and I haven't heard the entry (of anyone I think) so god only knows if it was deserved or not.

And finally, for today, a great language resource - The Alternative Hungarian Dictionary, from which you, the non-Hungarian speaker, can learn useful expressions which will either endear you to Hungarians, or earn you a smack in the face. I am familiar with quite a few of them, including all of the ones which involve equine genitalia (a very popular swearing device in Hungarian, for some reason), and some which are not included at all, but quite a few were entirely new to me. My favourite, I think, being Paksi mogyoró, which literally means "hazelnut from the town of Paks", but idiomatically would best be translated in English as "clingon". The site suffers somewhat from not rendering accents well (the Romanian dictionary from the same site is almost unreadable, so poorly does it deal with diacritical marks).

Blog of a Death Foretold

So, yesterday we went to Gyergyószárhegy, which is a village about an hour north of here to witness the funeral of the Farsang. [Szárhegy, as it is known, is one of those villages that really need you to be careful with your accents - write it as Szarhegy and it becomes "Shit Mountain"]. As you will be aware if you have been reading for a while, Farsang is the Jan 6th - Lent period in which much merriment is to be had (normally because it is too cold to do much but get drunk and have lots of sex as far as I can surmise). While some countries celebrate carnaval by having a four day bacchanalia, others have a single day of general mayhem, and still others (the UK) celebrate in a typically reserved way by making pancakes, here in the villages of Transylvania the period goes on for 6 weeks or more (depending on when Easter is).

But all good things must come to an end, and so it is that farsang (or actually some kind of athropomorphised farsang dummy) is laid to rest in a funeral ceremony on the weekend before Lent kicks off (ie this one). Villagers from all over the county convene on one spot - which changes annually- to perform their mock funeral ceremony, drink palinka (I assume - it certainly seemed like a well lubricated event) and consume large quantities of töltött káposzta (stuffed cabbage). It was all very enjoyable and I thought I would share with you some pictures (all of which can be blown up to a more viewable size by simply clicking on them).
~~~
Dancing round the funeral pyre - in the background you can see the castle for which Szárhegy is famous.


The Szentdomokos funeral procession



On-stage funeral. The big bale of straw you can see is actually a bloke dressed as a bale of straw. It was dancing and stuff.


The body of the Farsang is brought to face it's final rites. Sadly you can't see from this picture the fact that it had a carrot and two onions attached to it in a particularly suggestive place.


This is a bull apparently. To me it looked more like a beehive with a pot on its head, but I was assured that it was a bull.


A man is beaten to death for wearing a sheep's skull on top of his head. And rightly so.


The farsang is dead. Until next year, when he will rise, phoenix-like from the ashes.

"Subjective Transylvania" - a review

Recently (at the end of a fairly fractious exchange in the comments section of my post on the Romanian Orthodox Church's attempt to Romanianise Csikszereda), somebody enigmatically signing themselves "MS" suggested I read this book which is available online through OSI (Soros) in Hungary. So I did. And it was well worth reading, I can tell you. If you download it you'll find that it's 147 pages in Word, which may be rather daunting, so I'll attempt to offer a brief review here. Hopefully if this piques your interest you'll read it yourself.

The book, which I assume was eventually published by OSI, is entitled "SUBJECTIVE TRANSYLVANIA: A CASE STUDY OF POST COMMUNIST NATIONALISM" by Alina Mungiu Pippidi PhD, who is a Romanian social psychologist. It is a throughly researched study into the disagreements between and perceptions of Hungarians and Romanians in Transylvania, including reams of qualitative data. It concludes with some suggestions into what the future might hold and some suggested models for the future in creating a more harmonious situation. It's not clear when it was written, but it was obviously (from the context given) at some point during the Constantinescu government of 1996-2000.

I'll admit that my first impression was a negative one, since early on in the inroduction to the work Dr Pippidi refers to the 1990 ethnic clashes in Targu Mures/Marosvasarhely as a "violent outburst" while then going on to refer to an incident in Udvarhely "where the local community instigated by the town council brutally evacuated four Romanian nuns". Now I'm not familiar with this incident, and have no idea whether the adverb "brutally" is justified (I'm assuming it is), but it seems a bit biased to append it to whatever happened there and to merely refer to the mini-civil-war in which 8 people died and countless others were injured in Targu Mures as a "violent outburst". Given the context in which I'd received the link, I began to suspect that this would be yet another biased nationalistic tract of which there are so many out there (from both sides).

However, I gave the book a second chance, and am glad that I did. Since in the main the author (aside from the instance above and a later jarring reference to "the Hungarian problem") is broadly impartial and prepared to let her subjects speak for themselves. What really surprised me, I suspect, was how familiar all the quotes were - she interviews various groups of Tranyslvanians from different places, different ethnic backgrounds, different age groups, etc - and all of them repeat what I hear more or less every day about the differences and similarities between the two communities. I have cut and pasted some examples below:

Some comments on being a Transylvanian Hungarian
"When I was in Hungary I visited the fathers-in-law of a friend of mine. And they were surprised I speak such a good Hungarian. I never felt so insulted in my life."

"We, Transylvanians, sometimes feel like second rank Hungarians when compared to Hungarians from Hungary and second-rank Romanian citizens when compared to Romanians. We sometimes feel betrayed by both"

and, interestingly, from some of the Romanian subjects:
"It's more honorable to be from Transylvania than from any other part of Romania. When I am sometimes ashamed of being a Romanian I feel better when I think I am from Transylvania "


On the cultural differences: "Romanians need less than we do to feel satisfied. They watch TV and they feel happy, while we are concerned by one or by other and we can't get over it so easy. We Hungarians are so deadly serious"

And the following sentiments I have heard so many times that I have lost count:

This is the bosses business, politics that is; we ordinary people get along fine. (Hungarian workers, Cluj)
It weren’t for politics we wouldn’t even know who’s Romanian, who’s Hungarian, as it was in Ceausescu’s times, we were all alike then. (Romanian workers, Cluj)
You just can’t imagine how well we get along with people here [Romanian]. Politics doesn’t let us live peacefully. (Hungarian peasants, Miercurea Niraj)

I think my favourite bit would have to be this:

The most telling fact is, perhaps, that a social representation of nations living like a family within Romania is simply missing, so difficult it is to imagine an in-group including both Romanians and Hungarians. When asked ‘Were Romania a family, how would it look like’ most Hungarian groups told us they cannot conceive it as a family ‘or we would be the intruders' (intellectual, Miercurea Ciuc). Even Romanians had difficulties. ‘It would be like a mother-in-law with the daughter-in-law’ (classical image of conflict in the Romanian folk-stories) (peasants, Cluj). At the other extreme is this beautiful representation of a young Romanian student in Cluj:
The father should be a German, the Hungarian the cook and the Romanian should take care of the house. Now it's not working because the father is Romanian, not German.

As I say it is a fascinating piece of research, and well worth reading.

At the end Dr Pippidi concludes with the need to find a solution that satisfies the following (very little of which I can find any reason to disagree with):

1. to secure the right of the Hungarian minority to a shared public sphere of its own, that meaning 'a communal domain that is constructed not only as an arena of cooperation for the purpose of securing one's interests but also as a space where one's communal identity finds expression' (Tamir: 1993: 74). This space already exists to a large extent: all that is needed are supplementary legal guarantees.
2. to eliminate by a policy of affirmative action the disadvantages Hungarians still experience (proportion of Hungarian students compared to Romanians; proportion of Hungarian policemen, and so on) This was started in 1997, when the University of Cluj (babes-Bolyai) reserved seats for Hungarians applying for the Law School: this allowed them to be accepted with a much lower threshold than the Romanians.
3. Creating incentives for the Hungarian elite to choose moderate instead of radical policies
4. The same for the Romanian Transylvanian elite
5. Eliminating unnecessary competition between the two national groups as groups wherever this can be avoided
6. Preventing a deepening of the division between the two national groups and keeping a decent level of communication and interactivity between them in order to create at least occasionally a 'in-group' of both Romanians and Hungarians, instead of having them permanently exclude each other.
7. Eliminating the Hungarian theme from the Romanian internal political debate
8. Adjusting the political system in order to satisfy the listed requirements with reasonable costs and at a pace that would not endanger the stability of the political system (so often threatened both by ethno-regionalism and by the Romanian nationalist reaction).

Sadly, not much seems to have changed since the time 8(?) years ago when this was written - Hungarians are still very underrepresented in the police force, for example. (pt. 2)

And finally, in order to achieve the above, the author presents three models and critiques them. These models are
1. Hegemonic Control [the state controls/coerces/forces the minority group into submission]
2. Federalism [autonomous regions are created - the question remains whether these are formed on ethnic lines (cantonisation) or not (federalism)]
3. Consociationalism (yes, I had to look it up too) [By which power is somehow shared, either formally or informally. She opines that this was beginning when the paper was written, as the UDMR (Hungarian party) was at that time part of the ruling coalition. It has been ever since, to my knowledge]

She seems to lean towards the third, and I would be interested to hear how she feels now, given that to all intents and purposes this consociationalism has been going on for ten years now, and the problems seem to be exactly the same as when the paper was written. (I've written to her to ask).

I have been meaning for a while to write a post on the movement for autonomy in Szekely land, and this seems like a good starting point for what will end up being a series of pieces. I realise that there are so many issues to discuss in such a debate (the concept of nationality/ethnic identity; language and culture; balkanisation vs autonomy; centralisation vs de-centralisation; nationalism; discrimination against minorities; and many many others) that to attempt to do so in a shortish blog post would be impossible. I will (over the course of the next months) return to this subject and attempt to build up a picture of what I believe would be the best way forward. Not that my opinion matters as such, but I feel I ought to offer one at least.