Archive for the ‘romania’ Category
The Banat is one of the regions of Europe known as contact zones, where peoples of different ethnicity, religion and language co-existed, and to an extent still co-exist – sometimes harmoniously, sometimes uneasily, as is the case the world over.
Imagined as a Venn diagram, the Banat is perhaps a natural intersection for the Serbs to the west (who had pushed north to escape the Ottomans) and the Romanians to the east. However, there is also an artificial historical factor, caused by the ruling Habsburgs’ intervention and planned settlement of the land in the 18th century and more natural immigration of Imperial subjects in the 19th century. The majority of these were German speakers – they became known as Swabians, although Swabia was only one of various German regions from which they came. In addition to the Germans, the Banat received, among others, Bulgarian, Croat, Czech, French, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, Spanish, Swiss and Ukrainian settlers – mostly but not exclusively Catholics (there were also Protestants of different persuasions, among them again many German settlers). And further broadening the mix of peoples in the area were Jewish merchants and professionals, Austrian civil servants, and Gypsy (locally Tsigani or Ţigani) settlements.
Resources and professional genealogical research services for those with German Banater ancestry are well-established. In the wake of WW2, rightly or wrongly, the Germans in Yugoslavia and Romania became persona non grata. The descendants of the Banat Germans now live in Germany, in Canada, in USA and elsewhere and, like all displaced and diaspora peoples, show a keen interest in their roots (roots which, of course, pass through the rich black soil of the Banat and extend beyond it to Baden and Lorraine, Westfalen and Württemberg).
However, Bluebird Research, as well as undertaking German genealogy in Serbia and Romania, can assist with your genealogical research in the Banat whatever the nationality or religion of your ancestors. We work in both Romania and Serbia; we are just as interested in the cultural and social history of the Hungarians and the Slovaks of the Banat; we have a special interest in the Jewish communities, now mostly lost; and in the Serbian Orthodox families, many of which can trace their histories back to “continental” Serbia (for instance to Šumadija), or to Herzegovina, or to Montenegro.
If you have ancestors from the Banat, and would like professional assistance with your family history research, please get in touch with us for a free assessment and estimate of costs. Research is affordable and success rates are generally high.
This week the family history website Find My Past has published the central index to the register of merchant seamen on British vessels. The original record series was created by the then Registrar General of Shipping and Seaman (part of the Board of Trade). It is now held on microfiche at The National Archives in Kew, England and can be seen under shelf references BT348, BT349 and BT350.
The resource takes the shape of record cards which form a central index to seamen registered to serve on British-registered vessels within the period from approximately 1918 to 1941.
What makes the Central Index Register cards interesting from an Eastern European genealogical research perspective is that many of those employed in the British merchant navy were engaged at overseas ports. For example, there are large numbers of records relating to Estonian, Greek and Latvian sailors. Additionally, there are smaller but still significant quantities of seamen from Cyprus, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia, and even some from landlocked Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Some of these men may have settled and even become naturalised in Britain but presumably a majority remained citizens or subjects of their country of birth.
The front and back of each index card have been scanned and an online index published so that the records of individual merchant marines can be searched for and located. Two, three or more cards of different dates exist for some individuals.
The cards evolved a little over time, from CR1 to CR2 to CR10 types, and the details recorded changed too. However, the basic format remains the same, as does the core detail of name, year and place of birth, rating, Discharge A Number, ship name and/or official registered number, and date. Some cards give physical descriptions, while others sport a black and white passport-style photograph and signature.
The data is handwritten onto the printed index cards. The handwriting is not always legible and may be faint or contain abbreviations. The place of birth information on the cards will reflect the date at which they were created and the spellings current at that time, sometimes anglicised or misspelt. For example, the Estonian islands of Hiiumaa and Saaremaa often appear as Dagö and Ösel respectively (typically minus their diacritics), being their old Swedish names, and similarly the Saaremaa capital Kuressaare is often given as Arensburg.
This online collection is not a complete record of those sailing on British merchant vessels between the Wars. The majority of cards dating from 1913 to 1921 are known to have been destroyed in 1969. Moreover, a fourth record series at The National Archives (shelf reference BT364) is not being published, on account of data protection and personal privacy concerns. The series BT364 also covers the period 1921 to 1941 and was extracted from the materials that now comprise BT348 to BT350 inclusive. It remains possible that this series, which has also been scanned and indexed, may be released too in due course.
A final note: while some of the individuals contained within these records will have seen service additionally in the Royal Navy at some date, it must be emphasised that the majority would have served only on British merchant vessels and were not in the armed forces.
The Austro-Hungarian, or Habsburg, Empire, also known as the Dual Monarchy, collapsed and fractured during WW1 and new nation states emerged from its ruins, including of course the modest Central European state of Austria itself.
It is difficult to argue against today’s received opinion that empires are bad things and that it is wrong for one people to rule over another. In practice, though, the multinational Austro-Hungarian Empire was largely benign. It is true that from time and time, and perhaps particularly although by no means exclusively in areas under Hungarian rule, emerging nationalisms were suppressed; sometimes this was by show of force, but by the late 19th century the Empire had become largely a bureaucratic organism.
The great elegist of the Empire, Joseph Roth, does not attribute the collapse of Austro-Hungary to the rise of Yugoslav and Romanian and Czechoslovak nationalism, but to the overweening pan-Germanic nationalism which was to have such devastating consequences for Europe.
In his 1938 novel The Emperor’s Tomb (translated by John Hoare, pub Granta, 1999), the character Count Chojnicki — a cipher for Roth himself — prophesied before the outbreak of WW1 that “Austria will perish at the hands of the Nibelungen fantasy”1. “It is the Slovenes, the Poles and Galicians from Ruthenia, the kaftan-clad Jews from Boryslaw2, the horse traders from the Bacska3, the Moslems from Sarajevo, the chestnut roasters from Mostar who sing our national anthem “Gott Erhalte”, while the Germans in the Empire sing German martial and chauvinist tunes. Similarly, the narrator and protagonist, Trotta, writes of the “tragic love which the Crown Lands4 bore to Austria”:
“The gypsies of the Puszta5, the Huzulen6 of Subcarpathia, the Jewish coachmen of Galicia, my own kin the Slovene chestnut roasters of Sipolje, the Swabian7 tobacco growers from the Bacska, the horse breeders of the Steppes, the Osman Sibersna8, the people of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the horse traders from the Hanakei9 in Moravia, the weavers from the Erzgebirge10, the millers and coral dealers of Podolia11: all these were the open-handed providers of Austria.”
After WW1, reflecting on the demise of Austro-Hungary and the mediocrity to which defeated Austria had sunk, Chojnicki bemoans “the fatheads from the Alps and the Sudeten Germans, those cretinous Nibelungen… It was not our Czechs, our Poles, or Ruthenians who betrayed us, but the Germans, only the Germans, at our very heart.”
- Nibelungen: mythological nonsense popularised by Wagner
- Boryslaw: Boryslav, a small town now in Ukraine
- Bacska: properly Bačka, a region now largely in northern Serbia
- Crownlands: provinces of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
- Puszta: the steppes of the Alföld, the great Hungarian plain
- Huzulen: the Hutsuls, a Ruthenian or western Ukrainian people
- Swabian: 18th century German settlers in the Banat in northern Serbia and adjacent Romania
- Osman Sibersna: a phrase not properly translated into English from the original German language die osmanische Sibersna but presumably referring to Ottomans of Bosnia-Herzegovina
- Hanakei: the Moravian people of the Haná region around the town of Olomouc, Czech Republic
- Erzgebirg: the Krušné Hory mountain range, also now in the Czech Republic
- Podolia: here western Podolia is meant, being the region around the city of Ternopil‘, now in Ukraine
A family historian in the English-speaking world searching speculatively for the marriage of an ancestor on an unknown date does not usually consider seasonality; that is, they have no preconceptions as to whether a wedding would or would not have taken place at any particular time of year. Furthermore, one rarely comes across any especially noticeable peaks or troughs in the frequency of marriages across the calendar year. Couples get married all year round, perhaps in the post-WW2 world showing a preference for summer weddings.
In contrast, in most rural societies across Eastern Europe before WW2 and certainly before WW1 when traditional ways of life were still very much intact, there was marked seasonality of marriage. This is reflected in the pages of any volume of a parish marriage register.
One of the two chief factors was the agricultural year. Throughout the growing season and especially during the harvest, farmers, smallholders and peasants were joined in the fields and in the processing of harvested crops by just about every available hand – villagers of both sexes and all ages would be involved and frequently laboured both long days and by moonlight. During this period, there was generally no time for marriage.
The second factor was the religious calendar. In particular, fasting created marriage seasonality. Especially in Eastern Orthodox communities, marriage was an occasion of extended feasting and therefore incompatible with the fasts, during which meat, dairy produce, rich oils and so on were eschewed. There are various individual feast days during the Orthodox calendar, upon which it would be unthinkable for a wedding to be celebrated. But more to the point there were two fasts of great length.
The first fast was the great or holy fast of the seven weeks of Lent. For instance, in the Serbian Orthodox calendar, traditionally the Church celebrated no marriages between Bele Poklade (a moveable feast, “white Shrovetide”, the last Sunday before Lent) and Đurđevdan (St George’s Day, 6th May).
The second fast took place over the 40 days leading up to Christmas. Again, for the Serbian Orthodox calendar, this is the Božićni Post period from 28th November up to Božić, the Orthodox Christmas itself, on 7th January.
Marriages therefore tended to cluster between these two extended feasts. Factoring in the principal months of agricultural activity, this produced a spate of weddings from mid-January to early March, and again from October to late November.
Of course, for other Orthodox societies, the harvest might move a few weeks according to latitude, altitude, climate and other factors. Similarly, fasting at Lent might well take place over fewer weeks. However, the pattern itself remains largely true and produces the same seasonal peaks in marriage.
The Aromanians are one of the most fascinating of the various transnational minority groups in the Balkans. In the context of the region known as Macedonia and now subdivided between the nation states of Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece, this people tends to be called the Vlachs or Koutsovlachs but they are known by, and call themselves by, a number of different names, many geographically determined.
One reason for this is the nature of their traditional way of life, which was transhumance. Transhumant shepherds would migrate seasonally between summer and winter grazing lands, often significant distances apart, following the same droving routes between highland and lowland each year. They paid little regard to political boundaries, unless forced, and therefore the geographical space they occupied was greater than their numerical population might suggest (even though it is thought that there could well have been 500,000 Aromanians across the Balkans on the eve of the First World War).
Individual branches of Aromanians tended to be known by the names of the mountain ranges where they grazed their flocks in summer. For example, on the territory of modern Greece, those Aromanians frequenting the pastures of the Gramos mountain range in summer were known as the Gramostani and those on the Pindus Mountains as the Pindusteani.
By no means all Aromanians in this region practised transhumance. Many in fact were merchants and, indeed, part of the local elite in towns and larger villages, for example in what is now Florina prefecture in northern Greece abutting the border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The whole geographical region of Macedonia was ethnically mixed and polyglot and therefore the Aromanians, whether shepherds or merchants, were likely to speak one or more of the local Slavic vernaculars and/or Greek and Turkish as well as Aromanian. Certainly, the urban Aromanians were Greek-speaking and of the Orthodox religion and increasingly identified themselves with the Greek nation state, although those who did not – and there were not a few of these – emigrated to Romania (particularly to Dobruja) and beyond to Australia and North America.
Despite the processes of assimilation, there are still 20,000 or more Aromanians in Greece, with typical Vlach villages including Nymfaio (known as Nevesca in Aromanian) in Florina prefecture and Perivoli and Pisoderi in Grevena prefecture.
Researching Aromanian family history is likely to be challenging, at least beyond 1913 (when Epirus and Macedonia were incorporated into Greece). Many families were mobile across what are now international frontiers and many adjusted their surnames to suit the prevailing winds of politics (for instance, commonly changing the suffix at the end of their name from -ović to -ov to -ovski). However, with these caveats, Bluebird Research would be delighted to assist you with genealogical research into Vlach ancestors in northern Greece. Please contact us for a free assessment.
On the cusp of the 20th century, Romanian peasants still lived their lives much as their forefathers had done: their customs, their belief systems, their culture and their clothing had evolved gradually over the centuries without any sharp disjunctions from the past.
Families were large, notwithstanding high infant mortality rates. Pregnant women enjoyed no lying-in period but would work up to the very day of giving birth. Traditionally, a baby would be baptised and christened by the end of the week of its birth. The baptism was celebrated in the church without the presence of the parents of the child, the godparents standing in loco parentis during the service. A godparent is known by two names: naş or naşǎ expresses, respectively, the godfather’s and godmother’s relationship to the godchild (the fin, or finǎ), while cumǎtru expresses the godparent’s relation to the parents of the godchild. Marriage between cumǎtri and between the close kin of cumǎtri is prohibited. This even had an effect on attendance figures at a baptism, as all those present and who witnessed the baptism were considered in some way to have become cumǎtri.
Marriage was expected and, while love matches were not so unusual, often arranged between two families, with a family friend acting as go-between, rather than instigated by either partner. A proverb relates how a young man was married by his parents up to the age of 20 years, by his own choice to the age of 25 (although military service could swallow up much of these five years of his life), but from that age on he was in the hands of the old women, the babas.
The period of engagement was short, usually merely the necessary three weeks from betrothal to allow for the wedding banns (strigǎri) to be read out in the parish church on consecutive Sundays. The two sponsors (nuni) played a central role in the marriage ceremony – they were often godparents of one or both of the bride and groom.
A deceased’s body was customarily laid out for three days in his or her own house, before being taken to church for a short service and burial in the adjacent graveyard. Prayers for the dead were then said at three, nine, 20 and 40 days, and then on the anniversary of the death for seven years (this was the customary period of mourning during which, for example, a widow was expected not to re-marry).
If during the days of the Ottoman Empire the churches of the subject Christian peoples could not ring bells to call parishioners to prayer (see this blog), then how did the faithful know when to attend? In the days before pocket watches and public clocks, should we imagine a specially employed person rounding them up, or the pious telling the time by the position of the sun or being blessed with an innate homing instinct that would draw them to the church on time?
One traveller, the physician Adam Neale, writing circa 1805 à propos of Iaşi or Jassy, the capital of the principality of Moldavia, comments in passing:
“During the daytime, the clatter of the wooden mallets beating the tablets at the doors of the Greek churches, calling the people to prayers, the use of bells being prohibited in the Turkish provinces, produces a most disagreeable effect.”
(Travels Through Some Parts of Germany, Poland, Moldavia and Turkey, Longman & Co, 1818)
In this context, the “Greek churches” are the Eastern Orthodox churches of the Romanian and Russian inhabitants of Iaşi.
The “tablet” is the semantron, also variously known as talanton, klepalo (in Bulgarian and Serbian) or toacă (in Romanian). It can still be found, especially in monasteries, and is still used, even when bells are available, perhaps out of habit and tradition, perhaps out of continued assertion of Orthodox freedom of worship long after the centuries of Turkish rule.
Hungary became an equal partner with Austria in the Dual Monarchy following the 1867 Ausgleich, or compromise. Ironically, Hungary, which had been struggling for national self-determination and parity of recognition, then pursued policies which, in trying to consolidate its own nation state, failed to recognise properly the rights of the national minorities within its borders.
A policy of magyarisation was pursued vigorously, with view to welding all regions and peoples into a single nation state, as had been achieved in, for example, France. However, unlike France, Hungary contained within its border almost entire nations, such as the Croat and Slovak, and very significant populations of, for example, Romanians and Serbs living in regions very sparsely populated by Hungarians. The magyarisation project was therefore a doomed enterprise and its measures – for instance, to make Hungarian the exclusive official language of state and the language of instruction in schools, with church services to be held and parish registers kept in Hungarian – quickly aroused resentment and opposition.
The pressure upon non-Magyar Hungarian subjects to assimilate included pressure to change patently non-Hungarian or insufficiently Hungarian surnames. The legal process of change of name was simplified to the submitting of a petition. The fee was reduced from 5 forint to 50 krajcár (half a forint), meaning that poverty could not be pleaded as a good reason to retain one’s true name. These cheap “shilling names” were adopted by many among the professional and business classes. Robert Seton-Walsh, writing in his Racial Problems In Hungary of 1908, states that the “demoralising custom” of change of name “has played havoc with the family history of the Hungarian middle classes; and few countries will supply such a puzzle to the genealogist of the twenty-second century”.
Among the examples he gives:
the Oriental scholar Hermann Bamberger taking the name Ármin Vámbéry; the banker Eierstock taking the name Tőkőlyi; the historian Frankl taking the name Vilmos Fraknói; the ethnologist Hundsdorfer taking the name János Hunfalvy; the painter Lieb taking the name Mihály Munkácsy; the banker Löwenmuth taking the name Báthori; the poet Petrović taking the name Sándor Petőfi; the literary critic Franz Schedel taking the name Ferenc Toldy; and the politician Weinberger taking the name Soma Visontai.
The campaign intensified and was particularly directed at those in official positions, such as local authority civil servants, school teachers, railway employees and post office staff, with a clear implication that those not complying could at the very least not expect promotion within the service. Seton-Walsh also cites a document issued by the Royal Inspector of Schools showing exemplary official changes of name among teachers in Bihar county in 1881, designed to encourage colleagues to follow suit:
August Bruckenthal of Haimagi taking the name Bihari John Modora of Olosig (known as Érolaszi in Hungarian) taking the name Tinodi Nicholas Radovich of Cuzap (Középes in Hungarian) taking the name Keti
Urban German and Jewish Hungarians – who of course were not pushing for their own independent nation state as the Croats and Slovaks were – assimilated more readily than the rural populations of Romanians and Slavs and those family historians with German and Jewish roots from Hungary should be alert to the possibility of a change of name in the nineteenth century whenever research results are not achieved under the expected family name. However, anyone with ancestors from Hungary should be mindful of the change of name campaigns and their possible impact upon their family history research.
Towards the end of the 19th century, Cook County, Illinois, centred on the city of Chicago, had one of the fastest growing populations in USA, due to both transatlantic immigration and migration from other parts of the USA. Today, a significant segment of Cook County’s population has roots in Central and Eastern Europe, including a great many people of Polish descent and smaller but still sizeable groups of other Slavic origin.
A database of the Declarations of Intention completed by immigrants applying for naturalisation is available online here. This covers applications made locally between 1906 and 1929. The database has not yet been completed: somewhere between 150,000 and the total estimated number of 400,000 have been entered online so far. It is therefore worth bookmarking the website and returning to it later if a search is negative.
Importantly, the Declarations give the exact date of birth and the town and country of birth, which are essential when beginning research in the European country of origin.
Note that the place names as shown are subject to variation from the accepted norms: they may differ according to the ethnicity of the applicant, are rendered without diacritic marks and may have been transliterated in different ways from Cyrillic alphabet originals into the Latin script used in English.
Place names are also subject to mis-transcription, which is all but unavoidable when transcribing old handwritten originals. Here are two examples from modern Romania. The Banat city of Timişoara appears as Lemesveer, Temesvar (this is a correct German language spelling), Temisvar, Ternesvar, Timisoana etc; while the Moldavian university town of Iaşi shows up as Gassi, Iassy, Jasse, Jassy (a correct German and Yiddish form of its name), Tassi, Yassy, Yoss etc. The best advice is simply to proceed with care and not to use too many search terms to start with – you can always narrow down results by redefining your search later.
If searching by place, you should also consider the political geography of the period 1906 to 1929, which saw great change either side of the Great War. For example, a Croatian ancestor is most likely to have been residing in the Hungarian sphere of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the years before the War, and could therefore appear with Austria or Hungary against his or her name. After the War, the Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes was created, later to become known as Yugoslavia. Of course, a Croat nationalist might simply state that he or she was born in Croatia irrespective of the actual political borders at the time of their birth, emigration or application for naturalisation. Finally, do not forget that a Croat ancestor might not have been living within the modern borders of Croatia at all, but in Bosnia or Hungary proper or Serbia.
Analysis of the Croats who applied for naturalisation in Cook County offers a fascinating picture of their position in society at that date. Of the 820 entries returned by the search engine with Croatia as the recorded country of origin, 367 simply described themselves as labourers. Likewise, there are 67 machinists and many whose jobs – blacksmith, boilermaker, crane operator etc – are likely to have meant that they were either industrial factory hands or working in construction. However, there are good numbers of bakers, craftsmen in wood (cabinet makers, wood turners etc) and so on, and a number of less expected occupations – five chauffeurs, 16 firemen, nine saloon keepers, as well as a solitary iceman, pastor, reporter and undertaker.
As one would expect, most of the applicants came from Zagreb, which tends to appear in the database under its former name Agram. Other places with multiple entries include Čanak, Hreljin, Jaska, Luka, Petrinja, Plešivica, Ramljane, Samobor and Veliko Trgovište. Some of these places are small and the number of immigrants suggests chain migration: that is, one villager emigrating to Chicago, writing back home, and friends and family then following suit. This certainly seems to be true of Čanak, for example, where four of the eight named applicants are called Golić and two Prša (their names anglicised to Golich and Prsha in the absence of diacritical marks). Very few applicants for naturalisation appear to have come from the Dalmatian coast.
Finally, looking at the dates of birth of the 820 Croatian immigrants in Cook County, 33 were born in the 1860s, 109 in the 1870s, 389 in the 1880s, 271 in the 1890s and 16 in the 20th century. Partly this reflects the coverage period (application made from 1906 to 1929) but it also shows a clear upward trend of immigration towards the end of the 19th century.
Beyond the borders of modern Greece, throughout Eastern and South-eastern Europe, and especially in Romania, there are families with Greek ancestry. They may no longer bear distinctively Greek names, or be able to speak or read Greek, although some communities are still very much identifiably and consciously Greek. There are two related sources of these family histories, both dating back to the centuries of Ottoman rule.
Firstly, there are the Black Sea or Pontic Greeks, who spread from Constantinople around the Anatolian seaboard and to all ports around the coast of what are today Bulgaria, Romania, Ukraine, Russia, Abkhazia, Georgia and, of course, Turkey. These Greeks were bankers, merchants, ship owners and the like, and often formed (along with Armenians and Jews) the core of the middle class in the towns in which they settled. Naturally, there was also a Greek working class, often making a living as sailors and fishermen. In Romania, there are still coherent albeit dwindling Greek communities in the capital Bucharest and in the ports and towns of the Danube delta such as Constanţa, Galaţi and Sulina.
Secondly, there are the so-called Phanariotes, Greeks from the historic Phanar district of Constantinople (today Fener in Istanbul) who rose to influential positions in the administration of the Ottoman Empire and especially in its Danubian Principalities, the precursor of modern Romania. Here, the Greeks were not only financiers, traders and innkeepers but also often the local rulers and landowners. They married into and purchased estates from the native Romanian ruling class (the boyars). Many assimilated over time, so that the Phanariotes became more of a caste than an ethnic group, including families with clearly Albanian, Italian and Romanian as well as Greek roots. While some family surnames such as Mavrocordatos and Ypsilantis still bespeak Greek origins, others do not and, of course, this is doubly true of female lines of descent.
Bluebird Research is pleased to offer family history research services in all parts of Romania and would welcome the opportunity to assist you in investigating your family tree.
In 1989, the writer Gregor von Rezzori returned to the place of his birth for the first time since 1936.
He had been born into the elite caste of the pre-WW1 Austro-Hungarian civil service, in which his father served as a supervisor and administrator of the Romanian Orthodox Church estates and monasteries in Bukovina. In the remodelled post-War world, Romania acquired Bukovina and the former Austrian governing class there became déclassé. The von Rezzori family was among the minority which stayed on, residing in Czernowitz (now officially Cernăuţi), the capital of Bukovina, where Gregor himself had been born in 1914 and lived as a boy. Although he attended a boarding school in Braşov (Kronstadt) in Transylvania, and dwelt subsequently in Vienna, Bucharest, Berlin and Firenze, he continued to think of himself as a Czernowitzer.
Of course, much had happened in the intervening 50 years before von Rezzori returned to his birthplace, now called Chernivtsi. Bukovina had been bisected in 1940. Its top half, including Cernăuţi, was ceded by Romania to the Soviet Union and the transfer of territory was confirmed after the War. From that date, Chernivtsi ceased to be a provincial capital and became a town of little moment on the periphery of Ukraine.
To his surprise, upon his return von Rezzori finds the city largely intact – of major landmarks, only the synagogue had been destroyed, inevitably razed by the Nazis during their occupation in 1941 – and in good repair. There was the inevitable and ubiquitous urban sprawl of high-rise apartment blocks where once the city had almost imperceptibly merged into the surrounding countryside. What appeared to von Rezzori to have changed was the character of the city:
“My hometown gained world fame as the melting pot for dozens of ethnic groups, languages, creeds, temperaments and customs… Nothing could be detected now of the restlessly vivacious, cynically bold and melancholically sceptical spirit that had distinguished the children of this town and made them known and famous throughout the world as Czernowitzers… the spirit of Czernowitz was due to the unique propinquity and juxtaposition of the Bukovina’s multiplicity of populations” (The Snows of Yesteryear, trans HF Broch de Rothermann, New York Review Books, 2009).
Czernowitz has been “cleansed of its hodgepodge of Swabian Germans, Romanians, Poles, Jews, Prussians, Slovaks and Armenians… The motley ethnic variegation had been replaced by a homogeneous breed of people…. These were Ukrainians. In the old days we called them Ruthenians, one of the many minorities in a place where there was no majority”.
Of course, von Rezzori views Chernivtsi through eyes that might not distinguish between a local Ukrainian with deep Bukovina roots and a modern Hutsul, or between western Ukrainians and the Soviet era immigrants from central and eastern Ukraine foreign to Bukovina. However, the great diversity of the city, the outcome of centuries of organic growth and the occasional jolts of conflict, has gone. Like L’viv, like Vilnius, like other cities of the borders and contact zones of Eastern Europe, Chernivtsi lost something irreplaceable during the history of the 20th century.
The Greek Catholic, or Uniate, Church was one of many Christian faiths thriving in pre-Communist Romania, along side the Lutheran (followed by the Saxons of Transylvania), the Calvinist (with its mostly Hungarian adherents), the Roman Catholic (practised by the Swabians, for instance) and, of course, the majority Romanian Orthodox Church.
Following the 1698 Habsburg conquest, most Romanians in Transylvania had converted to Greek Catholicism by 1700. From 1737, the Metropolitan was located at Blaj, which developed into a centre of learning and Romanian nationalism and, accordingly, was nicknamed Little Rome (just as, for other reasons, Timişoara was Little Vienna and Bucureşti was Little Paris).
According to the December 1930 Romanian census, 31% of the population of Transylvania was Greek Catholic (second only to the 65% in Maramureş, where the Ukrainians, or Ruthenians, were also Uniate). In all, upwards of 1.5 million citizens of Romania were Greek Catholics in the 1930s.
However, the Communist state abolished the Greek Catholic Church in Romania on its 250th anniversary in October 1948 and its congregations were compulsorily converted to the Orthodox Church by decree. Those bishops and priests who declined conversion were imprisoned (as were, of course, many of the inter-War intelligentsia, politicians, army officers and the chiaburi – the peasantry who opposed enforced collectivisation and were Romania’s equivalent of Soviet Russia’s kulaks – and others who were regarded as counter-revolutionary).
The Communist state was officially and in some ways militantly atheist but, in the words of Lucian Boia, “Communism and Orthodoxy… arrived at a modus vivendi” (Romania, Reaktion Books, 2001). As long as the Orthodox Church did not interfere in politics, it was tolerated and its churches and seminaries stayed open. In fact, baptism and burial by Orthodox rite continued throughout the years of Communism, even among the families of Party members, who could discreetly practise their religion as long it was a matter of private conscience and they remained outwardly atheist.
The Orthodox Church’s accommodation with the state also meant that it had to effectively countenance the destruction of historic church and monastery buildings where this was deemed necessary, especially during the periods of “systematisation”: from 1974-80 and again from 1984-86, this policy of ruthless urbanisation of towns and villages demolished old quarters and removed their inhabitants to jerry-built high-rises and blocks of flats.
With the collapse of Communism, the Greek Catholic Church was re-established in 1989 and some of its places of worship have been reclaimed by their congregations. However, numbers of Greek Catholics remain much diminished compared to their pre-WW2 peak: 191,000, or 0.9%, nationwide, according to the 2002 census, with a visible presence mainly in the north-western judeţe or counties of Cluj, Maramureş and Satu Mare.
For family history research in Romania, this means that Greek Catholic kin may have converted to Orthodoxy for the 40 or so years from 1948 to 1989, and indeed might not have returned to their original faith; others, of course, will have ceased to believe altogether. Vital records of the post-War era are officially closed, although it is quite possible that some which remain at individual churches, especially in rural areas, will be opened by a sympathetic priest to enquirers if he is satisfied that the request is harmless.
During the 1920s and ‘30s, the Romanian countryside drew romantic adventurers, writers, ethnographers and musicologists from Western and Central Europe, fascinated by “the last peasants”. This fascination with a way of life tied to the land and largely lost elsewhere in Europe continues today – for instance, an excellent and non-patronising three-part documentary entitled The Last Peasants was made in 2003 about the villagers of Budeşti in the Maramureş region.
Not all portraits of the Romanian peasant avoid condescension and romanticisation. If you are interested in the subject and especially if you have Romanian ancestors, one writer worth reading about Romania in the inter-War period is Donald Hall, whose Romanian Furrow (republished by Bene Factum, 2007) was written in 1933 and provides an accessible and credible snapshot in time. Hall spent almost a year in the country, initially living among peasants in the village of Morăşti between Curtea de Argeş and Călimăneşti in the region of Muntenia. There he learnt the language and spent the summer working along side the family with which he was lodging.
After the harvest, Hall moved on to the Sibiu area of Ardeal (known as Erdély in Hungary and as Transylvania elsewhere outside Romania). There, first when visiting Poiana Sibiului and then in other places, he encountered villagers who spoke American. About 100,000 Transylvanian Romanians had emigrated to cities such as Cleveland OH and Chicago IL in USA during the late 19th century and early 20th century during the years of Hungarian rule in Ardeal. After the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, Ardeal was ceded to Romania and thus reunited with the “Old Kingdom” centred upon the core provinces of Wallachia and Moldavia. As a result, thousands of Romanians returned from USA. Men typically came back first, to test the waters, and, once satisfied that return migration was the right thing, their wives and children followed, just as the men folk had often emigrated to the States in advance of their families.
Of course, many more remained in USA. Reading Hall or one of the other inter-War writers on Romania, it is hard to imagine the peasants of Wallachia or Maramureş, whose lives had been inseparable from their land and the cycle of the seasons, finding themselves working and adjusting to life in the factories of Detroit or New York.
Data protection and personal privacy concerns dominate birth, marriage and death record access regimes throughout Europe. Records of the modern era – variously defined as, for example, the last 100 years, or 75 years – are generally closed other than to the persons concerned, their immediate family or their attorneys. These records are usually retained locally in municipal register offices. Records which pre-date the threshold are generally on more open access and tend to be held in national or regional archives.
This is true of Romania, too, a country which has a reputation for not being especially easy terrain for family history research. There is a 100-year closure rule for civil birth, marriage and death records. This is enforced in cities and towns; in villages and the countryside, the situation is sometimes more relaxed and registrars may be sympathetic to the plight of a family historian who needs records from the restricted era in order to be able to advance his or her research into the earlier open access era of records. If actual birth, marriage and death certificates are required for legal purposes by a person outside the country, these are best obtained via a Romanian notary, who is entitled to copies of closed records upon application.
There should be two copies of civil registers, the original with local district registry (at which actual life events are recorded) and a copy lodged periodically with the county town.
Some records under 100 years of age have been sent, for various reasons, to Romanian state archives, which are arranged at judeţ (county) level, and which is where records over 100 years old should be. Records held in these archives should be open and accessible. However, in a few areas there is a residual fear of higher authority dating to Communist times. Archivists may be afraid to grant access, fearing that in so doing they may open themselves up to later criticism from those higher up the hierarchy should the records be put to some purpose which is seen to reflect badly upon the archives, the state or the nation. In this regard, it is worth noting that genealogy does not have a high profile in Romania and is not a recognised recreational pursuit, and this goes part way to explaining the suspicion which family history researchers and their requests are sometimes regarded.
Ecclesiastical registers (baptism, marriage and burial) were created as working originals and annual copies (bishops’ transcripts). Therefore there is a double chance of finding a surviving copy and accessing it: one copy may be with the parish church, the other may be with an archive. Additionally, registers under 100 years of age may still be with the church, so if the incumbent of the parish is co-operative, it may be possible to use church registers to circumvent the 100-year rule. The older the records, the more favourably a priest is likely to regard a request to view and copy them. It may of course be necessary to make a donation to the church in exchange for this privilege.
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.