Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán delivered a congratulatory speech at the gala held on April 23, 2016 in Kolozsvár (Cluj, Romania) to mark Zoltán Kallós’s 90th birthday. (Watch Kallós’s birthday song here.) Kallós is an extraordinary man; a true treasure of Hungarian folk culture. Born in 1926 in an ethnic Hungarian family in Transylvania, Romania, in a small village called […]
The Hungarian Free Press has covered the efforts of an activist group in Kolozsvár (Cluj-Napoca), called Musai/Muszáj, to make the cultural capital of this multiethnic region of Romania more bilingual–at least in terms of encouraging the local government to allow for bilingual (Romanian/Hungarian) place name and street signs. András Bethlendi, a lawyer and activist with Musai/Muszáj, shared with our site […]
Immigrants to the United States and Canada often sing about the homeland left behind. Mexicans sing corridos, or ballads, the Irish have songs about the Emerald Isle they left and Vietnamese immigrants pass their traditions down from generation to generation through song and dance. How about Hungarian immigrants? Thanks to József Baki in California, we have a Hungarian example of […]
At the end of 2015, Romanian authorities arrested two Hungarian far-right activists associated with the nationalist and irredentist Sixty-Four Counties Youth Movement (HVIM), accusing them of planning bombings for Romania’s national holiday on December 1st, 2015. Also known as Great Union Day (Ziua Marii Uniri), Romanians recall the day in 1918, when the lands of Transylvania came under Romania’s control, following […]
My father’s cousin is a retired engineer who moved to Israel with his wife, Lory, over four decades ago. Endre Borsai now lives in a retirement home in Haifa, with his wife. On December 31st, 1999, as the twentieth century drew to a close, he wrote a lengthy letter–a very personal testimony–of our family’s experiences during World War II and, […]
It’s not very nice to look a gift horse in the mouth; especially not on Thanksgiving weekend! But considering that some of HFP’s readers are from Transylvania, the northwestern half of Romania that is home to 1.4 million ethnic Hungarians, I wanted to share with you two videos from Elections Canada, produced in advance of our federal vote scheduled for […]
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 […]
