A román hatalmi nyomással szembeni ellenállóképesség a két világháború között Kalotaszegen = Resistance to Romanian pressures in Kalotaszeg between the two world wars

Balogh, Balázs (2023) A román hatalmi nyomással szembeni ellenállóképesség a két világháború között Kalotaszegen = Resistance to Romanian pressures in Kalotaszeg between the two world wars. ETHNO-LORE: A MAGYAR TUDOMÁNYOS AKADÉMIA NÉPRAJZI KUTATÓINTÉZETÉNEK ÉVKÖNYVE, 40. pp. 123-152. ISSN 1787-9396

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Abstract

After World War I, Transylvania – along with Kalotaszeg – and the eastern and southern peripheries of the Hungarian Great Plain came under Romanian rule. The Hungarian community of more than one and a half million in Romania has thus become the largest ethnic minority in Europe. Between the two world wars and under Romanian rule, Hungarian minority life was characterized for more than two decades by a system of political, economic, and educational/cultural triple discrimination at the hands of the Romanian majority. In Transylvania, which was part of Hungary until the Treaty of Trianon, Hungarians had been considered the majority within the Kingdom of Hungary, but with the change of empires, they became a discriminated minority in Greater Romania overnight. On the one hand, this study describes the serious violations of rights of Hungarians, discussing the most diverse cases of discrimination, and, on the other hand, it illustrates through specific examples the communal and individual responses, ecclesiastical and sometimes political reactions – mostly spontaneous, rarely organized – to Romanian pressures. Through several decades of ethnographic fieldwork, I explored the forms of resilience in the individual and collective behavior of the Hungarians of Kalotaszeg, excluded by the new, centralizing power, and the strategies of flexible adaptation or rigid opposition to their radically changed – and severely worsened – living situation. Based on personal recollections and written documents of the time, the study describes cases that are largely invisible to historiography, mostly concerning peasant society. On the one hand, these provide important insights into the contemporary history of the burdens of oppression (e.g., land reform, persecution of priests) and discriminatory maladministration (e.g., language use, school law) of various social groups in the Hungarian community of Kalotaszeg, and on the other hand, they show the most diverse manifestations of resilience, which were often unsuccessful but sometimes successful attempts by individuals and communities to find ways to preserve their own values within the constraints of a system that was contrary to their beliefs.

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