Prologue
Note || 1: Transylvania is Far from Mesopotamia
Transylvania, with its deep valleys surrounded by a coronet of peaks, its wide
basins and highlands, pine forests and the Alpine meadows at the feet of
imposing glaciers; with its salt mines already worked in prehistory, with its
gold gathered since Neolithic times from veins in its rocks and from the waters
of its streams; with its refreshing, acidic, wine-like, naturally carbonated
springs, Transylvania, a small area in the lap of the Eastern and Southern
Carpathians, a country on the easternmost edge of Central Europe. Even though
it was approached early by Eastern Orthodoxy emanating from Byzantium, its
Christianity is basically western. Initially the Roman ritual was predominant
but later it became the bastion of European Protestantism.
Transylvania, this land protected by its mountains but accessible by its
passes and open valleys, was overrun, ravished, conquered and reconquered. It
was the historic apple of Eris between its original inhabitants and the
conquering Hungarians, between the Hungarians and the Turks, between the Turks
and the Austrian Habsburgs, between the Austrian Habsburgs and the Hungarians
and between the Hungarians and the Romanians. Transylvania is the land of a
remarkable people whose language is Hungarian, but who are distinctly
Székely, and who consider themselves descendants of the Huns. According
to the legends of their origin, they are the long awaited children of Prince
Csaba, one of Attila's sons, who came along the Highway of the Armies, the
Milky Way of the Heavens. This myth of their national origin is
well-appreciated in the other parts of Hungary as well, but it is nowhere as
strong as here. The dilemma of their true origin can not be discussed here, but
it should be mentioned that their centuries-long role as guardians of the
borders can be documented not only in Transylvania. There were Székelys
along the no-man's lands separating nations and countries in the southern and
western Transdanubia, near the foothills of the Alps, in Pannonia, next to the
southern Slav-German (Austrian-German) ethnic groups, as well as in the north,
along the contemporary Slovakian-Ruthenian (Carpatho-Ukranian) border. The
origin, history and fate of the Csángó-Hungarians, who were
pushed beyond the Carpathians and who were there slowly broken up, is a
historical question, allied to that of the Székelys. Their remnants,
mired in Moldavia, still use a medieval Hungarian, just as though some hidden,
detached fragment of a Serb or German population had kept old Slavic or
Teutonic alive in their daily speech.
Transylvania is the native land of independent, towering individuals. This is
whence Sándor Kõrõsi Csoma started out toward the East,
searching for the original home of the Hungarians and marooned in a mountain
monastery in Tibet, uncovered the secrets of the Tibetan language, previously
unknown in the West. It was in Transylvania that the son of Farkas Bolyai,
János Bolyai, spent most of his life and "created a new world out of
nothing" by independently delineating absolute geometry, anticipating most
forcefully Einstein's theory of relativity. It was this land that Count Samu
Teleki, the passionate hunter and explorer returned to from Africa, the only
Hungarian traveler whose name is associated with the discovery of large tracts
of "terra incognita". All were remarkable eccentrics, native geniuses of the
forests and the crags.
Transylvania was an independent principality for barely 150 years and yet, in
1568, at the Diet in Torda, the assembled representatives enacted into law the
principle of religious freedom, unprecedented in Europe at that time and for
very many years thereafter. For the readers and movie-goers in Europe and
around the world, Transylvania is the secret and mysterious refuge of Dracula,
the monster hiding in the blood-stained ossuary of a casemated castle among the
lightning-torn, ghost-ridden mountains. We consider Dracula as a specter born
of a diseased imagination, and that is exactly what he is, although there are
traces of a historic model for his existence. In one of the most beautiful
Székely ballads, the masons were unable to keep the walls of Déva
castle from crumbling until they drained the unresisting wife of mason Kelemen
of all her blood, burned her lily-white body and mixed her ashes with the
mortar. Then and only then would the stones hold and the walls rise.
Béla Bartók drew many of his ideas from Transylvanian, Hungarian
and Romanian folklore. His opera, "Bluebeard's Castle", with all of Bluebeard's
former wives immured in their rooms, takes place among the mountains of
Transylvania. One thing is certain: the soil of Transylvania has always
produced more myths than wheat. Among the fateful storms of history and in the
frequent famines, only a people having a rich and vivid imagination could
survive. In the recent past, Transylvania again became the center of a fiction
that must be classified as a myth. The Romanian ethnic group, late in
developing into a nation and into a realm, based its national pride on its
mid-Balkan roots and made the hypothesis of the continuous evolution of its
Daco-Roman descent not only a part of, but the actual basis of its national and
popular ideology.
The borders of Transylvania can be determined accurately by the geography of
its mountains and rivers, both historically and administratively. Politically
and ethnically, however, in the present Romania, these borders are more
uncertain, more vague and in fact are forcibly obscured and eliminated . For a
millennium the early Slavic and other nationalities were accommodated roughly
in this sequence -- Hungarian, Saxon, and Romanian people. Even though there
were numerous conflicts among them, they coexisted so that again and again
there was hope for tolerance and for a joint development so essential for
mutual advantage. Yet, in this century and, particularly, during the second
half of this century, there was a sharp increase in the Romanian endeavors
toward the complete assimilation or annihilation of the Hungarian, Saxon and
other extra-Transylvanian Romanian nationalities. This created a serious crisis
affecting all of Europe. Transylvania was called a "Fairy Garden" and was
considered an experiment in the history of East-Central Europe. In fact, more
frequently, it was a small but threatening, inflamed and purulent wound on the
body that was Europe.