Transylvania: why didn't it go the way of Yugoslavia or Ukraine?

The best way to see Transylvania where ethnic Hungarians, Romanians and Gypsies still live cheek-by-jowl. Photo by Bence Bardos.

Earlier this year I revisited Transylvania, where I cut my teeth as a journalist in my early twenties. Back then the land beyond the forest looked set to go the way of Yugoslavia or Ukraine. Thirty years later I wanted to understand why that didn’t happen. Three days on horseback in the hills and villages and a day in the regional capital Cluj (Kolozsvar in Hungarian) provided some answers.

It was my first taste of proper street violence and for a while I thought I would emerge unscathed. For the first half an hour or so I held a milk crate over my head, protection against the missiles and bottles that were raining down.

It was March 1990 and in the Transylvanian square where I was standing ethnic Romanian and Hungarian villagers were going at each other with pitch forks, knives, clubs, and strips of wood and metal they had ripped from park benches.

In a vain and half-hearted attempt to separate the two sides the Romanian Army had driven half a dozen armoured vehicles into the middle of the square. Their engines were growling in the night and their hatches were battened down.

And then just as things seemed to calm a small group of armed Romanian villagers came running out of a hotel where they had gone to ground. Hot on their heels were a posse of fired-up Magyars.

I ran to one side to avoid becoming embroiled in the melee and then, just as I thought I was clear of peril, a man appeared out of the dark and hit me on the head with a chunk of wood. For a second or two I was stunned. And then my survival instinct kicked in.

“I’m English,” I shouted at the top of my lungs in my best Hungarian. “English!”

The man who had hit me and was readying another blow stopped mid-swing. His intent had been to crack a Romanian skull, not bruise a British one. But soon his compatriots had gathered around, weapons raised, and they weren’t in a mood to listen.

Protest as I might the noise of the armoured vehicles drowned out my declarations of neutrality. It was only the protective arms of the very man who had hit me, now shielding my head, that was saving me from a proper beating.

But we both knew that sooner or later a blow would get through. And if I went down I might be in trouble. I may even have joined the ranks of the 300 seriously injured that night – or worse still the six killed.

Then I had a bit of luck. A local Hungarian TV journalist, known to the men with the weapons as ‘that-guy-on-the-telly’, recognised me. At first he gaped. And then, in a stroke of genius, he began clapping and cheering.

“Hero!” he shouted. “He’s a hero!”

The mob froze. One by one the flailing weapons were lowered. I surveyed the faces around me and I saw confusion, mistrust and, among some, a burning desire to get back to the job of doing in the Romanian.

But the enthusiastic journalist was still at it.

“An English hero!” he shouted.

And he clapped some more. And slowly, reluctantly, like men hypnotised into doing something silly against their will, the Hungarian villagers too began to clap, though they clearly had no idea why.

“Now’s your moment,” the journalist said into my ear. “You’d better get out of here. And for God’s sake, don’t run!”

As I walked through the mob, trying to look as heroic as I could and with my head now beginning to throb, the spell somehow held.

A half hour later I watched as the mob caught another man – this one really was a Romanian – and beat his head with rods. Eventually the impacts began to sound like a boot stepping into soft mud.

The street fight I was entangled in, the first violent story I covered as a journalist, took place in a town called Targu-Mures (Marosvasarhely in Hungarian.)

I was one of the few foreigners present and the next morning my eye-witness account, delivered down a scratchy Romanian telephone line, ran at the top of the BBC news.

Still young, and mesmerised by this exotic eponymous land beyond the forest, I was to spend the next year there as it was racked by sporadic ethnic, social and political violence.

Looking back on it now I realise that if I was lucky that violent night, Transylvania was also lucky. This north-western third of Romania, enclosed to the east and south by the sweep of the Carpathian mountains, had been hotly contested for centuries.

(Full disclosure here: my grandfather was a Hungarian-speaking Saxon born in southern Transylvania.)

There was enough bad blood between the Romanian majority, the then 1.7-million-strong Hungarian minority, and the communities of Gypsies and Saxons to last many a long generation.

But somehow, even as its far more advanced neighbour, Yugoslavia, moved down the path of bloody disintegration and ethnic cleansing, Romania always managed somehow to step back from the brink.

And eventually, in fits and starts, with a flurry of nationalist flag-waving, bickering, horse-trading and plenty of EU money, it emerged from the violent adolescence of its post-Communist childhood to become, if not a leading European citizen, then at least a reasonably balanced adult.

To bring in 2023 I spent a few days visiting Cluj, the capital of Transylvania, and its rural environs. It seemed somehow appropriate to spend some of the visit on horseback.

Arriving on the night train from Budapest into the small town of Huedin (Banffyhunyad in Hungarian) with my Chicago-born companion, we rode the first day in the rolling hills to the west of the city with a group of Hungarian horsemen.

Two of them were modern-day hussars - they had received an EU grant to create an equine society celebrating the traditions and uniforms of their forbears. A third looked more like a hardscrabble cowboy out of the American West.

We cantered over hills past shepherds tending their flocks and trotted through out-of-the-way villages where Romanians, Hungarians and Gypsies still live cheek-by-jowl.

That first night we roomed at a small pension owned by a couple who showered us with cabbage-based dishes and hams and uncorked home-made schnapps – palinka to the Hungarians, tsuica to the Romanians.

For lunch in the field we ate onions, radishes and hard slabs of pig fat on bread.

As we rode along an icy river bed and through a forest one morning, I asked the horsemen how relations were between the different nationalities 30 years after they had come so close to civil war.

“Most of the tension has gone,” said a villager in his twenties who breeds his own horses. “But if you are ask me who my friends are – they are all Hungarian. I have Romanians I get on with – they don’t bother me and I don’t bother them – but none I would call a friend.”

Others echoed his sentiments.

All said they spoke Romanian, if not always as well as their mother tongue, but when it comes to marrying and socialising they tended to stick to their own. (Although the couple that run the pension we stayed at were of a mixed marriage.) And for political leadership they look to Budapest rather than Bucharest.

“We are all for (long-serving Hungarian President Viktor) Orban,” the cowboy said over a glass of home-made wine. “I’m not saying he is perfect but he is ours and he helps us.”

Several of them cited local Hungarian buildings that have been restored with money from Budapest.

“That is an Arpad-era church,” one of the hussars told me with pride referring to the founder of modern Hungary who arrived in the Carpathian basin a thousand years ago.

There is even money available to pay for the graves of the Hungarian dead in the fabled Hajongard cemetery in Cluj.

Cluj - Kolozsvar to its Hungarian minority and Klausenburg to the now much-diminished German community - was the town where I spent most of my time in Romania in 1990.

Back then despite its eminent old-world charm it was backwards and struggling. The municipal buses had holes in the floor where you could watch the road go by.

There were miles-long queues for petrol. Even the traffic lights were unpredictable, sometimes turning from red to amber and then settling back to red again.

Today Cluj is a bustling, cosmopolitan, attractive (and expensive) metropolis. Most high-end western brands are represented in two fancy new shopping malls, and the main square would be as much at home in Scandinavia as the Balkans.

So why did Yugoslavia erupt in the early 1990s and Transylvania not?  The ingredients appeared to be there. Some of the nationalist mobs were hot-headed enough.

I even remember being approached by a Hungarian firebrand politician asking me to help him secure weapons and military training for his people. (I declined.)

Part of the reason, no doubt, is that there was no Slobodan Milosevic, the Serbian strongman who initiated the wars in Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia and later Kosovo and drip-fed guns, funding and power to ultra-nationalist goons willing to pursue his mono-ethnic vision.

The Romanian politicians of the time may have been venal, corrupt and self-serving but they were not in the business of wholesale mass murder.

Part of the reason, I venture, is that the Romanian majority, for all their chest-beating nationalism, are probably a more peaceful tribe than their southern Balkan counterparts.

And part of the reason is pure mathematics. Cluj may have been one of the most important Hungarian towns for centuries, and even back when I was living there probably had a 30 percent Hungarian minority.

But today with widespread emigration to Hungary proper by the local Magyars and a roaring economy - much of it driven by a vigorous IT industry - that has sucked in tens, possibly hundreds, of thousands of Romanians from elsewhere in the country that number has probably fallen to 10 percent.

On that fateful evening in March all those years ago, when I emerged with a lump on my head and my first notable story, it had been the Hungarian villagers who routed the Romanians and held the main square.

But today the events of that night are known by the Hungarians as Black March. They seem as much a victory as the Battle of Borodino in 1812, when Napoleon’s Grand Armee prevailed but which ultimately marked the turning point in the Corsican’s campaign to conquer Russia.

“Conflict is just not an option for us,” a local Hungarian academic said to me. “We have to defend our rights and we have to look after our culture, but without creating animosity among the Romanians. If we do that we can only lose.”

A version of this article appeared in the Spectator.

LINKS & MORE

+ Transylvania is still one of the most fascinating parts of Europe - part old-world charm, part bustling contemporary vigour. I can't recommend it highly enough for a visit. My companion and I took the overnight train from Budapest which leaves at a comfortable 10.45pm and gets into Cluj/Kolozsvar the next morning.

+ We rode with Istvan Bethlendi. You can find him on Facebook by searching Echitatie Lovaglás Horseback riding Calata/Kalota. Be warned it is not a hard hat, waiver and health-and-safety type operation, but the horses, company and home-made hooch are all great.

+ One of the classics on Transylvania is Patrick Leigh Fermor's Between the Woods and the Water: On Foot to Constantinople: From the Middle Danube to the Iron Gates written on the eve of World War 2.

+ Another is Miklos Banffy's trilogy. The first part is called They Were Counted. My American companion is currently reading it and loves it.

+ A friend, Bronwen Riley, runs an excellent book festival in Transylvania each summer.