I had the chance to visit Szováta, a primarily Hungarian-speaking resort town located in Romania’s Transylvania region, which is an admittedly off-the-beaten track destination for nearly any tourist who isn’t either ethnic Hungarian or Romanian. Most famous for the thermal salt water Bear Lake, or Lacul Ursu/Medve tó, and for its cliffs made of solid salt, the area around the […]
A group of local Hungarians and liberally-minded Romanian allies in the Transylvanian town of Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca) are attracting some international attention, thanks to their flash mobs and a creative use of social media that call for the municipality to replace unilingual Romanian road signs with trilingual ones, featuring Romanian, Hungarian and German. The group calls itself Musai-Muszáj (the Romanian/Hungarian word […]
The main Hungarian candidate in the first round of voting in Romania’s presidential election – Hunor Kelemen of the centrist Democratic Union of Hungarians in Romania (RMDSZ) – received only 3.50% of the vote on Sunday, but came out on top in the country’s two Hungarian majority counties, namely: Hargita (Harghita) and Kovászna (Covasna). The right-wing Transylvanian Hungarian People’s Party […]
The pro-government (although essentially neoconservative and occasionally libertarian) Mandiner blog published an opinion piece, noting that Viktor Orbán’s infamous statements in Tusnádfürdő/Băile Tușnad represent nothing new in how the prime minister views East vs. West, certainly nothing novel in his nationalist and irredentist rhetoric or in his serial vilification of liberals, leftists and the “1968 generation.” I should note that […]
Emil Boc, mayor of Cluj-Napoca, has appealed a ruling by a county court that would pave the way for bilingual, Romanian-Hungarian, street signs. The court’s ruling would make it possible to include Kolozsvár, the Hungarian version of Cluj, on signs, even though the city’s Hungarian population no longer exceeds the 20% threshold normally required to implement bilingual signage in Romania’s municipalities. […]
