How did I become a fiercer nationalist than Ceauşescu himself?
I can thank it to János Bak and, of course, to myself. It happened that in 1999 János turned 70, his friends and colleagues under the aegis of the Department of Medieval Studies of The Central European University decided to publish a Festschrift for this special occasion. As one of János’s old friends I was privileged to be among the contributors of the volume. I wrote an essay on Temesvár, an important town located in the southeastern part of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. This town, due to the dismemberment of the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy following World War I, became a part of modern Romania under the name Timişoara. Since I wrote about a medieval Hungarian town, I used its Hungarian name. However, in consideration to the well known sensitivities surrounding place-names, the very first footnote of my essay provided its modern Romanian name. Throughout the narrative, I followed the practice of giving first the modern Romanian name of the localities mentioned and, then in brackets, the Hungarian one. I thought this slight inconsistency a reasonable strategy to navigate through the minefield of variant place-names, shifting political boundaries, and skin-deep nationalist sentiments – a witch’s brew for any historian. After the Festschrift had been published I was astonished to read that a reviewer of the volume, a young Romanian researcher living in the USA, accused me of systematically avoiding any mention the current name of Temesvár. To top it all, he stated that I even listed “Turnu Severin as Drobeta, although the ancient name was never used during the Middle Ages, and was attached to the current name only as a result of the fiercely nationalistic policies of the communist dictator Nicolae Ceauşescu.” This criticism may sound fair, but what about reality? In 2000 (and several times since) I travelled to the principal city of Transylvania: Cluj/Kolozsvár/Clausenburg. At the railroad station a big sign was laughing at me: ‘Cluj-Napoca’. And it turns out that Drobeta-Turnu Severin remains the official name of that city too. It seems that, at the end, neither I nor my reviewer escaped the pitfalls of geography and nationalism. Historians beware, or is Ceauşescu still alive?
IstvÁn Petrovics
