Lajos Kazar: Facts against fiction |
2. Assuming the continuous habitation of the Wallachians/Rumanians on the soil of what is now called Transylvania after the withdrawal from there of the roman colonists and legions by approximately 270 A.D. and considering that the peoples following the Romans there, namely the Goths, Huns, Gepids, Avars and Bulgars were swept away by the Völkerwanderung (mass migration of peoples), while according to the proponents of the Daco-roman theory the ,,Daco-roman,, ancestors of the Wallachians/Rumanians survived there in mountain caves, one would like to know in exactly which caves did they survive unnoticed during those war-filled centuries? And where are the pertinent archaeological proofs: sleeping cubicles, whole or broken cooking utensils and other household articles attesting to the permanent living of masses of ,,Daco-Romans,, in such caves?
3. Because the proponents of the Daco-Roman theory claim that the Wallachians/Rumanians became Christian on the soil of what is now called Transylvania in the 4th or 5th century, one is curious to learn about any creation of the ,,Daco-roman,, ancestors of the Wallachians/Rumanians, which should have been preserved in well-hidden caves:
(a) religious creations dating from the time that passed between approx. 270 A.D. and the acceptance of Christianity by the ,,Daco-roman,, ancestors of the Wallachians/Rumanians;
(b) religious creations between the time of acceptance of Christianity by the same people and their first mention in documents of the Hungarian Kingdom in the early 13th century.
One is especially interested in evidence of a reasonable quantity of inscriptions in either the Dacian or the Latin language regarding the first period, and in Latin or Neo-Latin regarding the second, on the walls of cave churches, on gravestones or other cultic objects, for such inscriptions bearing witness to Roman civilization are not lacking in numerous other areas once held by the Romans.
4. How is it explained that no records exist or are referred to either in Rome or in Byzantium about:
(a) the acceptance of Christianity by the ,,Daco-roman,, population which is claimed to have stayed behind after the evacuation of Provincia Dacia around 270 A.D.
(b) episcopal visitations carried out for many centuries to that population;
(c) the discovery of a Latin speaking population in erstwhile Provincia Dacia? It stands to reason that such a discovery should have caused quite a sensation, and exactly an area inhabited by such a population could have been turned into a new center for Christian mission, where at least one bishopric and several parishes as well as monasteries should have been established.
5. Ever since history has records about the ancestors of the Rumanians, they figured as adherents of the Eastern Church of Slav Rites rits:, and in 1698 only one part of the Wallachians/Rumanians living in Transylvania entered into union with Rome.
In 895 A.D. the area now called Transylvania became a part of the new realm of the Hungarians, and in 1003 or 1004 the Hungarian king, (Saint) Stephen I. began to organize the area in question called in Old Hungarian Erdö Elve, later in a contracted form Erdel or Erdély 'the land beyond the forest', as seen from the Great Hungarian Plain - as an integral part of his kingdom within the ecclesiastical framework of the Roman Church; if not under him, then at least since the schism of 1054, the adherents of the Eastern Church of Slav Rites rits: were regarded in the Hungarian Kingdom as heretics, and such were not allowed to stay or settle there. In view of this, how did the claimed ,,Daco-roman,, ancestors of the Wallachians/Rumanians not come into conflict with Endre I. (1046-1060) and his successors, if the claimed ,,Daco-roman,, ancestors lived in the Hungarian Kingdom? And if it is claimed that they had been converted to the Eastern Church of Slav Rites rits: as subjects of the Hungarian Kingdom, one must ask:
(a) when did they convert,
(b) why did they convert,
(c) with whose permission did they convert?
6. How is it explained that in the language of the claimed ,,Daco-roman,, ancestors of the Wallachians/Rumanians the name given to the area in question by the Dacians (if they called it by any name) or the Romans, who called it Provincia Dacia, did not survive? Why was it necessary for the Wallachian ancestors of the Rumanians to borrow Old Hungarian ERDEL which, with some phonetic distortion, the Rumanians still write and pronounce as ARDEAL?
7. If on the soil of Britain after some 400 years of roman rule the Latin language failed to continue its existence, how could it have survived in abandoned Provincia Dacia after a mere 165 years of roman rule? Besides, most of the settlers and soldiers had not hailed from Italy, thus their language was in most cases not Latin.
8. According to the analysis by the 19th century Rumanian linguist Alexandre de Cihac (in Dictionnaire étymologique de la langue roumaine), the vocabulary of the Rumanian language then showed the following break-down: 45.7% words Slav origin, 31.5% words of Latin origin, 8.4% words of Turkish origin, 7% words of Greek origin, 6% words of Hungarian origin, 0.6% words of Albanian origin (plus some unidentified residue with no Dacian word in it). Now linguistics teaches us that after a language change by a people a considerable number of words and some grammatical features are retained as a substratum remaining from the abandoned language. Where are such substratum remnants of the Dacian language in Rumanian?
9. History and archaeology attest clearly that after the withdrawal of the settlers and soldiers from Provincia Dacia, to an area south of the Danube (roughly the area of later Bulgaria), the culturally advanced Goths and Gepids, (of Germanic languages), lived for centuries in the territory abandoned by the Romans. As, according to the testimony of de Cihac, the Wallachians/Rumanians were not at all averse to borrowing from the languages of their neighbours, the question arises: why did they not borrow even a single word from the culturally advanced Goths and Gepids whose neighbours, according to the Daco-Roman hypothesis, they inevitably had to be on the soil of former Provincia Dacia?
10. As objective historiography does not say that the Albanians had migrated to the area of traditional Albania from what is now called Transylvania, how is it explained that many conspicuously common features exist between Albanian and Rumanian? Is it by some chance that the migration of the Wallachians/Rumanians towards Transylvania began right in the vicinity of Albania? It is known that as early as the 10th century A.D. extensive Wallachian settlements existed in the general vicinity of later Albania. Arumunian and Meglenetic ,,Rumanians,, still live there.
11. After his resounding victory over the Bulgars and their Wallachian allies in 1018, the Byzantine Emperor Basilios placed (in 1020) the roaming Vlachos, as the Byzantines called the Wallachian ancestors, under the ecclesiastical rule of the archbishopric of Ochrida, just south-east of Albania. Why did the Wallachians/Rumanians in Transylvania belong to the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the archbishopric of Ochrida as late as 1715, when Orthodox bishoprics of Slav Rites existed closer to them?
12. Why was the language of the liturgy of the Wallachians/Rumanians on the soil of what is now called Transylvania neither Latin, nor Wallachian/Rumanian, but Slav even in the second half of the 19th century, and why were so many members of the clergy of the Wallachians/Rumanians over the centuries of Serbian or Bulgarian origin?
13. How it is explained that among the claimed descendants of Dacians and Romans not even the priests used Latin letters, but Cyrillic, even in the 19th century? If the claimed ,,Daco-Roman,, ancestors of the Wallachians/Rumanians exchanged their expected Latin script for Cyrillic, which could not take place prior to the middle of the 9th century, then why and when did they do it in the Hungarian Kingdom where no other group of people used Cyrillic until Serbian and Wallachian refugees from the Turks requested entry?
14. The Regestrum Varadiense contains the court records of ordeals held between 1205 and 1238 within the jurisdiction of the bishopric of Várad covering eastern Hungary, including Transylvania. From those records, approx. 600 place-names and approx. 2500 personal names have been listed. Neither list contains names rooted in the Wallachian/Rumanian language, although along with most Hungarians, Wallonians, Germans, Ruthenians and Ishmaelites are mentioned, and Wallachian/Rumanian names are not lacking in documents of the Hungarian Kingdom during later centuries. How is this explained?
15. What is the explanation for the fact that the Wallachians/Rumanians, claimed descendants of the Dacians who built fortified towns, and of the Romans who were famous far and wide for their ability to build magnificent towns, never built a single town on the soil of what is now called Transylvania? What is more, the Wallachian/Rumanian word for 'town' i.e. oras, is a borrowing of old Hungarian waras.
16. The history of settlements in Transylvania shows that of 511 villages whose names can be ascertained by the end of the 13th century, only three had names rooted in the language of the Wallachians/Rumanians. Did the ancestors of Wallachians-Rumanians begin to immigrate into Transylvania during the 13th century?
17. Why is it that in Transylvania not a single river or larger rivulet bears a name rooted in the language of the Wallachians/Rumanians?
Lajos Kazar: Facts against fiction |