Transilvania

Geography

Transilvania is the largest region in Romania, and forms the western and central parts of Romania. Transilvania was a principality during the Middle Ages and has always formed a cohesive territory with it's own identity under many different rules.

The Transilvanian plateau, 300 to 500 metres (1,000-1,600 feet) high, is drained by the Mureş, Someş, Criş, and Olt rivers, as well as other tributaries of the Danube.

This core of historical Transilvania roughly corresponds with nine counties of Alba, Bistriţa-Năsăud, Braşov, Cluj, Covasna, Harghita, Hunedoara, Mureş, and Sibiu. Other areas to the west (Crişana) and north (Maramureş), also added to Romania by peace treaties in 1919-20, are since that time sometimes considered part of Transilvania.   We have chosen to organise our website with Crişana and Banat as separate regions.

The main city Cluj-Napoca, is considered to be the region's historic capital (although Transilvania has for long been ruled from Alba-Iulia - throughout its vassalage to the Ottoman Empire, and the seat of its Diet was moved to Sibiu for some time in the 19th century).

In its extended version, mostly used in a Romanian cultural context, the term Transilvania designates Transilvania-proper together with regions that have had fluctuating status towards the core area, the Kingdom of Hungary, the Habsburg Monarchy, or Wallachian and Moldovan hospodars, while some others are solely defined according to their cultural specificity such as Banat, Burzenland, Crişana (and its more traditional form, Partium), Maramureş, Mezőség, Nösnerland, Székelyföld, and Ţara Moţilor.

Economy

Transilvania is rich in mineral resources, notably lignite, iron, lead, manganese, gold, copper, natural gas, salt, and sulfur.

There are large iron and steel, chemical, and textile industries. Stock raising, agriculture, wine production, and fruit growing are important occupations. Timber is another valuable resource.

Transilvania accounts for around 35% of Romania's GDP, and has a GDP per capita (PPP) of around $11,500, around 10% higher than the Romanian average.

Population

According to the 2002 census, Transilvania has a population of 7,221,733, with a large Romanian majority (74.7%). In addition, there are also sizeable Hungarian (19.6%), Roma (3.4%) and German (0.7%) communities. 14 of the counties have Romanian majorities, and two are mostly Hungarian.

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==HISTORY===================================

Transilvania:  1900 - Present

Transilvania as part of Romania

Although Kings Carol I and Ferdinand I were of the German Hohenzollern dynasty, the Kingdom of Romania refused to join the Central Powers and stayed neutral when the First World War began. In 1916 Romania joined the Triple Entente by signing the Military Convention with the Entente, which recognised Romania's rights over Transilvania.

Habsburg Transilvania before WWII The three states which will become Romania all under the control of the surrounding empires.

Romanians in Transilvania, 1911 For 1000 years since the first Hungarian mercenaries marched, Transilvania was the eastern buffer state for the west.

As a consequence of the Convention, Romania declared war against the Central Powers on 27 August 1916, and crossed the Carpathian mountains into Transilvania, thus forcing the Central Powers to fight on yet another front. A German-Bulgarian counter-offensive began the following month in Dobruja and in the Carpathians, driving the Romanian army back into Romania by mid-October and eventually leading to the capture of Bucharest.

The exit of Russia from the war in March 1918 in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk left Romania alone in Eastern Europe, and a peace treaty between Romania and Germany was negotiated in May 1918. However, the resulting Treaty of Bucharest, never ratified in Romania, was denounced in October 1918 by the Romanian government, which then re-entered the war on the Allied side. The Romanian Army advanced to the Mureş river in Transilvania.

By mid-1918 the Central Powers were losing the war, and the Austro-Hungarian empire had begun to disintegrate. The nations living inside Austria-Hungary proclaimed their independence from the empire during September and October 1918. The leaders of Transilvania's National Party met and drafted a resolution invoking the right of self-determination (Woodrow Wilson's 14 points) of Transilvania's Romanian people, and proclaimed the unification of Transilvania with Romania. In November, the Romanian National Central Council, which represented all the Romanians of Transilvania, notified the Budapest government that it had assumed control of twenty-three Transilvanian counties and parts of three others. A mass assembly on 1 December in Alba Iulia passed a resolution calling for unification of all Romanians in a single state. The National Council of the Germans from Transilvania approved the Proclamation, as did the Council of the Danube Swabians from the Banat. In response, the Hungarian General Assembly of Cluj reaffirmed the loyalty of Hungarians from Transilvania to Hungary on December 22 1918.

Bolsheviks on the Borders

In December 1918 the Romanian army was stationed on the Mureş river, but crossed the demarcation zone and advanced up to Cluj and then up to Sighet, after making a request to the Powers of Versailles on the grounds of protecting the Romanians in Transilvania. In February 1919, the escalating violence in the area - Bolshevik elements were making efforts to spread the "Bolshevik Revolution" - led to the creation of a Neutral Zone between Romania and Hungary.

The Prime Minister of the newly proclaimed independent Republic of Hungary resigned in March 1919, refusing to officially recognize the Treaty of Versailles which placed Transilvania under the sovereignty of Romania. When the Communist Party of Hungary, led by Béla Kun, came to power in March 1919 it proclaimed the Hungarian Soviet Republic and after promising that Hungary would regain the lands that were under its control during the Austro-Hungarian Empire, it decided to attack Czechoslovakia and Romania.

The Hungarian Army began the offensive in Transilvania in April 1919 along the Someş, and Mureş rivers. A Romanian counter-offensive pushed forward to reach - and halt at - the Tisa River in May. A new Hungarian offensive in July penetrated 60 km into Romanian lines before a further Romanian counter-offensive led to the occupation of the Hungarian capital Budapest in August, putting an end to the Hungarian Soviet Republic. The Romanian army withdrew from Hungary between October 1919 and March 1920.

Greater Romania (1920 - 1940)

The Romanian term "România Mare" is sometimes translated as "Greater Romania", both to refer to the historic notion, and to translate the name of the political party.

In 1918, at the end of World War I, Transilvania and Bessarabia united with the Romanian Old Kingdom, Transilvania united by a Proclamation of Union of Alba Iulia voted by the Deputies of the Romanians from Transilvania; Bessarabia, having declared its independence from Russia in 1917 by the Conference of the Country (Sfatul Ţarii), called in Romanian troops to protect the province from the Bolsheviks who were spreading the Russian Revolution.

The Treaty of Versailles, formally signed in June 1919, recognised the sovereignty of Romania over Transilvania. The Treaties of St. Germain (1919) and Trianon (signed on June 1920) further elaborated the status of Transilvania and defined the new border between the states of Hungary and Romania. King Ferdinand I of Romania and Queen Maria of Romania were crowned at Alba Iulia in the year 1922.

In August 1940, during the Second World War, Adolf Hitler gave the northern half of Transilvania to Hungary by the second Vienna Diktat. The Treaty of Paris (1947) after the end of the Second World War rendered the Vienna Diktat, and the territory of northern Transilvania was returned to Romania. The post-WWII borders with Hungary, agreed on at the Treaty of Paris were identical with those set out in 1920.

Hungarian Transilvania, 1940 - 1947

The northern part of Transilvania  were ceded to the Hungarians during the Nazi occupation, awarded by Germany and Italy to Hungary in line with the Vienna Awards of 1940.

It was returned to Romania only in 1947, when the Treaty of Paris defined the border between Romania and Hungary as the same as those defined in the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. The basis of claiming the whole Transilvania or at least a part of it was based on Transilvania having ethnic Hungarians as rulers in the Middle Ages and on Transilvania's being a part of or politically-socially interrelated to the Kingdom of Hungary from 10th century up to 1920, marking the end of the First World War.

The Treaty was felt an unfair measure by Romania, considering that Transilvania had become part of Romania in 1918 as a result of the population's will, something similar to a referendum but not quite- not quite, so did 32% of the population became Romanian subjects against their will, some of them living directly close to the new borders between Romania and Hungary.

In 1940, the joint German/Italian Second Vienna Award gave Northern Transilvania to Hungary, which held it until 1944. Historian Keith Hitchins (1994) summarizes the situation created by the award:

"Far from settling matters, the Vienna Award had exacerbated relations between Romania and Hungary. It did not solve the nationality problem by separating all Magyars from all Romanians. Some 1,150,000 to 1,300,000 Romanians, or 48 per cent to over 50 per cent of the population of the ceded territory, depending upon whose statistics are used, remained north of the new frontier, while about 500,000 Magyars (other Hungarian estimates go as high as 800,000, Romanian as low as 363,000) continued to reside in the south. "

During this period, some members of the Hungarian minority participated in discriminating policies and harassment against the Romanian population.

Like Jews living in Hungary, most of the Jews in Northern Transilvania (about 150,000) were sent to concentration camps during the World War II. Some of the Romanian population, in this region fled or was expelled, and the same happened with many Hungarians in the Southern Transilvania- there was a real exodus, over 100 000 people changed their residences on the two sides.

Romanians living in that area were victims to countless atrocities for the simple fact that they were not Hungarians. Unfortunately atrocities against Romanian persons with death tolls are recorded to be just under 1000. This was duly repaid as Romanian troops entered Transilvania in 1944, when similar, wicked acts were committed against civilians. The Soviet military administration had to declare martial law and subdue Romanian military administration to stop the bloodshed against ethnic Hungarian civilians.