Transylvania and Hungary

"Transylvania will kindle your fire." This from a young assistant to his retired senior.  On an extended mountain walk, I had confessed my weariness with scholarship. Thirty years of it!  My young English colleague was confident my creative juices could still be excited.  In Egar, Matt and I were guests of his young lady and her family Kauty was the third fiancée the Englishman had managed in six years as a vagabond instructor in Hungary.  He had also reached the last stage of his doctorate on the design of three Gothic churches in Transylvania.  This static pursuit belied his vitality.

Matt exuded innocent wonder and curiosity instead of the reserve expected of a transplanted Englishman.  He listened well; Hungarians were affected by his sincere interest, his empathy, and genuine sense of caring.  Often he was taken for Magyar, having mastered the language, acquired the culture, and studied the history.  He no longer counted expenses in quid but in forints.

Every year he bicycled home across Hungary, Austria, Germany and France, the last time with Kauty.  And everywhere, Hungarians were charmed with his knowledge and preference for their native ways, in spite of his unshaven face, unkempt hair, and blunt opinions.

The baroque city of Eger should have stirred my creative juices but instead only dilated my pedantic veins.

I stood on the restored fortifications where the town women repulsed the Turks in 1552 by dowsing their heads with boiling water as they climbed the walls; I duly recorded as historical mementoes the minaret marking the Turks farthest thrust north and the Romanesque remnants in the rebuilt Cathedral.  Perhaps Eger"s famed Bulls' Blood wine could have stimulated the appropriate energy, but suffering late onset diabetes, I refrained.

I was in Hungary to teach at L. Klossuth University in Debrecen on the Alfold, the great eastern plain.  Stimulation was everywhere. A visiting professor from Oklahoma, I still hadn't seen the Hortobàgy, most romantic puszta (prairie), where Hungary's lassoing cowboys roam.

So why Transylvania?  Why another country before I explored this one.  I suspected my young friend, also visiting faculty, simply wanted companionship as he pursued his own agenda in the medieval churches.  It was a fabled land.  I was curious.

In Debrecen,   Reka Ruark gave us messages for her publisher friends in Koloszvar, Miklós and Irina.  Reka was a Hungarian English professor married to an American Fulbrighter.  "Koloszvar is Cluj to the Romanians."  She considered it the cultural capital of Erdèly.  "That's the Szèkely name for Transylvania.  If you use it in public, you could be arrested."

"And Szèkely?"

"The purest Hungarians." She was effusive.  "Romania's Magyar minority, most noble, most innocent, unspoiled by the excesses of western civilization."  Szèkelys arrived from somewhere in the East with Arpàd in 896 and stayed when the Magyar Chieftain led his tribes to the Alfold plain and Pannonia to establish the Hungarian nation.  Reka claimed that when King Stephan returned to Transylvania, the Szèkelys had already settled the (empty land,' and received their king with open arms.  They fought with him in 1003, when he slew Guyla the Vlach, the original Romanian according to Reka, actually Wallachian.  But according to most histories, Romanians were originally Dacians who inhabited the forests when the Romans arrived. 

For one brief year, 1600, the Vlatch king, Michael the Brave, campaigning for the Orthodox Church against the Protestants, united Wallacia, Moldavia, and Transylvania into a single state, prefiguring modern Romania.  But the Hapsburg Emperor, Rudolph II, could not tolerate such independence.  Michael was doomed to be murdered.  This occurred the following year by order of the Emperor's commissioner, General Gorgio Basta.  A fury of Jesuit proselytizing followed, accompanied by severe prosecution of Vlach, an earlier ethnic cleansing.  The pieces were not put together again for three and a half centuries, when the Treaty of Triano created the country of Romania in 1920.