Lajos Kazar: Facts against fiction

GREECE

Transylvania is an area of Rumania. Formerly it belonged to Hungary. Today it is officially known by the Rumanian name Ardeal, which is Hungarian Erdély, German Siebenbürgen. In the antiquity the area in question was a part of the Dacian kingdom which was conquered by Trajan in 105 A.D. In 275 it fell to the Goths, later to the Huns, still later to the Avars.

In 1004 Stephen I of Hungary conquered it and Hungary held it until the Battle of Mohács in 1526. From then on until the Treaty of Carlowacz in 1699 it was an independent state. From 1700 until the end of WW I it was under Hungarian rule again. In the wake of WW I, in October 1918, the Rumanians of Transylvania declared their independence from Hungary. On December 1st, 1918, at Alba Iulia (German Karlsburg), the country voted for unification with Rumania.

The Saxons became involved in the vote for this unity in January 1919, the Hungarians in 1921. The definite border between Hungary and Rumania was fixed by the Treaty of Trianon on June 4th, 1920.

N.B. In 1004 (or 1003) Stephen I, king of Hungary, wrested eastern Hungary, including Erdel, later also known as Transylvania, from his own uncle, Gyula. Eastern Hungary had been conquered by the Magyars/Hungarians around 895. - It is strange that only the Rumanian Alba Iulia and German Karlsburg are given for the originally Hungarian town Gyulafehérvár where on December 1st, 1918 the Rumanians of Transylvania (,,the country") allegedly voted for unification with the Kingdom of Rumania, while Transylvania was still entirely under Hungarian administration. Again, it is worth knowing that at that time only Rumanian activists and onlookers congregated at Gyulafehérvár - brought in free of charge by trains put at their disposal by the Hungarian government - to negotiate with Hungarian government officials.

The gathering was not composed of elected and empowered representatives, for which reason the voting in question was not valid at all. Not even the some 2,800,000 Transylvanian Rumanians voted validly, let alone the some 1,700,000 Hungarians, 560,000 Germans and others. Such important facts should have been pointed out by the writers of the article, otherwise the users of the encyclopedia are likely to be misled.

Rumania - History - Anthropology. The present-day Rumanians are considered to be the descendants of the Daco-Roman race. However, more probably they are the descendants of the Romans who were called in by Emperor Trajan when he was replacing the original Dacians. This is what Rumanian scholars maintain. According to others, the Rumanians are descended from other peoples of the Balkan region (shepherds and mountain dwellers); they are perhaps of Slav stock that crossed the Danube in its northward move from the 11th century onward. Whatever may be their origin, the Rumanians' blood today is mixed and contains both Slav and Greek components. The most pure Rumanians, the so-called Mediterranean types, are found in the Carpathian Mountains. They have black eyes and hair and are of medium stature. - The settlement areas of this once migratory shepherd people now extend as far as Moravia and Istria, and these are called Slavicized Vlachs.

N.B. If present-day Rumanians are descended from the Dacians and Romans, as the Daco-Roman theory asserts, then the Rumanian language should contain as a substratum at least some Dacian language elements. No search has been able to show such beyond reasonable doubt. The colonists called to Dacia by Trajan and his successors were from all parts of the roman Empire, but least from Italy, due to Trajan's own law.

The colonists had a large variety of mother-tongues which they were not likely to have given up for Latin in barely 165 years. - Linguistic and archaeological evidence does not support the Rumanians' claim that their ancestors remained in Dacia during the great migration of peoples. The Rumanian language contains a large amount of Greek words, along with Albanian ones, which could not possibly have been borrowed in, or in the vicinity of, what is today known as Transylvania.

Lajos Kazar: Facts against fiction