Transylvanian Ethnic Groups

Transylvanian Ethnic Groups

ETHNONYMS: Magyarok (Hungarians), Români (Romanians), Sachsen (Saxons), Schwaben (Swabians), Srbi (Serbians)

Orientation

Identification. Transylvania is a multiethnic region located in the present-day state of Romania. Its principal Ethnic groups, or nationalities, are Romanians, Hungarians, and Germans; there are also Serbs, Gypsies, and Jews in the Region, as well as small numbers of others (such as Armenians). It is difficult to give basic facts about Transylvania, since members of the different groups—particularly the Romanians and Hungarians—disagree on fundamental points of information.

Location. Disagreement begins with the territory to which the label "Transylvania" applies (since the region does not now have any administrative status, there are no political boundaries to simplify the problem of its designation). Some people use the term to include all the territory of Romania west and north of the watershed of the southern and eastern Carpathian Mountains, to the Hungarian and Ukrainian borders. Others use it in a narrower sense, to refer to the Central plateau (400-600 meters in elevation) encircled by the eastern, southern, and western Carpathians; the remaining areas between this plateau and the Hungarian and Ukrainian borders are then called Banat, Crişana, and Maramureş. The former, more inclusive definition (somewhat more common) will be used here. Transylvania thus defined lies between approximately 45.5° and 48° N and 20.5° and 26° E. It occupies 41.9 percent of the total surface area of Romania. The climate is continental, with relatively dry, warm summers and cold winters.

Demography. Population figures for the different groups are another area of disagreement. Romanian statistics gave the country's population, as of 31 December 1988, as 23,112,000; of this, the counties of Transylvania comprised 35 percent, distributed in 16 of Romania's 39 counties. Official statistics showing Romania's ethnic groups by county or region have not been published for many years. Even the national percentages for each group (not published since 1977) are disputed, Hungarians claiming that the official statistics understate the numbers of Hungarians in Romania. Since it: is therefore impossible to say exactly what proportions each nationality represents of the Transylvanian population, only estimates are available. In 1977, official figures gave the national population as 89.1 percent Romanian, 7.7 percent Hungarian, 1.5 percent German, and .2 percent Serbian (down from 1966 percentages of 85.7 percent, 9.1 percent, 2.2 percent, and .3 percent). Given that most Hungarians, Germans, and Serbs in Romania lived in Transylvania, the approximate proportions for Transylvania's nationalities as of 1977 were: slightly more than 70 percent for Romanians, about 22 percent for Hungarians, about 4.3 percent for Germans, and about .6 percent for Serbs. Extensive emigration of Germans during the late 1970s and 1980s reduced their numbers from the roughly 325,000 of the 1977 census; informal estimates as of 1990 put them at 200,000 to 250,000. The figure often used for Hungarians as of 1990 was about 2,000,000 (some Hungarian sources put the number as high as 2,500,000). Until accurate statistics are collected and published, it is probably safest to speak of Hungarians as constituting about 8 percent of the population of Romania and about one-fourth of Transylvania. Gypsies were generally underenumerated and often did not declare Gypsy identity, making it impossible to state the size of this minority. While these population figures may seem vague, figures offering greater precision are probably motivated by one or another group's bias and cannot be accepted with confidence.

The Hungarian and German minorities are concentrated in different parts of Transylvania. Hungarians are most Numerous in the eastern counties of Harghita and Covasna, the north-central city of Cluj (Hungarian: Kolozsvar), the surrounding Cluj and Mureş counties, and the western portions of the counties of Satu Mareş Arad, Bihor, and Timiş (all bordering on Hungary). Germans are concentrated in southern Transylvania, particularly the cities of Brassov (German: Kronstadt) and Sibiu (German: Hermannstadt) and their environs. Serbs are found largely in the city of Timişoara and the counties of Timiş and Caraş-Severin, which border on Serbia. Romanians and Gypsies are found in all parts of the region, somewhat less numerous in the two eastern counties (Harghita and Covasna) where Hungarians have their highest densities.

Linguistic Affiliation. Each of Transylvania's major Ethnic groups is distinguished from the others by both language and religious affiliation. The language of Transylvanian Romanians is Romanian, a Romance language of the Indo-European Family having some elements of Slavic vocabulary and grammar. Although some differences in pronunciation and lexicon exist among them, the speech of Transylvanian Romanians is fully intelligible both among themselves and with Romanians from elsewhere in the country. Hungarian, of the Finno-Ugrian Language Family, is the first language of Transylvanian Hungarians. While it is marked by regionalisms and other features that distinguish it from the language spoken in Hungary, Hungarian-speakers from Transylvania and Hungary have no difficulty in understanding one another. Particularly during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when the heartland of Hungary was occupied by the Ottomans and Transylvania was a quasi-independent principality, many Hungarians came to regard Transylvanian Hungarian as the proper literary form; from this has come their present notion that Transylvanian Hungarian is the "purest" form of this language. Transylvania's Germans are all schooled in High German (Hochdeutsch) and, through it, they communicate freely both with one another and with Germans from Austria, Germany, and Switzerland. Domestically, however, many of them use one of two dialects that are not mutually comprehensible, known as Saxon and Swabian. These were brought into the region in two different waves of migration, one in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the other in the eighteenth (see History below). The differences between Saxon and Swabian, together with the tendency for Swabian-speakers to be concentrated in southwestern Transylvania and Saxon-speakers in the southcentral and southeastern zones, meant that up to 1940, speakers of Saxon and Swabian did not often intermarry. Following World War II, the numbers of Germans declined markedly, not just from the emigration of the 1970s and 1980s but also from deportation and exile between 1945 and 1951, which halved Romania's prewar German minority of nearly 700,000. This, together with the increased social and geographical mobility of Germans under Communist-party rule, led to increased Intermarriage between Swabians and Saxons (such couples Usually spoke Hochdeutsch in the home, rather than either dialect).

Of Romania's other groups, Serbs speak the South Slavic language known as Serbo-Croatian, comprehensible to Serbs from Yugoslavia. Gypsies employ both Romani (of the Indo-Iranian Subfamily of Indo-European) and Romanian; many of them also speak Hungarian and/or Serbian, from their circuits across the borders of the three countries. Jews may have as their domestic language Yiddish, Romanian, or Hungarian, the latter two depending in part on which nationality they or their families had oriented to historically; many Transylvanian Jews do not know Yiddish.

Religion

Each of Transylvania's three principal nationalities is divided across two or more religions. Most Transylvanian Romanians belong to either the Romanian (Eastern) Orthodox church or the Uniate church (a hybrid of Eastern Orthodoxy and Roman Catholicism that the Habsburgs created in the late 1600s, with the aim of Catholicizing Transylvania's Romanians) . Some Transylvanian Romanians stayed with the Uniate church even after the Communists forcibly rejoined it with the Orthodox Church in 1948. In addition, as of about 1960 small but growing numbers of Romanians converted to one or another Protestant sect, of which the most significant are the Pentecostals, Seventh-Day Adventists, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Baptists. Among the other ethnic groups, only Serbs share the Orthodox religion with Romanians; the faiths practiced by Romanians are otherwise unique to them. Hungarians in Transylvania have historically belonged to three faiths: Roman Catholicism, Calvinism, and Unitarianism. Swabian Germans were generally (although not universally) Roman Catholic, and Saxons were Lutheran. These historical Religious attachments diminished to some extent during the Communist period as secularization and official atheism eroded religious practice. The different faiths continue, However, to be more or less exclusive to the different ethnic groups, only Roman Catholicism being shared (by some Hungarians and some Swabians). (While both Serbs and Romanians are Orthodox, each group orients to its own patriarch—of, respectively, the Serbian and Romanian Orthodox Churches.)

History

The history of the different groups in Transylvania is the area of greatest disagreement between Romanians and Hungarians. Few facts are beyond dispute. It seems certain that the ancestral population of modern Romanians derives from the mixture of two groups on the territory of Transylvania: Dacians, an important group at the margins of the Roman Empire, and Romans, who conquered the territory of the Dacians in a.d. 105-106 and brought in substantial numbers of colonists to fortify this easternmost border of the empire. Admixtures of Slavs during their migrations of the seventh to eighth centuries further augmented Romania's heritage. Hungarians arrived in the Danube basin at the end of the ninth century a.d. (the date usually accepted is 896) and, having established their control over the plains in what is now central and eastern Hungary, gradually moved into the Transylvanian region during the tenth and eleventh centuries, consolidating their hold over it by the twelfth century. Disagreement begins here, centering on whether or not a population ancestral to today's Romanians was already inhabiting the area when the Hungarians moved in. Hungarian histories claim that the territory Hungarians settled was empty, the local population having moved out with the Roman retreat from Dacia in 271; Romanians claim that their forebears had stayed in Transylvania, perhaps not in the open spaces but in the foothills, where they had retreated to escape the nomads (Goths, Avars, Khazars, etc.) whose invasion had prompted the Roman retreat. It is difficult to adjudicate between these positions. The way of life of ancestral Romanians did not readily lend itself to producing concrete remains for archaeologists to find. Although both sides invoke archaeology to support their positions, the degree of political investment and patriotic sentiment even among outstanding scholars on both sides obviates neutral scientific interpretation. The matter is further complicated by the fact that the ethnic labels "Hungarian" and "Romanian" as now understood are inapplicable to the tenth and eleventh centuries; current theories of ethnic processes do not unequivocally support the notion that these ethnic groups formed in antiquity and evolved with no changes in their identity into the present, as both Hungarian and Romanian sides presume.

The argument between Hungarians and Romanians Concerning first settlement of Transylvania is linked to their claims to the territory. Following the Hungarian conquest, Transylvania became the eastern rampart of the Hungarian kingdom; it was ruled by a voivod, or military leader, charged with defending Christian Hungary from the Mongols, Petchenegs, Cumans, and other groups raiding from the Asian steppes. The cultured and largely Hungarian nobility of the region participated in the glories of the Renaissance courts of the Hungarian kings; speakers of Romanian, by contrast, were illiterate and uncultured serfs. The region gained importance for Hungarians following the defeat of their army by the Ottomans in 1526, after which the kingdom's center of gravity moved into the Transylvanian hills that the Turks did not manage to subdue fully. For Hungarians, Transylvania was an integral part of their historical kingdom and ought to have remained part of it into the present. By the time population statistics began to be collected in the 1700s, however, Romanians outnumbered Hungarians and Germans; to the argument based on numbers the Romanians added their own historical arguments, marshaling scraps of documentary Evidence from medieval Hungarian and Byzantine sources to buttress their claim that Romanians had been constantly present since the Roman conquest. At first, the goal of this argument was to obtain civic rights for Romanians in Hungary, not to bring the territory under Romanian control. Only late in the nineteenth century did Romanians begin to demand that Transylvania be severed from Hungary and joined with the kingdom of Romania. This was finally accomplished in the wake of World War I, as the victorious powers awarded Transylvania to their Romanian allies (Hungary had been on the losing side). This award was seen by Romanians as the just recognition of their historic rights and by Hungarians as the unjust usurpation of theirs. Between these two exclusive claims, each with its accompanying arsenal of scientific and historical arguments, there is no easy reconciliation.

The history of the German presence in Transylvania is less contested. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Hungary's kings invited colonists from the Rhineland and Flanders to settle in Transylvania, granting them privileges and self-governance; their role was to secure the eastern borderland of the Hungarian kingdom, increase agricultural output, and serve as a counterweight to the power of certain Hungarian nobles. These settlers formed the ancestral Population of the Saxons. Several centuries later, following Austrian expulsion of the Ottomans from Hungary, Habsburg emperors brought a second series of colonists from the area around the Black Forest, settling them in the eastern plain of the Danube basin (the Banat). Once again, the aim was to secure otherwise vulnerable spaces, increase agricultural productivity, and provide a counterweight to the powerful nobles of Hungary. The descendants of these settlers were the modern-day Swabians (found not only in Transylvania but also in eastern Hungary and northern Yugoslavia). On the question of Romanian-Hungarian priority in Transylvania, German-language scholarship tended to take the Hungarian side when Transylvania was part of Hungary, later becoming somewhat more equivocal.

Contemporary Relations

Under the last decade of the rule of Communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu (1965-1989), relations between Hungarians and Romanians worsened but rarely broke out into open conflict owing to the high level of police repression. Following Ceausescu's overthrow in December 1989, a brief period of interethnic harmony gave way to overt tensions as Hungarians promptly demanded the educational, political, and linguistic freedoms suppressed under Ceauşescu and Romanians reacted with anger, at least partly fomented by the remnants of Ceauşescu's security apparatus. The voices of those who continued to call for mutual cooperation tended to be lost in the outbreak of nationalism on both sides. As for Transylvania's Germans, the proportions of their emigration from Romania suggest that they will cease to be a significant minority presence in Transylvania within a generation. Relations between them and other ethnic groups had in any case been more peaceable than those between Romanians and Hungarians.

See also Germans; Hungarians; Romanians

Bibliography

Daicoviciu, Constantin, et al. (1961). Din Istoria Transilvaniei (From the history of Transylvania). Bucharest: Ed. Academiei.

Köpeczi, Béla, et al. (1986). Erdély Története (History of Transylvania). 3 vols. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó.

McArthur, Marilyn S. (1981). "The Politics of Identity: Transylvanian Saxons in Socialist Romania." Ph.D. dissertation, University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

Paikert, G. C. (1967). The Danube Swabians: German Populations in Hungary, Rumania, and Yugoslavia and Hitler's Impact on Their Patterns. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.

Pamlényi, Ervin, ed. (1975). A History of Hungary. London: Collet's.

Prodan, David (1971). Supplex Libellus Valachorum. Bucharest: Ed. Academiei.

Seton-Watson, R. W. (1934). A History of the Roumanians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Verdery, Katherine (1983). Transylvanian Villagers: Three Centuries of Political, Economic, and Ethnic Change. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

KATHERINE VERDERY