Between the Woods and the Water (14 page)

* * *

The tempo of my journey had slowed up, all sense of time dissolved, and it is only now, half a century too late, that I have sudden retrospective qualms about accepting so much hospitality, and they are not very severe. The industrial revolution had left these regions untouched and the rhythm of life had remained many decades behind the pace of the West—a hundred years, perhaps, when stays in the country were as long and as leisurely as they are in English and Russian novels of the time; and, in this lost province, where the hospitable Hungarians felt cut off from life, visitors from the West were greeted with embraces. I hoped it was so, for the next three months of leisurely sojourns across the marches and the southern parts of Transylvania turned that spring and early summer into a complete exception to the rest of these travels. A blessed and happy spell descended.

* * *

Transylvania
[3]
is nearly three times the size of Wales and to the Hungarians the loss of the province seemed the hardest to bear of
all her post-war disasters. Hungary's position in the Dual Monarchy had inextricably involved her in the fortunes of Austria, and then, by chain reaction, of Germany too and finally, in 1918, in the chaos of defeat. But, of the ensuing disasters—the brief Soviet republic of Béla Kun, the conquest by the Rumanians that put an end to it and the White Terror that followed—none seemed so catastrophic as the dismemberment of the country at the Treaty of Trianon. The losses to Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia were bitter but in comparison simple, the cuts clean and the losses quite literally peripheral. It was the opposite in Transylvania; justice to both sides was and is impossible; and the impossibility resides in the dense mass of Transylvanian Hungarians, isolated two hundred miles east of their fellow-countrymen by a still greater surrounding mass of Rumanians. Short of making this enormous Magyar enclave a detached outpost of Hungary—embedded, as it would have had to have been, in a hostile Rumania like the later experiment of East Pakistan, and perhaps with the same fate—there was no solution. Apart from this, the Rumanians of Transylvania out-numbered the Hungarians by the best part of a million, so
mutatis mutandis
, it would have been equally impossible to frame reasonable frontiers for a victorious Hungary which would have been fair to the Rumanians. Who was to suffer the unavoidable injustice—loss of their Transylvanian kinsmen for Hungary, perpetuation of the status quo for the Rumanians—merely depended on who lost the War. Hungary was involved in the losing side, and the result was inevitable: frontiers were destroyed which, except for the Turkish period, had remained intact for nearly a thousand years and two-thirds of her territory were shared out among the winners; and ever since, the Hungarian flag had remained metaphorically and literally at half mast.

The Hungarians based their claim to Transylvania on historical priority rather than ethnic preponderance, the Rumanians on both. The Rumanians claimed descent from a mixture of ancient Dacians (whose kingdom lay exactly here) with the Romans who conquered and colonised the country under Trajan, in
ad
107;
alternatively, they descended—for theories change—from Dacians who had been Romanised by the occupation which lasted until
ad
271, when the overwhelming flood of the Goths compelled the Emperor Aurelian to withdraw his troops to the south of the Danube. During the hundred and sixty-four years between Trajan and Aurelian, a Daco-Roman, Latin-speaking population, comparable to the Gallo-Romans of Gaul, had taken shape, and when Aurelian's troops withdrew, they remained there (rather like, in the West, the Latin-speaking local successors to the legions when they were recalled to Rome) and bequeathed their language to their descendants. They attribute a Slavonic element in Rumanian to the later spread of the Slavs over the whole of Eastern Europe, a linguistic contribution that could be likened in the West to the Teutonic elements in the language of northern Gaul when the Franks crossed the Rhine and spread. The Daco-Romans, then, would have been the bottom layer of the racial and linguistic make-up of the country. Invaders swept across it, with their eyes on prizes farther west; some lingered for a time; but they vanished one by one. Meanwhile, all through these unchronicled Dark Ages, the Daco-Romans, living as nomad shepherds—rough nobles, perhaps, with their pastoral liegemen—grazed their flocks here until the Magyars, turning eastwards again after their occupation of the Great Hungarian Plain, invaded Transylvania and subjugated them: a subjugation which lasted, according to this theory of history, until the liberating Treaty of Trianon.

The Hungarian version of history agrees with the Rumanian as far as Aurelian. According to Hungarians—basing their theory on the only text which touches on the matter
[4]
—the removal of the colonists, and not only of the troops and the administration, was complete. If a few Dacians remained, they are presumed to have been dispersed and obliterated by the Goths and their habitat overlaid by the subsequent Slav expansion: the only population
the Magyars found there in the ninth century would have been a scattering of Slavs, who were soon absorbed; the region was described as ‘deserted' by the first chronicler. To fill the void, the Magyars installed their warlike kinsmen, the Szelkers, in the Carpathians (unless they had preceded them) where they still form the bulk of the Hungarian population. Then they summoned the ‘Saxons' from the lower Rhine; and it is only after this, in the early thirteenth century (the Hungarians urge), that the Rumanians enter the scene; not as descendants of the Daco-Romans surviving in unbroken incumbency, but as immigrant groups of the famous Vlach population of Macedonia and the Balkans, who spoke a low-Latin language from their long subjection to the Empire. They had wandered north with their flocks, the Hungarians say, perhaps driven there by the Cumans, and perhaps not, and probably in company with the wild Pechenegs. They made their way into southern
Transylvania and settled among the Carpathian peaks, where—so this theory continues—they were steadily reinforced by new Vlach arrivals; until finally they outnumbered the Magyars of the region—and the Szeklers, and the Saxons—by an enormous margin.

The speech of the Rumanians and of the Vlachs of the Balkans must spring from the same source. They are too alike for it to be otherwise; few of the Romance languages are so closely related and it is only surprising that the centuries and the distance which separate them have not prised them further apart. Until a hundred and fifty years ago both national groups were loosely called Vlachs, or Wallachs, by the rest of the world (but never by the Rumanians themselves), and this surely points to a common origin. Where? Outside Transylvania, the Hungarians say: they only entered as late immigrants; inside it, the Rumanians insist, only spreading south as later emigrants... It is at this point that an inexpert newcomer to the problem begins tentatively to wonder: could the answer not lie somewhere between the two? Vlachs were scattered all over south-east Europe; might there not also have been some in Transylvania when the Magyars invaded, as well as the wandering Slavs?
[5]
Similarly, could these putative Vlachs in Transylvania not have been part of a wider scattering, and not necessarily the radiating nucleus of the entire race, as the Rumanians uphold? Both parties would answer No: Hungarians insist on a vacuum, Rumanians on a hot-bed. It need hardly be said that controversialists on both sides, quoting or challenging the sources and adducing linguistics, archaeology, geography, place names, religion and a whole supporting array of circumstantial evidence, can explain away all opposing arguments with convincing and long-practised ease.

In the Rumanian view, the Koutzo-Vlachs, the ‘Macedo-Rumans' of the Balkans, would be some of the scattered descendants of the inhabitants of two new ‘Dacias'—the colonies Aurelian founded for the population he had evacuated to Moesia (modern Serbia and Bulgaria) along the south bank of the Danube. One interesting figure glimmers for a moment among these transplanted Dacians a hundred years after Aurelian's evacuation south of the Danube: the remarkable St. Nicetas of Remesiana (now Bela Palanka, in Serbia) who is the author not only of the
Te Deum
—which was wrongly attributed until early this century to SS. Ambrose and Augustine—but also of a clause in the Apostles' Creed. He was a friend of Paulinus of Nola who wrote an ode to him in sapphics when he visited him in south Italy; this sets him at only one remove from Ausonius and Roman Bordeaux. Then the dark swallows up this twilight beacon.

* * *

If only we knew what happened at Aurelian's withdrawal! But, apart from Vopiscus's shadowy sentences, we don't; not a thing: the silence and darkness lasted a thousand years. We know that the
Roman withdrawal took place in
ad
271 (over a century before the Romans left Britain), but after that—apart from Gelu—the earliest mentions of Latin-speaking inhabitants of Transylvania occur in 1222 and 1231, when there is mention of ‘the region of the Vlachs' and ‘the forest of the Pechenegs and the Vlachs.' They emerge—or re-emerge—from the shadows while the Valois and the Plantagenet dynasties were at their height, only twenty years after the Crusaders had captured Constantinople and a bare six after Magna Carta. It is baffling, and hardly credible, that so little is known about their contemporaries in Transylvania. Some blame the Mongol invasion the century before for this astounding blank. The Mongols destroyed everything; not only castles and churches and abbeys but, it seems, every single document they may have contained. One longs for news from the buried ruins of some stronghold miraculously untouched since Batu Khan set fire to it, the trove, perhaps, of some Transylvanian forester digging out a fox or a badger and suddenly tumbling through the creepers and the roots into a dry vault full of iron chests abrim with parchments...

But, from a different point of view, the advantage of this void to the rival controversialists is enormous. Theories can be evolved in a void, as it were, and the occasional fragments of hard fact—linguistic, geographical, ethnological or religious—need not fit into any jigsaw; indeed, they are unable to do so, because all the other pieces are missing; and within certain loose bounds they can be arranged in whatever pattern suits the speaker best. The interpretations are as different as the work of two palaeontologists, one of whom would reconstruct a dinosaur and the other a mastodon from the same handful of bone-fragments. ‘Let us assume' turns in a few pages into ‘We may assume,' which, in a few more, is ‘As we have shown'; and, after a few more pages yet, the shy initial hypothesis has hardened into a brazen established landmark, all the time with not an atom of new evidence being adduced. Advantageous points are coaxed into opulent bloom, awkward ones discreetly pruned into non-being. Obscurity reigns. It is a dim region where
suggestio
falsi
and
suppressio veri
, those twin villains of historical conflict, stalk about the shadows with dark-lantern and bow-string.

These ancient ambiguities would be a field for learned conjecture merely, were it not for the bitter rivalries that haunted them in later times and haunt them still. Historic priority, could it be proved, would be vital evidence in a suit of contested ownership; and earlier in this century, before ethnic considerations were the overriding factors they have since become, it was more important still: possession by conquest, backed by historical continuity and stiffened by treaties, was still a valid and respectable consideration. The colonial empires of Great Britain and France flourished unchallenged and Russia was in firm possession, as she still is, of the colossal Asian annexations of the Tsars. In such an atmosphere, all objectivity of research liable to unearth evidence damaging to the researcher's side must seem tainted with treason.

Obviously, I knew very little of all this at the time, but it was impossible not to pick up an inkling; and later, when I stayed for long stretches in ‘old' Rumania—
Regat
, or ‘the Kingdom,' as it was always referred to in Transylvania—I more or less got the hang of the Rumanian approach, but not in very strong doses—it would be hard to think of less chauvinistic people than the family and friends I settled among in Moldavia—and I read all that came my way on both sides. The opposing cases were skilfully and persuasively argued; in each the chains of logic seemed faultless; all objections were faced and demolished; and when I turned from one argument to its rival the same thing would happen, leaving me stranded between the two. I am the only person I know who has feelings of equal warmth for both these embattled claimants and I wish with fervour they could become friends. Would the discovery of those imaginary scrolls in the ruins solve matters? My unsatisfactory position between the two makes me useless to both.

Among the Hungarian landowners in Transylvania there was an added bitterness. Agrarian reforms had expropriated and redistributed the bulk of their estates among the peasants. However just this measure may have been, nobody likes losing land and cries of
outrage went up. They could not know it, but these cries were substantially no different from the lamentations one could hear in the country-houses of Rumanian boyars, whose estates had been similarly dismantled. These boyars, what is more, were resentfully convinced that their own Rumanian government gave more favourable treatment to the new and unwilling Hungarian subjects, in order to curry favour with them. On later visits, when I told this to Hungarian Transylvanians, unshakably convinced that they were the special victims of discrimination, they were amazed and disbelieving. They seethed at the inequity of the regime and the venality of the new officials from Regat. Tales of bribery abounded, and their attitude to the new state and to its officials from beyond the Carpathian watershed resembled the distrust and disdain of post-American Civil War plantation owners for the carpetbaggers from the north. Indeed, there were unprepossessing aspects: lack of tact and scruple was backed, perhaps, by promptings of revenge for Hungarian absolutism in the past. The Hungarians over the centuries had handled their alien subjects—and all their own compatriots below a certain rank—with great clumsiness; disdain, oppression, blind feudalism, exclusion from any voice in their counsels, rigorous Magyarisation—no blemish was missing. (In case their iniquities should breed complacency in an English breast, their feelings towards the helot population most compellingly recall the English attitude that Swift satirises in post-Cromwellian Ireland.) Trouble heaped up; it broke out now and then in murderous revolts followed by pitiless retribution. Had a reversal of the positions placed the Hungarians under Rumanian suzerainty for these grim centuries, there is no reason to think that the shifted yoke would have been lighter to bear: Rumanian rulers were as illiberal and oppressive to their own subjects as the Hungarians to theirs. They were fierce times in Eastern Europe; and they still are.
[6]