bluebird research

In July 2003, while staying in Timişoara in Romania, I visited the village of Vinga on the main road north to the city of Arad. The most noticeable feature of Vinga is its imposing Roman Catholic church dedicated to Sfânta Treime (the Holy Trinity). The church was built in 1892. What is unusual, beyond its scale in relation to the size of the village, is the fact that it was founded not by Hungarians or Romanians but by Bulgarians. And, of course, that these Bulgarians were not Orthodox but of the small Catholic minority.

The Roman Catholic Banat Bulgarians, such as those in Vinga, arrived and settled in the Banat region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the C18th. They had originated in the Chiprovtsi district in Bulgaria from whence they arrived in Vinga, via the Oltenia region of Romania, in 1741, escaping the Ottoman Empire and taking advantage of the privileges offered by the Habsburgs to colonists in the Banat.

After World War One and the partition of defeated Hungary at the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, the Banat was divided between Serbia and Romania, and Banat Bulgarians found themselves of either side of the new border. Some still remain in villages such as Ivanovo and Konak (both in Serbia) and Breştea and Dudeştii Vechi (in Romania), but many have moved to cities such as Arad and Timişoara, removed to Bulgaria, or emigrated to Hungary and USA.  

The Bulgarian population of Vinga has dwindled. According to the 1880 Austrian census, there were 3,543 Bulgarians out of a total village population of 4,796 (74%). At the time of the Romanian census of 2002, this had fallen to 512 out of a population of 6,388 (8%) and the Bulgarians are now outnumbered not merely by Romanians but also by Hungarians and Roma.

As well as Romanians and Serbs, there are Croats, Germans, Hungarians, Slovaks and Ukrainians, among others, on both sides of the current Serbian-Romanian border and the Banat remains a fascinating ethnically mixed supranational region.