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Different people, Different Destinies: Transylvanian Hungarians

Different people, different destinies: Similar to the Kosovo issue (in Kosovo, both the Albanians and the Serbs have their versions of the history of this province. Needless to say both versions have particular political implications for the present status of Kosovo) is the so-called dispute on Transylvanian history. The problem with the history of Transylvania is that both Romanians and Hungarians have their own interpretations and that accordingly claim the area as their own historical heritage. Hungarians explain that when they conquered the Danube basin at the end of the ninth century, Transylvania was not populated by Romanians but only sparsely occupied by Slavonic tribes. The Hungarians claim that the Romanian population in the region migrated across the Carpathians in the 13th century. The Romanians have their own theory of Daco-Romanian continuity. They say that the inhabitants of Romania, the Dacians, were conquered by the Roman Empire in the first and second centuries AD. and mixed the cultures of the two peoples giving birth to a new Romanian nation and culture. Throughout history Transylvania before 1920 never belonged to a Romanian state. After a period of independence (lingering between the Ottomans and the Habsburgs) in 1867 it became part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. However, the 1920 Treaty of Trianon gave Transylvania to Romania.(at the time Transylvania had area of 102,000 sq.km with a total population of 3.5 million of which 1,664,000 were Hungarians-figures from the census of 1910) During the World War II parts of Transylvania (the North) were annexed by Hungary. The Yalta Conference restored Romanian rule in the areas of northern Transylvania. In communist times the Hungarians in Transylvania witnessed a period of autonomy 1952-1968 and a period of assimilation, 1968 to 1989/90. From 1968 to 1989 Romanian dictator Ceaus escu followed a "modernisation policy": forced urbanisation of the population from villages to cities, thus meant destruction of traditional cultural and archit

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