Black Spring

FOREWORD

One big problem facing Europe as it considers an unsettled future is the question of its various national minorities. Nearly every news item we read or hear today seem to confirm this.

In the last century, one could say that social questions occupied the centrestage in the political debate. The 19th Century's social challenge was duly addressed via the deadend of Marxist Communism, but also through the policies pursued more or less successfully down to this day by the Western democracies.

Now, since the death of Communist dictatorship, Europe's artificially dormant nationality problem has been again thrust forward, and it demands our urgent attention.

The Transylvania region in Romania with its Hungarian, German and other minorities is probably the part of Europe where the minorities dilemma is experienced at its worst. Yet is it a region whose dire problems are little understood by West Europeans. And the reports that do reach the Western massmedia are often falsified in the service of partisan interests.

It is quite clear that the Transylvania crisis has to be readdressed if the full extension of freedom into Central and Eastern Europe is to be completed.

Under these conditions, a factual report on the days between the Romanian revolution of December 1989 and the ethnic massacre in Transylvania three months later is welcome. This is especially so if it honestly describes the precedents we need to be aware of if we are to analyse and respond to the unfolding nationalities dilemma besetting this entire region of Europe.

In this sense, the testimony contained in the book Black Spring, by Elöd Kincses, will add much to our objective knowledge of the situation in this troubled, area. One hopes this book will be read by many and that it will help to form their opinion on the political destiny awaiting Europe.

Otto von Habsburg

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EDITOR'S FOREWORD

Ostensibly, this book could not appear in its English edition at a worst time. Today, all eyes are on the tragedy of the former Yugoslavia, where thousands have died. This book meanwhile describes a relatively minor incident that happened in the Romanian Transylvanian town of Tirgu Mures in March 1990, three months after the revolution that overthrew Ceausescu. A riot by local Romanians against members of the large Hungarian community. Five people battered to death on the streets. Why should we be concerned now with this obscure tale from a couple of years ago?

Various reasons. Setting aside the killings in the former republics of the Soviet Union which began before the death of Communism in the East and which will continue indefinitely into the future, the episode described here was the first warning that liberation from Communism does not mean liberation from ancient evil, but on the contrary invites the return of ancient evil. The pogrom of Tirgu Mures represented perhaps the "first blood" of the post-Communist settlement in Eastern Europe. Here, liberation turned to pogrom within three months. Our fortune is that Elöd Kincses, a clearminded lawyer, was present both as a major player in the events and as a witness to chronicle how the residual powers of evil achieved such a transformation.

But this book is far more than a simple morality tale: on the contrary, it is disgusting but also genuinely gripping to read such a dispassionate and "fair" narrative of such vile events.

Further, the poisons it describes in action are still at work in this part of the European body politic. And things tend to get worse. An independent Slovakia will include 600,000 Hungarians a little more than 10 percent of the total Slovak population. All the indications so far are that the Slovaks will not be kind to the minority rights aspirations of the Hungarians. Similarly, the 450,000 Hungarians living in the Vojvodina province of northern Serbia are threatened by the Serb power play that has so ravaged the former republics of Yugoslavia. It is no wild speculation to say that the Hungarian government may well find itself dragged into conflict with the rulers of Slovakia or Serbia to protect the Hungarian minorities there.

And in Romania itself, the situation for Hungarians has continued to worsen following the events described here. But Romania is more than twice the size of Hungary, and it is difficult to imagine what Hungary could do to protect its more than two million kin across the border in Transylvania. While the military option hardly presents a solution, however, it is still true to say that Romania's treatment of its Hungarian minority will remain a source of continuing tension in an already volatile corner of Europe. A great war was sparked by events in the Balkans, we know. And although

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it is not likely that this region's problems will ever provoke another great war, it would still be prudent to understand the story behind Europe's one remaining major political faultline.

Most sentient people three years ago would probably have said that they did not anticipate living to witness the demise of the 1945 Yalta postwar settlement. And yet Yalta is now no more. How doubly unlikely it ever seemed that the 1919 Versailles Settlement would be undone. And yet two of its major creations Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia are determined to selfdestruct. Will a third creation of Versailles modern day Rumania find the will to save itself from internal division and at the same time finally earn its place in the European House? Based on the evidence provided by this book, one would have to say that the jury is most definitely still out.

I first met Elöd Kincses in February 1990, right in the middle of the period he describes in this book. It was then six weeks after the revolution that overthrew Ceausescu and in which Kincses played no small part and six weeks before the pogrom in Kincses's home town of Tirgu Mures that resulted in his flight into exile. It was a three-month metamorphosis from joy to vileness.

By chance, I interviewed several of the main characters who were later to figure in these pages. These included Kincses, the new administrator sitting in his county government office in Tirgu Mures. My reporter's brief was whither Romanian Transylvania following the fall of Ceauescu. The specific issue that swiftly emerged was why everyone was talking about the potential for violence between Romanians and Hungarians who so recently had been the united victors over Ceausescu?

These were some of the reporter's biographical notes on the players that I made then shorthand and crass:

Kincses. Top Hungarian in new postrevolution county administration. Jovial, amiable chap. Up to his ears in furore with Romanians over the restoration of separate language schooling for Hungarians.

Enache. Local Romanian intellectual who stood up for Hungarian rights to separate education and who gets lots of death threats. Saintly woman, deeply sad and harried. Goodlooking.

Judea. Colonel, top Romanian on the new town council. Supposed to be evenhanded. Slimy, reptillian, sweats a lot. Judea denies he ever said Enache deserves to die for what she said re the Hungarians.

Ceontea. Leader of local new, ultranationalist Romanian movement, Vatra [Hearth]. Hates Hungarians. Very scarey, very violent. Could give Fascism a bad name.

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I do not claim any great perspicacity by these remarks. Rather, these various qualities were - are - glaringly obvious to anyone with eyes, ears and a nose.

The shape of these three months under review aspires to high tragedy. Specifically, a Transylvanian Hungarian revolt against the common Ceausescu enemy that leads to the overthrow of that enemy and reconciliation with the Romanian community. The clock of eternal joy and brotherhood finally begins to tick. But then this movement swiftly finds itself confronting a new (or perhaps the original, old) enemy which destroys the hope of the revolution, splits the two communities, and turns on, kills and disperses the very people who initiated the overthrow of Ceausescu in the first place.

As high tragedy, the time-frame is too neat, the bewilderment of the relevant mortals too total, for us to find the plot at all plausible. For plausibility, for some stab at sense and meaning, we must rely on Mr Kincses and what he relates in his book.

Kincses is an unlikely hero within this drama. He was thrust into the storm by two roles which he did not seek: his lawyer's defence of Hungarian Pastor László Tökés in Tökés's stand against Ceausescu (the defiance that initiated the Romanian revolution), and high office in the post-revolutionary local council forced upon him because of the national prominence he gained through his defence of Tökés. The right comes to no man to judge whether the formerly un-controversial country solicitor was up to the task, or suited the part. Kincses played the hand that was hurriedly dealt him as best he could, never knowing at the time just how much the deck was always stacked against him and his people,

Kincses's book is sometimes frustrating. Not because his story is frustrating -the word is hardly adequate - but because of the way he insists on telling it. As he notes himself, he is not a politician or polemicist, but a lawyer. And the lawyer in Kincses - one obsessed with the credibility of his evidence - emerges not only in what he says but also in what he refuses to say. The initial Hungarian version of this book was written in the late summer of 1''0. It was a time when Kincses (and others) were still relatively ignorant of the true logic of events in post-revolutionary Romania. Though tantalizing flashes of initial suspicion are evident throughout the book. Now of course, Kincses (and others) know how unreformed and compromised the postrevolutionary regime of President Ion Iliescu insisted on being. And Kincses would probably have written a different book if he had started it later. But he refused to revise his original testament substantially, because - he argued - this would have involved hindsight. This is not boy scout's honour: in today's Romania (as in the old), credibility is a political weapon - for the lawyer as for anyone else. And Kincses did not want to be charged by his enemies with second-guessing his own or others' actions and motives during that time.

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Indeed, it was only in the preparation of this English-language edition that Kincses specifically said how one Romanian died in the events of the night of March 20, 1''0, in Tirgu Mures. This man's death was used by the Romanian nationalists as propaganda for their cause - still is - though it was clear that he was killed by the reckless driving of the colleague transporting him to the pogrom! But Kincses says that when he wrote the first, Hungarian, draft of this book, the coroner's report on this man's death had not yet been filed. And - despite his own knowledge of the reality - he did not wish to say anything that would have preempted the coroner. (Also read: As a prominent voice of the Hungarians, I did not want to say anything about this man ' s death that come the inevitable whitewash of the official report could have been turned around and used as evidence of my lies and as a stick to beat us with.)

It is difficult for a Westerner to comprehend this climate of permanent self-restraint and abnegation under which the Hungarians of Transylvania have to live. It is similarly difficult for a Westerner to grasp the degree of State lawlessness and disregard for due process that has allowed - even encouraged - such a situation to persist. For, as Kincses wrote in 1990, the perpetrators of the crimes recorded here were never punished. Nor - if -s climate endures - will they ever be.

Indeed, it is Kincses who stands accused because of the events recorded here. After he fled Romania at the end of March 1990, Kincses became aware that "legal" measures had been prepared against him. It proved difficult to discover if a formal warrant existed, and if it did, what it actually might say. But it appeared that more than two years after the violence, Kincses would have been arrested if he had returned to his home town and would have been charged with "incitement to murder" (initially, it was "incitement to genocide").

It is also difficult for a Westerner to believe that the main (ostensible) irritant that led to the pogrom of Tirgu Mures was the Hungarian agitation for the restoration of the mother-tongue schooling they had enjoyed in earlier years. But it is futile for outsiders to try to understand or respect the essential frivolity of the suspicions that certain Romanians harbour towards the aspirations of the Transylvanian Hungarian minority.

If one scratched a Transylvanian Hungarian and asked privately whether he believes his lot would have been easier if the Versailles Settlement had not given Hungarian Transylvania to Romania, he would probably reply that things would have been better for him otherwise. This is fair enough: ask an Irishman about Ulster. If one imagines however that a coherent policy existed among the Hungarians of post-revolutionary Tirgu Mures which anticipated or actively sought the reunification of Hungary with its lost Transylvanian lands, then one would have stumbled into total unreality. Of course not! How, exactly?

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But the Romanians who flocked to join the Vatra Romaneasca (Romanian Heart) Organization in the months after the revolution did not accept this. They did believe in The Plot. They did regard the Hungarian yearning for schools teaching in the mother tongue to be the thin end of the wedge, leading remorselessly towards demands for the separation of Transylvania from the Romanian state. Kincses would not be so impolitic as to say it, but the neurotic cultural, intellectual and ethnic insecurity evidenced by this Romanian reaction to Hungarian aspirations is frightening to observe.

The activities of the Vatra Romaneasca organization run as a thread through this entire book. Vatra then called itself a cultural organization simply committed to defending Romanian interests in troubled times. With less kindness, one could regard Vatra as a poisonous conspiracy feeding from the deepest recesses of Romanian insecurity. The unanswered question then would be: who pulls the strings and what is the full agenda?

Yet Vatra thrives. And the conspirators who organized a pogrom remain unchained. And the authorities who gave carte blanche to their activities have never been called to account.

But Kincses would not now wish to overemphasize the role of Vatra Romaneasca in all of these events. For the present considers it more than ever to have been a front for other forces. Indeed, Kincses now agrees with those who say that the pogrom of Tirgu Mures was organized by a special unit of the Interior Ministry (Securitate) run by a certain Securitate colonel. He also now agrees that this special unit was responsible for organizing the invasion of Bucharest by a miners' mob in June 1990 that resulted in grave injury to a number of anti-government demonstrators. The Romanian opposition press has said special unit number 02105 of the Romanian Interior Ministry led by one Colonel Cristescu was responsible for the miners' rampage.

In his exile meanwhile, Kincses has a favorite pastime, which is to take down a copy of Ceausescu's old penal code and to write on the back of an envelope a list of just how many crimes he can think of that the organizers of the pogrom of Tirgu Mures should properly be charged with. Clauses and subclauses. Ever the lawyer. But it must pain him to do it, for given his prospects, and Romania's prospects, it is a futile pastime indeed.

Harry Richards,
Editor of the English language edition,
September 1992

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HISTORY, AND A GLOSSARY OF TERMS

Many of the tensions gripping former Soviet Bloc nations today have their roots more in ancient rivalries than in modern politics. In this region, anniversaries can kill, and he who controls history controls the contemporary debate. The following notes might help the Reader not fully familiar with the historical and demographic back ground to the events described in this book.

Versailles, before and after

Until the post-First World War Settlement of Versailles (specifically the Treaty of Trianon) Transylvania was one of the provinces of the Greater Hungary that itself existed within the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The "Dual Monarchy" system which elevated the status of Hungary within the Austrian Habsburg Empire was adopted in 1867 following persistent Hungarian resentment (and uprisings) at the curbs on its full expression of nationhood.

The loss of the First World War destroyed not only the Habsburg Empire, but also the Hungarian nation existing within it. Hungarians were not treated as one of the dozen peoples enduring Austrian imperial rule. Rather, because of its status as a co respondent Hungary was "punished" - way out of proportion - for waging the war, as were Austria and Germany.

The multinational Hungarian Kingdom lost two-thirds of its land and one-third of its ethnic Hungarian population. It lost Transylvania and two million of its own people to an enlarged Romania. It saw one million of its people enter under Slovak control within the new Czechoslovak Federation. And it saw half a million of its people placed within the Vojvodina province of the Serb republic within the new Yugoslav Federation. Land and people were also lost to Austria and Croatia, giving rise to the old Hungarian quip: How many countries border on Hungary? One, Greater Hungary.

While the figures above refer to ethnic Hungarians, not all of the people lost after the First World War were Hungarian of course. Indeed, come Versailles/Trianon, Transylvanian Hungarians were a minority within their own province. This is because since the early 18th Century there had been a great influx of Romanians encouraged by Hungarian landowners looking for cheaper labour than Hungarians provided. In the next century these Romanian arrivals were also taking the places of rural Hungarians emigrating to the United States. Today, the estimated population of Transylvania is two million Hungarians and four million Romanians.

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Hungarians arrived in the Carpathian Basin from the east in the mid-9'th Century and Transylvania became a principality under the Hungarian crown. In the 11th Century Hungarian kings brought large German communities to settle in the region and granted them special rights, which allowed them to maintain German towns and villages for more than 800 years. After the Turks conquered most of Hungary in the early 16th Century, Transylvania remained an independent princedom until Hungary was liberated by Habsburg troops at the end of the 17th Century. Then Transylvania came under the direct authority of Vienna, but as part of the Hungarian Kingdom. The Hungarian and Transylvanian constitutions remained in force (Diploma Leopoldinum). It returned to direct Hungarian jurisdiction with the compromise of 1867 which set up the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. After the peace treaties of Versailles, St. Germain, Neuilly and Trianon, it fell to Romania. Northern Transylvania was briefly reunited with Hungary under the Vienna settlement of 1940 (see below).

The debate between Hungarians and Romanians over national(ity) rights is often turned into a debate about who has lived longer in Transylvania, who did what to the other party over the years, who's at home there and who is a newcomer/intruder.

The official Romanian "continuity theory" posits that Romanians have an historic right to Transylvania because they are the auchtochtonous, people, deriving from the Dacians who were conquered and romanized by the Romans in the 1st Century. This theory holds that even after the Empire collapsed and Roman troops retreated south of the Danube at the end of the 3rd Century, people speaking a Roman language lived on up in the Transylvanian mountains, letting history go on in the plains below until the arrival of the Hungarians 600 years later. These are the ancestors of today's Romanians and that's why Transylvania belongs to them.

Another theory (More favoured by the Hungarians and more and more western historians) has it that today's Romanians are descendants of a Romanized people from today's Macedonia (where one can still find a small population of Macedo-Rumanians) who in the course of the first millennium migrated north settling eventually in the lowlands east and south of the Carpathian mountains, where they formed their first states in the 12th Century. These lands formed the old, pre-Trianon, Romania, and they didn't include Transylvania.

The fact is that there are many unknowns in the history of Transylvania between the departure of the Romans and the arrival of the Hungarians. (This was generally a period of great migrations of nations.) Historians and archaeologist have yet to provide satisfactory answers.

Open fighting over the nationality issue first broke out in the 1848 revolution.

Although the Hungarian revolution against the Habsburgs started as a social one, asking for the liberation of serfs, a free press, etc., it soon turned into an independence

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war against Habsburg rule. It pursued full national independence for Hungary (also reunification with Transylvania) along the lines of the 19'th Century all-European (French) idea of a nation state, posing as its aim national and linguistic unity. One reason for the failure of the 1848/49 revolution was Hungarian intolerance towards Croats and Romanians, who therefore played a major part in the repression of the revolution on the side of the Austrians. That they were not rewarded by any more rights from Vienna is another story.

The 1867 compromise gave Hungarians equal status with the ruling Austrians. It also brought Transylvania back under direct Hungarian rule. The 1868 nationality law of the Hungarian Parliament was most liberal for its time. Its implementation wasn't. The Hungarian administration attempted to enforce Hungarian-language education on all nationalities at the state school level, thereby diminishing the opportunity of education in the respective mother tongue.

(The CD-ROM editor's note: This is a popular misconception, fostered and spread by Rumanian and Slovak propaganda. Unfortunately under the Communists the Hungarians had to accept at face value, whatever the rulers ordered to be "The truth". What Mr. Kincses states here was true in some of the state-run schools only. Most of the schools were run by the churches. In those the Hungarian language was not even offered as a second or foreign language up to 1879. That's when the Hungarian language was introduced as a foreign language in the Separate schools. For the whole story see: Biro: The Nationalities Problem In Transylvania 1867-1940, also on this Home Page.)

In 1918 in a great popular meeting in the Transylvanian town of Alba Iulia, Romanians voted for unification with the Romanian kingdom.

(The CD-ROM editor's note: The Hungarians accepted the terms of the armistice, on the bases of the "Fourteen Points" of President Woodrow Wilson , naively believing that the future of Hungary will be decided by plebistice under foreign supervision. Naturally the Czechs, Serbs and the Rumanians did not even want to consider it, knowing full well, that the outcome of a plebistice is far from being a forgone conclusion. The meeting at Alba Iulia was hastily assembled with handpicked representatives and was designed to forestal any possibility of a plebistice. So much for the Tenth of the Fourteen Points: "the peoples' right of self-determination". It was only applied to others, never to Hungarians. For more on the subject see: Cadzow-Éltetö-Ludanyi: The Roots of Ethnic Conflict, also on this Home Page.)

The proclamation published on this occasion also contained passages assuring full minority rights to the Hungarians of Transylvania. The reality turned out different: following a land reform carried out along different principles in the old Romanian Kingdom and in Transylvania, Hungarian landowners and Hungarian churches lost most of their wealth. By this they also lost the material base for private schooling. The number of Hungarian-language state schools was drastically reduced, the Hungarian university of Cluj (or Kolozsvár, as it had been) closed.

Until 1918 Transylvanian towns of any size had a big Hungarian or German majority, the Romanians mostly living in rural areas. Hungarians had been the master nation for a thousand years and they suddenly came under the rule of people they did not have much esteem for. There was arrogance and haughtiness on the Hungarian side, plenty of inferiority complexes and revenge feeling on the Romanian side. Since these days, each community has placed great pressure on its independently minded, historically sensitive and realistic members to proceed publicly according to what is perceived to be ones's "national" interest.

Wartime

In the Second World War, both Hungary and Romania were erstwhile allies of the Reich. This led in the Vienna Treaty of 1940 to the return to Hungary of northern Transylvania, where there is a majority Hungarian population, and the return of a chunk of the Moldovan territories to Romania that had been seized by Stalin at the start of the war. This arrangement was undone with the defeat of Germany.

The four wartime years were marked by insecurity. No major changes were implemented by Hungarian rulers except for the reinstituting of the Hungarian University

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of Cluj and the reopening of Hungarian schools. The Romanian language continued to be an obligatory subject in Hungarian schools. A major tragedy was the deportation of several hundred thousand Jews of Northern Transylvania to German extermination camps in the spring of 1944, after Germany occupied Hungary following the attempt of Governor Miklos Horthy to change sides in the war.

Under the Communists

Predictably, Communist pledges and constitutional guarantees on minority rights sounded impressive. But in practice the 40 years of Romanian Communist rule systematically reduced the educational basis of the Hungarians, depriving them of the means to maintain and develop their own culture. The number of Hungarian schools and universities kept falling, industrialization led to the planned settlement of Rumanians in formerly strictly Hungarian regions, and the deteriorating economic and ethnic situation drove tens of thousands of Hungarians into exile, mainly those with higher education. The Germans of Transylvania suffered similarly, and beginning in the 1960s they emigrated in large numbers to West Germany. Of the 500,000 Germans of prewar Transylvania, 100,000 are left today. And most of them want to leave as soon as possible.

Romania's December Revolution

The situation for all Romanian citizens on the eve of the Romanian revolution of December 1988 was dire. Ceausescu's manic desire to repay Romania's relatively modest foreign debt at breakneck speed ruined the country in the years leading up to the revolution. All foods that could be sold for hard currency were exported. Investment in services and utilities was slashed, leaving Romanians to endure their winters hungry, cold and in the dark.

In addition to fantastical building projects which involved the destruction of parts of historic Bucharest, Ceausescu also planned the bulldozing of many rural settlements in the name of economic efficiency. These were to he replaced by a few concrete agroconcentrations. The Hungarians of Transylvania saw this policy as directed particularly at their own rural life and cultural identity.

The other East European Communist regimes tumbled in the months before the Romanian December revolution. Aside from Stalinist Albania, Romania's liberation was the last and the most violent. But even before this, Ceausescu's Romania had become increasingly isolated internationally, including within the Soviet bloc. Significantly, even Hungary's Communist rulers felt compelled to break ranks with Warsaw Pact solidarity to openly complain about the treatment of the Transylvanian Hungarian minority. Ceausescu's Romania was a signatory to the 1975 Helsinki Accords, and

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The December revolution was triggered by the Tõkés' case as described in the first chapter of this book. László Tõkés, a Calvinist parson, had been in conflict with the authorities for several years. At the start of his ministry, he had managed to gather young people around him in Biblical Circles, helping them to learn about their own Hungarian culture and history. (The Hungarians of Transylvania are either Roman Catholic or Calvinist, the Germans Lutheran or Catholic, the Romanians Orthodox or Greeek Catholic, i.e. Uniate - like the western Ukrainians). Tõkés had been a critic of the Ceauesescu system - both of its minority policies and its nationalistic Communism. He was also an editor of the Hungarian-language samizdat publication, Ellenpontok.[Counter Points]. in the early '80s. He had been transferred several times from his earlier parishes, and Timisoara was also a demotion from his former post. His conflict with his bishop, faitful to Ceauqescu, was in fact a conflict with the nationalilstic-communist regime.

Today and Tomorrow

Of all the losses suffered by Hungary in this century, Transylvania represents the greatest trauma - then and now. But the preoccupation of responsible Hungarians both within Hungary and in Transylvania - has not to date been the recovery of lost lands. Rather "it has been the constant inability of the Romanian state to guarantee and honour the minority rights which the Hunganans of Transylvania - indeed all the Romanian minorities - can legitimately claim.

The failure of post-revolutionary Romanian leaders to secure minority rights after three years of waiting has now led some Hungarians to radicalise their demands, however. A New-Right within Hungary itself (of as yet undetermined size) speaks more stridently of the evil of the Trianon (peace treaty). Some Hungarian leaders within Transylvania - while horrified at such provocative musings - do now see autonomous areas as the only way to secure local ethnic rights.

For all Romanians, however, post-revolutionary aspirations have been frustrated. Perhaps because their Communist masters were so vile, or because their revolution was won with blood, Romanians believed they deserved more of a liberation from the past than has been achieved. So has their bitterness been all the greater. The Securitate secret police have continued to operate in new guises, Communist holdovers have continued to rule to a greater degree than in any other East European state. And such is their ability to manipulate the hopes and fears of Romanian peasant voters that they have not even had to resort to large electoral fraud to retain power.

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Of particular concern to the Hungarians has been the activity of Romanian extremist nationalists occupying mayoral offices in Transylvania. They have promulgated more and more discriminatory measures against minorities. Public use of the language - indeed practically any public expression of Hungarian identity - is under frontal attack. There is a growing Romanian hysteria: the potential for violence is no less today than it was in the days after the revolution, when a pogrom was organised in Tirgu Mures, in the centre of Europe.

A word on "pogrom": this edition retains the term in its current East European and Russian meaning, which does not require hundreds or thousands to be slaughtered. "Pogrom"- here means ethnically-inspired violence or assault by one group upon another.

H.R.

In most areas of Transylvania there are hardly any clean ethnic divisions. One will find many villages with a mixed Romanian-Hungarian population, or 'areas where settlements only a few miles apart have populations speaking either Hungarian or Romanian or German.

Many Transylvanian settlements have their own Romanian, Hungarian and German names. This book uses the official Romanian names. Below is a table of placenames mentioned in the text with the Hungarian and German varieties, where they exist.

Romanian	Hungarian	German
Alba Iulia	Gyulafehérvár	Weissenburg
Baclu	Bikó
Band	Bánd
Bobilna	Bibolna
Brassov	Brasso	Kronstadt
Caransebes	Karánsebes	Karansebesch
Cluj	Kolozsvár	Klausenburg
Covasna	Kovászna	Kovasna
Deda Bistra	Dédabisztra
Dej	Dés	Desch
Dumbravioara	Sáromberke	Scharnberg
Dumbrlvita	Ujszentes
Emei	Nagyernye
Gornesti	Gernyeszeg	Kertzing

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Gurghiu	Görgény	Görgen
Harghita	Hargita	Hargita
Hodac	Hodák
Iasi	Jászváros
Ibanesti	Libánfalva
Iernut	Radnót	Radnuten
Luduq	Ludas	Luciesch
Luna	Lóna	Lone
Niraj	Nyárád
Ocna de Jos	Alsófalva
Odorheiul Secuiesc	Székelyudvarhely	Hofmarkt
Oradea	Nagyárad	Groswardein
Razboieni	Székelykocsárd
Reghin	Szászrégen	Sachsisch Regen
Satu Mare	Szatmárnémeti	Sathmar
Sibiu	Nagyszeben	Hermannstadt
Sighisoara	Segesvár	Schisburg
Singeorgiu de Mures	Marosszentgyörgy
Sovata	Szováta
Timisoara	Temesvár	Temeschwar
Tirgu Mures	Marosvásárhely	Neumarkt
Tirnaveni	Dicsôszentmáron	Martinskirch
Turda	Torda	Thorenburg

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Black Spring