Transylvania

• 1. Introduction

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  Transylvania lies in the middle of Romania, a high plateau and plain enclosed by the Carpathian Mountains to the east and south and the Apuseni Mountains to the west. Romanians call it Ardeal. Hungarians call it Erdély. German speakers call it Siebenbürgen. One stretch of land carries all three names because so many rulers and peoples have claimed it. Broader definitions push its edges outward to take in Crișana and Maramureș, and sometimes Banat.

  The region holds Romania's second-largest city, Cluj-Napoca, along with medieval towns such as Brașov, Sibiu and Sighișoara. It also holds several UNESCO World Heritage Sites, including villages with fortified churches and the Dacian fortresses of the Orăștie Mountains. Yet for many people abroad, the word means something else entirely, a setting for horror stories.

  So where did the name come from, and what does it literally say? Which empires and kingdoms took turns ruling the land, and how did a Romanian region come to hold a large Hungarian minority? What do censuses reveal about who has lived here, and how did the faiths of those people share one small territory? And how did a place of salt mines, steelworks and Gothic churches become shorthand for the supernatural?

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• 2. Names and Emblems

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  A Latin document from the Kingdom of Hungary, dated 1078, contains the earliest known mention of the region. It describes the land as ultra silvam, which means beyond the forest. Medieval Latin later reshaped that into Ultrasylvania and then Transylvania. The Latin was a direct translation of the Hungarian Erdő-elve, which later contracted to Erdély.

  In Hungarian, erdő means forest, and elve marks a region defined by its position relative to something. The same ending appears in Havas-elve, the Hungarian name for Muntenia, which describes land lying ahead of snow-capped mountains. The twelfth-century Gesta Hungarorum wrote the Hungarian name as Erdeuleu. Romanian Ardeal grew out of the Hungarian word, and a Church Slavonic document written by a Romanian chancellery uses the form Ardeliu in 1432. German speakers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries also had their own way of saying beyond the forest, überwald.

  Siebenbürgen works differently. It means seven castles, a reference to seven cities founded by the Transylvanian Saxons, the ethnic Germans of the region. That idea travelled far. Croatian Sedmogradska, Bulgarian Sedmigradsko, Polish Siedmiogród, Yiddish Zibnbergn and Ukrainian Semyhorod all echo it.

  The number seven reappears in the region's coats of arms. The first heraldic images of Transylvania date to the sixteenth century. In 1596, Levinus Hulsius published a design in his work Chronologia, issued in Nuremberg. It showed a rising eagle above and seven hills crowned with towers below.

  The seal of Sigismund Báthory, Prince of Transylvania, copied that design in 1597 with small changes. The eagle now stood between a sun and a moon, and plain towers replaced the hills. Michael the Brave used a short-lived variant with two lions holding a sword and standing on seven hills.

  The Diet of 1659 fixed the arms around the Union of the Three Nations. A black eagle called the Turul on a blue field stood for the Hungarians. The Sun and Moon stood for the Székelys. Seven red towers on a yellow field stood for the Saxons. Queen Maria Theresa granted the flag and arms in 1765.

  Neither emblem has official status in present-day Romania. The Transylvanian arms are still marshalled inside the national coat of arms of Romania, and they were once a component of the arms of Hungary.

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• 3. Before the Hungarians

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  The Agathyrsi, a people of the Scythic cultures, are the first known inhabitants of the territory. From the fourth century BC, the Celtic La Tène culture came to dominate. By the first century BC, the Dacian tribes had united under King Burebista and formed the kingdom of Dacia.

  Rome wanted the land and fought hard for it. Emperor Trajan waged costly, bloody wars against King Decebalus, and in 106 the province of Roman Dacia took shape. The population had been depleted, so Latin colonists were brought in. The rich resources of the territory were exploited in an organised way.

  The province did not last long. Threatened by East Germanic and Carpic invasions, Emperor Aurelian pulled out his legions in 275. He moved the citizens south of the Lower Danube, and the Goths occupied the empty province. In 376 the nomadic Huns defeated and shattered the Goths and settled in the area.

  After the death of the Hun king Attila, the Hunic empire broke apart. In 455 the Gepids conquered the region under King Ardaric. They held Transylvania for two centuries. Their King Elemund fought successful battles against the Eastern Roman Empire. Then the Lombards and Avars defeated them in 567.

  The Avars took full control and settled many Slavic tribes who accepted their rule. The expanding Frankish Empire later crushed the Avar khaganate in the Avar Wars, though Avars and Slavs, much reduced in number, stayed in the Carpathian Basin. In the ninth century, the First Bulgarian Empire pushed into southern Transylvania.

  Hungarian conquerors reached the region in the late ninth century, and scholars still argue about who was living there. The theory of Daco-Roman continuity says Romanians lived on the land without interruption. Opponents point to missing written, archaeological and linguistic evidence. Hungarian chronicles claimed the Székely people descended from Huns who had stayed behind.

  The Gesta Hungarorum names a Vlach leader called Gelou who ruled part of Transylvania before the Hungarians came. Historians debate whether he was a real person or an invention. In the tenth century, the gyulas, one of the seven chieftains of the Hungarians, governed the land. King Stephen I of Hungary then led his army personally against his maternal uncle, Gyula III, and in 1002 Transylvania joined the Kingdom of Hungary.

  Place names derived from Hungarian tribes show large groups settling from the 950s. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Saxon colonists settled the southeast and northeast. Romanian historians hold that Romanians were already an important part of the population before the Mongol invasions. Hungarian historians argue that Vlachs arrived from the Balkans only in the twelfth century, with the Mongol devastation prompting larger waves of settlers over several centuries. After the Battle of Kosovo and the Ottoman arrival at Hungary's border, thousands of Vlach and Serbian refugees also came.

  From 1002 until 1526, a voivode appointed by the King of Hungary governed the region.

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• 4. A Principality Between Empires

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  The Battle of Mohács in 1526 broke the old order. Transylvania passed to the Eastern Hungarian Kingdom, and in 1570 the Treaty of Speyer turned that kingdom into the Principality of Transylvania. The Eastern Hungarian king became its first prince. Calvinist Hungarian princes ruled it for the most part. In public law the principality still counted as part of the Kingdom of Hungary, and the treaty stressed that John Sigismund's lands belonged to the Holy Crown of Hungary. He could not give them away.

  For most of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the principality was an Ottoman vassal state, though it lived under dual suzerainty, both Ottoman and Habsburg. Then the Habsburgs advanced. They took the territory soon after the Battle of Vienna in 1683, and in 1687 Transylvania's rulers recognised Emperor Leopold I as their overlord. The Habsburgs treated the principality as one of the Lands of the Crown of Saint Stephen, yet they administered it separately from Habsburg Hungary, under governors answerable to the emperor.

  In 1699 the Ottomans legally accepted their loss in the Treaty of Karlowitz. Some anti-Habsburg elements held out until the Peace of Szatmár in 1711, which consolidated Habsburg control. Maria Theresa later restored the title of Grand Principality of Transylvania, in 1765, which was 54 years after Szatmár.

  The next crisis came in 1848. A Hungarian revolution against the Habsburgs grew into a war for full independence. The Hungarian government proclaimed union with Transylvania in the April Laws of that year. After the revolution failed, the Austrian March Constitution made Transylvania a crown land separate from Hungary.

  The Habsburgs defeated the Hungarians only with outside help. Emperor Franz Joseph I called on Czar Nicholas I, who sent an army of 200,000 men with 80,000 auxiliary forces. After the Hungarian army surrendered at Világos, now Șiria in Romania, in 1849, Tsarist troops carried the revolutionary banners to Russia. They stayed there under both Tsarist and Communist rule. In 1940 the Soviet Union offered them to the government of Horthy.

  Julius Jacob von Haynau, the Austrian commander, was given powers to restore order. He ordered the execution of the 13 Hungarian Martyrs of Arad. Prime Minister Batthyány was executed the same day in Pest.

  The Ausgleich of 1867 abolished the principality for a second time and placed Transylvania inside Transleithania, the Hungarian half of the new Austro-Hungarian Empire. Romanian intellectuals answered with the Blaj Pronouncement. In this period Romanians were also developing a sense of national identity, shown in cultural movements such as the Transylvanian School and in petitions such as the Supplex Libellus Valachorum.

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• 5. Union and Its Aftermath

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  A single battle in Transylvania during World War I changed the German high command. It led to the replacement of the German Chief of Staff, briefly halted German offensives on every other front and created a unified Central Powers command under the German Kaiser.

  When Austria-Hungary fell apart, elected representatives of the ethnic Romanians of Transylvania, Banat, Crișana and Maramureș proclaimed union with Romania on the 1st of December 1918. Romanian troops were mobilised in support. The Deputies of the Romanians from Transylvania adopted the Proclamation of Union of Alba Iulia, and one month later the Deputies of the Saxons voted to back it.

  Romania now marks the 1st of December as Great Union Day, its national holiday. It was established after the Romanian Revolution. It celebrates the joining of Banat, Bessarabia and Bukovina as well as Transylvania, though those other provinces had joined the Kingdom a few months earlier.

  The Treaty of Trianon in 1920 set the new borders. Hungary protested that they did not follow ethnic lines. Depending on the statistics used, between 1.3 and 1.6 million Hungarians, from 25.5 to 31.6 percent of the Transylvanian population, ended up on the Romanian side. Most lived in the Székely Land of eastern Transylvania and along the new frontier.

  In August 1940, Germany and Italy arbitrated the Second Vienna Award. Hungary gained Northern Transylvania, including parts of Crișana and Maramureș, which was over 40 percent of the territory it had lost in 1920. The award settled nothing. Between 1.15 and 1.3 million Romanians remained in the north, and between 0.36 and 0.8 million Hungarians stayed in the south.

  After the Nazi invasion of Hungary in March 1944, Germany took control of Northern Transylvania. Over the next three months, the region's Jewish population was herded into ghettos and then deported to Auschwitz. The great majority were murdered there.

  The Allied Commission voided the Second Vienna Award on the 12th of September 1944, through Article 19 of the Armistice Agreement with Romania. The 1947 Treaty of Paris reaffirmed the borders drawn in Trianon 27 years earlier. From 1947 to 1989, Transylvania lived under the communist regime that ruled all of Romania.

  Tensions outlasted that regime. In March 1990, ethnic clashes in Târgu Mureș between Romanians and Hungarians became the most notable inter-ethnic incident of the post-communist era. In 2019 a dispute over the military cemetery of Valea Uzului raised the same fault line again.

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• 6. Counting the People

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  On the 1st of May 1784, Emperor Joseph II ordered the first official census of the Habsburg Empire, Transylvania included. Published in 1787, it recorded only the overall population, 1,440,986 inhabitants. The Hungarian statistician Fényes Elek estimated in 1842 that Romanians made up 62.3 percent of the population in the years 1830-1840, with Hungarians at 23.3 percent.

  The 1910 Hungarian census shows the next shift. The Hungarian share rose from 24.9 percent in 1869 to 31.6 percent. The Romanian share fell from 59.0 to 53.8 percent, and the German share from 11.9 to 10.7 percent, out of 5,262,495 people. Most Jewish residents reported Hungarian as their main language, so that census counted them as ethnically Hungarian. Magyarization policies also contributed greatly to the change.

  After 1918 the Romanian majority grew. More inhabitants moved into cities, where pressure to assimilate and Romanianize was stronger, and the Hungarian share declined steeply. The expropriation of Magyar magnates' estates, the redistribution of land to Romanian peasants and cultural Romanianization after Trianon caused friction between Hungary and Romania. Estimates show about 630,000 people moving from the Old Kingdom to Transylvania between 1945 and 1977, and 280,000 moving the other way, most of them to Bucharest.

  The 2011 census counted 6,789,250 people. Romanians made up 70.62 percent and Hungarians 17.92 percent. Roma accounted for 3.99 percent, Ukrainians 0.63 percent and Germans 0.49 percent, a group that includes Transylvanian Saxons and Banat Swabians. Another 378,298 people, 5.58 percent, did not declare an ethnicity. Hungarians form a majority in Covasna County at 73.7 percent and in Harghita County at 85.7 percent.

  Religion tells a parallel story. After the Reformation, Romanian Orthodox, Latin Catholic, Romanian Greek Catholic, Lutheran, Reformed and Unitarian communities all lived here. Under the Habsburgs, Transylvania became a destination for what the source calls religious undesirables. Some were non-conformists sent there by force, and many were religious refugees.

  The balance shifted under communism, when the state favoured the Orthodox Church. Figures for the extended region show Eastern Orthodoxy rising from 34.85 percent in 1930 to 65.96 percent in 2011. Greek Catholicism dropped from 24.96 to 2.10 percent. Hungarians are mainly Reformed or Roman Catholic, while about half of the Germans of Romania are Roman Catholic.

  Jews numbered 191,877 in 1930, which was 3.46 percent of the population. Today the number is very small. Babeș-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca is the only university in Europe with four theology faculties: Orthodox, Reformed, Roman Catholic and Greek Catholic.

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• 7. Cities and Industry

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  The Transylvanian Plateau lies between 300 and 500 metres high. The Mureș, Someș, Criș and Olt rivers drain it, along with other tributaries of the Danube. This core roughly matches nine counties of modern Romania. The historical voivodeship covered 55,146 square kilometres. The lands that Romania received in 1920 spanned 23 counties and nearly 102,200 square kilometres. After administrative reorganisations, Transylvania today spans 16 counties and about 100,290 square kilometres.

  Cluj-Napoca is the second most populous city in Romania after Bucharest, according to the 2021 census. It was the official capital of the Grand Principality of Transylvania from 1790 to 1848 and again from 1861 to 1867. Sibiu, the former centre of Transylvanian Saxon culture, shared the title of European Capital of Culture for 2007 with Luxembourg. It served as the principality's capital from 1692 to 1791 and again from 1849 to 1865.

  Alba Iulia stands on the Mureș River. It has been the seat of the Roman Catholic diocese since the High Middle Ages, and from 1541 to 1690 it was the capital of the Eastern Hungarian Kingdom and later the Principality. Brașov is the largest city in a mountain resort area and a convenient base for exploring Romania.

  The ground beneath the region is rich. Transylvania holds lignite, iron, lead, manganese, gold, copper, natural gas, salt and sulfur. The Jiu Valley in southern Hunedoara County was a major mining area through the second half of the nineteenth century and the twentieth. Many of its mines closed after the communist regime collapsed, and the region had to diversify.

  Industry has long mattered here. During the Second World War, factories in the southern, Romanian half of the divided region built over 1,000 warplanes and over 1,000 artillery pieces, among other equipment. Today large iron and steel, chemical and textile industries operate alongside stock raising, wine production and fruit growing. Cluj-Napoca and Timișoara host IT, electronics and automotive firms such as Robert Bosch GmbH, Emerson Electric, Alcatel-Lucent, Flextronics and Continental AG.

  Native brands include Roman of Brașov, which makes trucks and buses, and Azomureș of Târgu Mureș, a fertilizer producer. Terapia in Cluj-Napoca makes pharmaceuticals, Banca Transilvania in Cluj-Napoca is a bank, and the state-owned Cugir Arms Factory makes weapons. Medical traditions are strong in Cluj-Napoca and Târgu Mureș. Transylvania ranks second in Romania for human development, with an index of 0.829, behind only Bucharest-Ilfov.

  The landscape adds its own attractions. Scărișoara Cave in Alba County is the third largest glacier cave in the world. The Salina Turda salt mine appears on a Business Insider list of the ten coolest underground places.

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• 8. Writers, Castles and Dracula

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  Three men of the Transylvanian School, Samuil Micu-Klein, Petru Maior and Gheorghe Șincai, were responsible for an early version of the Romanian alphabet. Transylvania also gave literature a long list of writers born in the region, including Emil Cioran, Lucian Blaga, George Coșbuc, Ioan Slavici, Octavian Goga, Liviu Rebreanu, Endre Ady, Elie Wiesel, Elek Benedek and Károly Kós.

  Liviu Rebreanu wrote the novel Ion, a portrait of Romanian peasants and intellectuals around 1900. Kós was a leading voice of the movement known as Transylvanianism. Miklós Bánffy's Transylvanian trilogy, which includes The Writing on the Wall, follows the social and political history of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

  The Black Church in Brașov, built in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, preserves Transylvanian Gothic, as do several cathedrals. Bran Castle in Brașov County dates to the fourteenth century, and Hunyad Castle in Hunedoara to the fifteenth. The Densuș Church is the oldest church in Romania that still holds services. In Săpânța, the Merry Cemetery is described as the only one of its kind in the world.

  Bran Castle is also known as Dracula's Castle, and the connection traces to Vlad the Impaler. Many Transylvanian Saxons were furious with him. He had strengthened the borders of Wallachia, which interfered with their control of trade routes. Credible accounts from varied origins, mostly non-Saxon, describe how he killed enemies, among them Saxons, boyars and Ottoman soldiers, by impaling. Victims were often arranged in grotesque displays meant to terrorize.

  The Saxons struck back with propaganda. They circulated poems of cruelty portraying Vlad III Dracula as a drinker of blood. Sighișoara is the alleged birthplace of Vlad Dracula.

  The vampire's modern fame came much later, through English-language fiction. After Emily Gerard published The Land Beyond the Forest in 1888, Bram Stoker set his gothic horror novel Dracula in Transylvania in 1897. Its success tied the region to vampires in the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds.

  Bela Lugosi, born in Lugos, now Lugoj in Romania, was among the first actors to play Dracula on film. In 1992, Francis Ford Coppola made a Hollywood film based on Stoker's novel. The Japanese video game franchise Castlevania and the animated movie franchise Hotel Transylvania also trade on the link. Elsewhere, Paulo Coelho's novel The Witch of Portobello calls its heroine, Sherine Khalil, a Transylvanian orphan with a Romani mother, to add mystique. The Principality of Transylvania even appears as a playable nation in Europa Universalis IV.

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