Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland 9781789206357

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Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

Austrian and Habsburg Studies

General Editor: Howard Louthan, Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota Before 1918, Austria and the Habsburg lands constituted an expansive multinational and multiethnic empire, the second largest state in Europe and a key site for cultural and intellectual developments across the continent. At the turn of the twentieth century, the region gave birth to modern psychology, philosophy, economics and music, and since then has played an important mediating role between Western and Eastern Europe, today participating as a critical member of the European Union. The volumes in this series address specific themes and questions around the history, culture, politics, social and economic experience of Austria, the Habsburg Empire and its successor states in Central and Eastern Europe. Recent volumes: Volume 27 Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries: The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland Ágoston Berecz Volume 26 Men under Fire: Motivation, Morale and Masculinity among Czech Soldiers in the Great War, 1914–1918 Jiří Hutečka Volume 25 Nationalism Revisited: Austrian Social Closure from Romanticism to the Digital Age Christian Karner Volume 24 Entangled Entertainers: Jews and Popular Culture in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna Klaus Hödl Volume 23 Comical Modernity: Popular Humour and the Transformation of Urban Space in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna Heidi Hakkarainen

Volume 22 Embers of Empire: Continuity and Rupture in the Habsburg Successor States after 1918 Edited by Paul Miller and Claire Morelon Volume 21 The Art of Resistance: Cultural Protest against the Austrian Far Right in the Early TwentyFirst Century Allyson Fiddler Volume 20 The Monumental Nation: Magyar Nationalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-de-siècle Hungary Bálint Varga Volume 19 Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire Ulrich E. Bach Volume 18 Sacrifice and Rebirth: The Legacy of the Last Habsburg War Edited by Mark Cornwall and John Paul Newman

For a full volume listing, please see the series page on our website: http://berghahnbooks.com/series/austrian-habsburg-studies.

Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries The Entangled Nationalization of Names and Naming in a Late Habsburg Borderland

d Ágoston Berecz

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

First published in 2020 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com © 2020 Ágoston Berecz All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Berecz, Ágoston, author. Title: Empty signs, historical imaginaries : the entangled nationalization of names and naming in a late Habsburg borderland / Ágoston Berecz. Description: First edition. | New York : Berghahn Books, 2020. | Series: Austrian and Habsburg studies ; vol 27 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019048164 (print) | LCCN 2019048165 (ebook) | ISBN 9781789206340 (hardback) | ISBN 9781789206357 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Names, Personal--Hungary. | Names, Personal--Political aspects--Hungary. | Names, Geographical--Hungary. | Names, Geographical--Political aspects--Hungary. | Names, Hungarian. | Names, Romanian. Classification: LCC CS2910 .B47 2020 (print) | LCC CS2910 (ebook) | DDC 929.4/209439--dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048164 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019048165 British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78920-634-0 hardback ISBN 978-1-78920-635-7 ebook

Lenkének, Bertának e a Carla

Contents

d List of Illustrations viii Acknowledgements x Notes on Text xi Introduction 1 Part I. Peasants 1. Under Ancestral Masks: Name-Giving Nationalized 2. Family Names on the Ground 3. Place Names and Etymologies from Below

25 54 71

Part II. Nationalisms 4. Faces of the Self-Other: Contact-Influenced Family Names in Discourse and Practice 5. Dimensions of Family-Name Magyarization 6. Signposts over the Land

89 108 126

Part III. The State 7. Floreas into Virágs: State Regulation of First Names 8. The Most Correct Ways to Spell One’s Name 9. The Grand Toponymic Manoeuvre

159 177 193

Conclusions 259 Appendix A. Tables 274 Appendix B. Place-Name Index 279 Bibliography 291 Index 329

Illustrations

d Maps 1.1 Percentage of Latinate names among Romanian male students, by areas. 35 5.1 Spatial distribution of Magyarization of Romanian family names by non-public employees and people of unknown occupations. 117 Illustrations 1.1 The shopfront of Dimitrie Proca’s grocery in bilingual Satulung/ Hosszúfalu (Brassó County), early twentieth century. 45 9.1 The first issue of the weekly Keveváraer (formerly Temes-Kubiner) Wochenblatt after the place was renamed from Temes-Kubin to Kevevára. 234 Figures 1.1 The percentage of Latinate first names among Romanian students in time series, by family background. 34 1.2 Hungarian historical and pagan names among Calvinist and Unitarian students in time series, by family background. 39 1.3 First names of Transylvanian Saxon students, by family background. 42 5.1 Magyarization of Romanian family names per year. 113 5.2 Residential profile of the category of other and unknown occupations. 116 Tables 0.1 Basic linguistic attraction-dependency model of the territory according to the 1880 census. 1.1 Trends of first names in Romanian girls’ civil schools. 3.1 Distribution of the cross-linguistic variation of settlement names by types in four Cisleithanian crownlands. 3.2 Vernacular place-name etymologies embedded in dialogues.

13 37 75 80

Illustrations  |  ix

5.1 Magyarizers of Romanian family names without confirmed public employees – their distribution across occupational and ethnoconfessional categories. 9.1 The count of Magyarized locality names and other locality name changes (disambiguations) by county. A.1 Divergent standardized vs local endonyms. A.2 Unrelated high and low endonyms. A.3 A selection from Nem-magyar keresztnevek jegyzéke [List of nonHungarian first names]: Romanian names and their Hungarian equivalents, by categories.

115 213 274 275 276

Acknowledgements

d My first word of gratitude goes to those who have read all or parts of the manuscript in its various incarnations and have commented on it: Balázs Trencsényi, Maciej Janowski, Tomasz Kamusella, Judit Pál, Robert Nemes, Monika Baár, Christian Karner and Pieter Judson. I spent parts of the research and writing period in Bucharest and Munich as an International Fellow in New Europe College, in Florence as a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute, and in Leiden on a Doctoral Research Support Grant from Central European University. Further thanks are due to Victor Karády, Luminița Dumănescu and Tamás Farkas for permission to access and use their large research databases, to Nigel Smith and Michael Gnat for polishing my English, to Zsombor Bartos-Elekes for useful suggestions, to the late Mihály Hajdú for his copy of András Mező’s Adatok, to Nándor Bárdi and Gábor Egry for references on interwar Transylvania, to Piotr Kisiel and Justyna Walkowiak for access to their unpublished manuscripts, to Adela Hîncu for her native Romanian expertise, to Ádám Kolozsi and Lily Iuga for hard-to-find material, to Viktor Lagutov for introducing me to QGIS, and, last but not least, to Susan Gal and Irina Marin for warm encouragement. Finally, I recognize the staff of the Széchényi Library of Budapest, the Central University Library of Cluj, the Academy Library of Bucharest and the Ostlesesaal of the Bavarian State Library in Munich, who humoured my very numerous, unusual and seemingly incoherent requests without a word. All disclaimers apply.

Notes on Text

d It is fitting to add to a book on names a few clarifications about my own use of names. I have tried to restore the Romanian names of people who appear under Hungarian forms in the sources, but were to all appearances Romanian. This has led to disputable results at times, but even these I found preferable to keeping the Hungarian name forms. A few people with known double loyalties will figure under double names like ‘Grigore Moldovan/Moldován Gergely’. Places have been referred to by all their relevant names at their first occurrence, and later on by the names as used by the largest local linguistic group at the time. If the largest group was not the same in 1880 as in 1910 (the first and the last censuses of the era to ask about mother tongue), I have made decisions by comparing their relative shares in the total population. The names of the counties as existed after 1876, however, will appear in Hungarian. Due to changes of Hungarian locality names in the 1900s and Romanian ones after 1920, as described in Chapter 10, some names that I have used are not found on modern maps. A place-name index in Appendix B, containing all important name variants and cross-references from the present-day Romanian names, will help to locate them.

Administrative divisions before 1867, with the natural features and historical/ ethnographic regions mentioned in the book. Map created by the author and Chris Chappell.

Counties as of 1881–1914, with the towns and cities mentioned in the book. Map created by the author and Chris Chappell.

Introduction

d In September 1908, members of the local council came together for an extraordinary meeting in Mehadia, a market town in the south-eastern corner of thenHungary’s Banat region. They arrived in a distressed mood – the sole item on their agenda alarmed as much as it baffled them. In a letter from the Budapest Ministry of the Interior, which the town secretary read out in an improvised Romanian translation, they were asked whether they consented to have their town renamed to the more Hungarian-sounding Miháldvára, a name that nobody present had even heard of before. Ominously, attached to the letter was an expert judgement by a competent national body they had similarly never heard of, which praised Miháldvára as being closer to Miháld, the original medieval name. For thirtyfive years, since the Habsburg Military Frontier was dissolved and they came under Hungarian rule, their secretaries had been increasingly pressured to do the paperwork in Hungarian, but no authority had found a problem with their name as it also appeared in Hungarian documents. All this would have sounded like a childish prank to them, had it not been deadly serious. The Orthodox archpriest, the spiritual father of a large majority of locals, came prepared with an elaborate and carefully worded plea in defence of the existing name, compiled from all relevant Romanian and Hungarian books he found in his rectory. Miháld, he contended, while certainly the historical Hungarian name, was far from being the original. According to him, the place had been founded by the Roman army in the first century ad, and had, since then, only borne the name Miháld for two and a half centuries, whereas the current name harked back to the Roman one. He further reminded the Budapest board of the eighteenth-century battles against the Ottomans that had brought the town perpetual fame, and concluded that ‘we have no right to change this name since it does not belong to us, but to the past and the future’. Some on the council advised caution, suggesting that their voice could not alter a decision already taken and that defiance could easily get them in trouble with the district administrator. Another party pushed for taking a firm stand against the name change. Should they agree to this nonsense with many as, they warned, it would expose them to the ridicule of the entire valley. The latter

2  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

opinion finally carried the day, and the quorum unanimously voted to minute the priest’s detailed rebuttal and send a Hungarian transcript to Budapest. This turned out to be an unusually bold move. Similar decisions were sent out by the hundreds to majority Romanian local governments in those months, and while most of them objected to the idea of a name change, few dared to lecture the experts on the Communal Registry Board, mandated by an 1898 law to revise Hungary’s settlement names, on history.1 At this point in the story, pragmatic considerations unexpectedly came to the help of locals. The county leadership weighed in in favour of keeping the name unchanged, with an acute accent on the first a as a nod to Hungarian pronunciation. They pointed out that it was still widely used for neighbouring Herkulesbad/Herkulesfürdő/Băile Herculane, contemporary Hungary’s only spa resort of international standing, and they expressed fear that a name change would jeopardize the brand. This chimed in with the opinion of the National Archives and with that of one board member in the first round, and the board finally overturned its previous decision. This turn of events, however, owed nothing to the confident response of the Mehadia council, and by no means did the board acknowledge the historical statements laid out in it. Most protests were swept off the table without further ado, and the county soon saw a record number of name changes, with 255 out of its 363 settlement names being revised or replaced. The council meeting may not have happened in the exact way I have described; it seems likely, however, that the councilmen were unaware of the flurry of learned polemics surrounding the name of their hometown. At the heart of the dispute there was either a strange coincidence or a remote folk etymology – on one hand, the point marked Admediā on the so-called Peutinger Map, the most complete road map of the late Roman Empire, matched the position of modern Mehadia to a tee; and on the other, the settlement and its fortress appeared under the meaningful Hungarian name Mihald (Hun. Mihály ‘Michael’ + -d suffix) in documents between the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, then part of the Kingdom of Hungary.2 Behind these two possible etymologies, there lay two diametrically opposed visions of history. If the modern place name (first occurrence in 1614) went back to the Latin Admediā, that was understood to support the idea of unbroken Romance-speaking settlement and to justify the claim that the three million Romanians of Hungary made up an indigenous entity. Romanian nationalists in Hungary quoted this etymology as the single most certain toponymic proof of Romance continuity within the Carpathians, and the response of the Mehadia council also took it as a basis. Whereas if Miháld was the original form, possibly dating from the first centuries after the Hungarian conquest, then that made the modern Romanian population ‘latecomers’ in comparison to the state nation.

Introduction  |  3

Both etymologies were established around the same time, after the 1848–49 revolution had showed the mobilizing power that antagonistic national movements could muster, which claimed the same territories for their homelands. In 1826–27, the local Romanian archpriest Nicolae Stoica still saw the legacy of a South Slavic međa ‘border’ behind the place name.3 Soon after its inception, comparative linguistics cast a shadow of doubt over the Latin etymology, because a regular sound change would have produced Romanian miază out of Latin Media (as it did in the words miazăzi ‘noon’ and miazănoapte ‘midnight’). It was rejected on this ground by the leading Romanian philologist Bogdan Petriceicu-Hașdeu,4 while the German pioneer of Romanian dialectology Gustav Weigand allegedly scoffed at it as ‘so crass a dilettantism that I don’t waste words on it’.5 It was upheld by the Romanian historian Xenopol, however, in an influential French-language defence of Romanian continuity.6 He thought to solve the problem by a supposed development Ad Mediam > Meaddiam, which his fellow-Moldavian Ioan Nădejde dismissed as a ‘salto mortale’.7 For good measure, the Romanian Orthodox seminary professor Iosif Bălan insisted on deriving the name from Slavic, but from meha ‘fly’ instead of međa,8 while Dimitrie Dan, a Romanian Orthodox priest from the Bukovina, contended for a Hungarian etymology from *Méhed (Hun. méh ‘bee’), linking the name to the neighbouring Mehedinți County of then-Romania, and presenting various historical t­ estimonies that described the area as a bee-keeping paradise.9 This book is not about the correct etymologies, and etymological scholarship will in general play an accidental role in it. Instead, it raises questions such as how nineteenth-century nationalists turned personal and place names into powerful sites of memory; how and to what effect they popularized the resulting new meanings and uses among the populace at large; and how a nationalizing state elite sought to reshape the names in its reach to reflect its ideals. It combines three ambitions. To begin with, it navigates the rich but difficult subject of Hungary’s nationality policies and national conflicts between the Compromise of 1867 and the First World War – a period referred to as Dualism after the broad Hungarian autonomy within the empire. In this respect, it is a sequel to my book The Politics of Early Language Teaching, which explored how the Hungarian state language was taught to native Romanian and German children.10 Sharing the earlier study’s temporal and spatial framework, it also uses many of the same sources. After various attempts at direct governance of the Hungarian lands, which took up most of the eighteen years since the quelling of the 1848–49 revolution, foreign policy setbacks led Francis Joseph to negotiate a deal with Ferenc Deák and Gyula Andrássy, which granted Hungary far-reaching autonomy. The new constitutional framework was looser than a federal link and tighter than a personal union, but as its exact terms were not fixed and half of the Magyar political elite rejected it, the relationship of Austria and Hungary remained the main divisive factor in Hungarian politics for the next fifty years.11 Magyar

4  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

Forty-eightists, who wished to loosen the ties with Austria, competed with Sixtysevenists, who governed for most of the period. New political forces could only come to power after dropping those planks of their platform that contested the grounds of the system – this happened most notably for the miscellaneous coalition of opposition forces that won the 1905 elections but was not allowed to form a government until its leaders had struck a bargain with Francis Joseph the following year. Sixty-sevenist Liberals nevertheless joined in a chorus with the forty-eightist Independentists and other opponents of their rule, waxing lyrical about the political genius of Magyars during the Millennial Celebrations of 1896. Ethnic minority politicians, on the other hand, opposed not just the status quo, but all forms of a Hungarian nation-state. Romanian nationalist politicians from Transylvania boycotted elections until the 1900s to protest annexation to Hungary, while their peers in Hungary writ small mostly advocated federalist designs. The territory studied encompasses historical Transylvania together with its neighbouring counties to the West, excluding Máramaros, but including Temes according to the administrative division instituted in 1876. These lands had belonged to the independent Kingdom of Hungary until the sixteenth century but had been governed separately for 350 years, to be reunited only as a consequence of the 1867 Compromise. Transylvania, the eastern part of the area, was briefly merged with Hungary in 1848 and then, more enduringly, in 1867. The Transylvanian regiments of the Habsburg Military Frontier were dissolved in 1851, but those along the southern strip of the Banat only in 1873, which were then similarly integrated into Dualist Hungary. As will be shown more in detail below, slightly more than half of the area’s population was made up of native Romanians, while the rest were Magyars and various German-speakers – mainly Protestant Transylvanian Saxons in the East, and Catholic Swabians in the West. The borders running along the Carpathians separated the majority Romanian dwellers, who will receive the most attention in this book, from their kin state, which took the name Kingdom of Romania almost in lockstep with the creation of the Dual Monarchy. Today, the area studied occupies the Western half of Romania, apart from its westernmost fringe, which belongs to Hungary and Serbia. If the area so circumscribed was not seen as one region by anyone at the time, it nonetheless approximates the expansion of Romanian language in contemporary Hungary, and through it the contested space over which Romanian, Magyar/Hungarian and, in some respects, German nationalisms clashed, while its internal diversity can be turned into an advantage through making internal comparisons. Such demarcation has been primarily imposed by my linguistic deficiencies and prior knowledge, but I could also hardly stretch the data mining and crunching that I perform here to an even larger or more complex piece of land. The exact range – as operationalized for quantitative purposes – was defined

Introduction  |  5

by county boundaries, since most statistical data are available on the county level, but I will also draw in relevant Romanian examples from outside of the area. Questions reflecting more recent understanding – such as in what ways and avatars Hungarian state nationalism and the national movements challenging it reached out to their claimed constituencies; how the millions of Hungarian subjects reacted to and interpreted these rival national programmes and the related historical-political imageries; how they became split along them or manoeuvred between them – remain very much an uncharted land for today’s otherwise lively historiography of the Late Habsburg Empire. This research gap is particularly glaring because some of the most innovative work on nineteenth-century nationalism has come from researchers working on the contemporary Austrian lands. But the situation is worse than that, as most Hungarian state policies that were meant as nationalizing at the time fare not much better in historiography and have not been studied anywhere near adequately or sufficiently. In the absence of an accurate overview of the relevant legislation and of policy designs written in a widely accessible language, to say nothing about archival-based studies of implementation in any language, international scholars rightly feel unnerved by the contradictory frustrated claims and interpretations that militant national historiographies in the successor states continue to mount, often perpetuating panels of contemporary political propaganda and confusing discourses for policy designs, legislation for enforcement and for outcomes. When hard pressed to include Hungary in bigger narratives, historians are not to blame if they just reiterate a few formulaic points, cautiously trying to cut back to size claims on both sides that exude hyperbole or apologetics. An earlier mood among historians tended to see a particularly ruthless version of national oppression in Dualist Hungary’s Magyarizing policies, which the Polish-Silesian historian Józef Chlebowczyk described pointedly as the ‘PrussoMagyar model of nationality policy’.12 This characterization has lost much of its purchase in recent decades, if for no other reason than that the very idea of national oppression fell into disrepute; if there were no conscious nationals in the first place, who then should be regarded as victims of the alleged national oppression or attempted alienation? Instead, the few scholars from outside the region who research these policies today usually interpret them as typical for nineteenth-century nation building.13 I cannot fully share this flattening perspective. Dualist Hungary certainly was singular in at least one key respect, namely the sheer number of its citizens claimed by other self-styled nation-states or strong national movements who also did not qualify as natural constituents of the Hungarian political nation by the same shibboleths of ethnic nationalism acclaimed by Magyar elites. That the first point lent support to the argument touting Magyarizing policies as preventive measures did not make the Kingdom of Hungary special in the European context, but the second one caused it evermore serious legitimacy troubles in so far as

6  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

it insisted on figuring itself as a nation-state. If anything, the Hungarian example instructs us not so much about how nation building worked on the European peripheries, but about the limits to state nationalist ventures. True, Hungarian cultural nationalism held a powerful appeal to the domestic non-Magyar middle classes before as much as after 1867  – witness tens of thousands of German-speaking urban families consciously transforming themselves into Magyars. In addition, Dualist Hungary possessed all the trappings of state power necessary to carry out independent nation-building policies, putting it at odds with a decentralized, federal Austria. It had its separate legal system, including a separate Hungarian citizenship law, its own parliament, judiciary and executive branch. Hungarian governments levied taxes, they had full latitude over educational matters, they oversaw the workings of county and local governments, they could withhold registration from minority associations and easily found ways to allocate funds to Magyar nationalist ones such as the Transylvanian EMKE, they could ban rallies, they could seize journals and prevent their circulation, they owned most of the railway network and they kept the civil registry after 1894. The military was the only relevant instrument of power beyond their control, although a small separate Hungarian army did exist. Apart from the lack of patriotic and linguistic training that young men underwent in other fledgling nation-states, this was all the more a thorn in the side of Magyar politicians, as the plural linguistic policies of the Common Army made those recruits enlisted from minority areas of Hungary more aware of the worth of their home languages. If nationalizing policies that worked in other European states did not and maybe could not work in Hungary, that was, as becomes clear from the above, not so much because of any deficit of sovereignty. Hungarian state agencies and their non-state allies already faced a thorny problem, not necessarily encountered in other European lands, when trying to address rural people especially; not only did half the Hungarian population speak languages completely unrelated to Hungarian, but just a tiny fragment of them also understood the state language. Moreover, social control over rural minority groups was traditionally exercised by ethnic churches and formerly privileged institutions, which also reigned over the circuits of social communication. In the narrower area, cities were disproportionately Hungarian-speaking, and for that reason Magyar pundits projected them as hubs of Magyarization; but industrial development remained timid, and most arrivals from the countryside were themselves Hungarian-speakers. At least in the short and middle run, attempts by the Hungarian state to appear as anything other than a culturally alien force to its non-Magyar rural citizens and to achieve more than just symbolic Magyarization hinged upon co-opting the inherited ethnic elites, which was largely successful with Latin-rite Catholics – but, to the extent that it was actually pushed for, it proved an utter failure as regards Romanians and Transylvanian Saxons.

Introduction  |  7

Beyond the language barrier and the inherited ethnic structures, there was another important factor limiting Dualist Hungary’s infrastructural power, and one more commonly shared by contemporary European states – namely, insufficient resources. To take the subject of my earlier book as an example, in spite of its full jurisdiction over primary education, the Hungarian state dispensed with a comprehensive network of Hungarian schools in minority–majority areas. Ministers of education would announce with great fanfare their plans to expand the existing network, praising Hungarian schools as vital patriotic instruments, but they knew full well that footing the bill for thousands of state schools was way beyond their budgets, not to mention staffing them with a competent workforce. Most Romanian and the overwhelming majority of Transylvanian Saxon children continued to attend mother-tongue confessional schools funded by locals, and when the Coalition Government of 1906–10 tried to curtail their autonomy in order to harness them to teach Hungarian, it led to a deadlock in Romanian schools, partly because many of the teachers did not know the language well enough to teach it.14 Other contemporary nationalizing state elites with more homogeneous citizenries might rely on a sympathetic civil society to put their ideas into practice, but in the area, civil society became pillarized along ethnonational lines. Over the course of the Dualist Period, Magyar associational life was intertwined with the Dualist Hungarian state through the high share of civil servants in leadership positions, and it had little real leverage on the non-Magyar masses. However, Magyar associations not only aided the state in implementing the symbolic cultural policies that form one of the subjects of this book, but they were often also the ones who devised and lobbied for these policies in the first place, seldom making any bones about their intended effects. Dualist Hungary’s naming policies have never been studied as such, and given the high profile that they enjoyed in nationalist polemics at the time, and in particular in charges against the contemporary Magyarizing regime, it may seem curious that what empirical research exists is in Hungarian. In contrast, in those historiographical traditions that have drawn much of their legitimacy as national assets from describing their audiences as historical victims of Hungarian oppression, their memory lives on latently, but vigorously, in the form of hyperbolic stories. But both the caution of Hungarian and the silence of Romanian scholarships reflect a similar unease about cultural entanglements that threaten to contradict assumptions about national essentialism. Through the uncustomary choice of my research subject, and this is my second ambition with this book, I also make a case for revisiting the significance of proper names for history writing. Names as carriers of ideological messages have received little attention from historians, and in general, the space between analytic philosophy’s theoretical interest in proper names and the all-too-often purely descriptive and taxonomic pursuits of onomastics is a barely explored

8  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

field. In particular, my book makes a wager that a sociocultural history of nation formation that is comprehensive in its breadth can be written from this ­seemingly narrow and barren perspective. Under the heading of national symbols are usually classified flags, anthems, select and emblematic dishes, dances, garments, musical pieces and landscapes. Proper names do not belong in this company, but they have also been heavily exploited for symbolic purposes and made to represent national identity and history. Remarkably, from all components of national standard languages, names are in general the most amenable to such uses. This, I think, has to do with their marginal place on the periphery of vocabulary, and, indeed, the uncertainty of whether they are part of language at all. This dubious position is reflected in the scholarly tradition, also embraced here, that treats the inventory of proper names that can be attributed to one language as a subsystem separate from common nouns (appellatives), and calls it the onomasticon.15 Thus, I tentatively propose that it is because of their semantic weakness, their lack of a proper lexical meaning, that proper names have been more able to convey nationalist messages than core elements of the vocabulary. There is a general agreement about the deviant semantic behaviour of proper names, which has made them a pet subject of analytic philosophers. According to mainstream accounts, a proper name does not have a sense (Sinn, intension), only a referential status (denotation), which fixes its referent (Bedeutung, extension, denotatum). In other words, there are no rules that would determine the exact things or concepts a name can stand for, but as a ‘mere tag’, it is simply assigned to a referent. For instance, a person’s first or family name cannot be guessed from the way they look or behave.16 It is tempting to think that this semantic void makes proper names more suitable for symbolic uses, as it translates into higher connotative potential. To utilize this potential, it was necessary either to impose new normative clues for their interpretation, to invest names with new connotations or to create new names that derived their interpretive values from the spaces they occupied. Different categories of names were not put to symbolic uses in the same way. Animal names did not even take on such connotations, and for all the interest they offer for the study of language contact and cultural transfer, I will not include them in the present book.17 With most categories of names, the operation could follow two distinct strategies. One of them tied a name to a person or family who had originally worn it or at any rate to some remote era, typically the nation’s imaginary golden age, when it had been in use for the first time. This strategy, inherent in the trend of national given names and commemorative street naming, related modern referents to dead prototypes, and by so doing turned these names into sites of memory. This could in the course of their everyday use also naturalize the national canons and historical narratives comprising them.

Introduction  |  9

The second strategy built on the indexicality of etymons proposed for place or family names, and then it pinned the ethnic character deduced from the names onto the referents. In this way, it tried to assign each place and person to one national community and one authoritative vision of national history – preferably to one’s own, but sometimes to another. Often, there was thought to be no need for any philological inquiry to lay claim on a name because a visible etymology was at hand as a supposedly obvious link. Notably, many names sport a residual, so-called ‘appellative’ meaning in spite of their lack of a full-fledged lexical one.18 The name of Frankfurt, which reveals its etymology for all German-speakers to see  – ‘the Franks’ ford’  – can validate the city’s German character according to this strategy, whatever that means. Historically, place and family names never arose out of arbitrary strings of sounds, but always started out based on a ­meaning, typically motivated by some characteristics of their referents. Both of these underlying strategies turned proper names into projection screens for visions of national history. Historical imagination drew on myths, stories  – the term implies no judgement about their factual bases  – credited with revelatory power and invested with great emotional involvement for the ingroup.19 These myths structured national members’ knowledge about the nation’s history, they filtered and framed new information, guided social action and thus ultimately fed back into immediate reality. Two historical myths informed much of the imaginary that I will discuss here. On the one side, ‘Latinity’ and bimillennial self-identity as first occupants, along with the profound normative implications flowing from them, constituted Romanian nationalism’s charter myth throughout the era. They were informed by the belief in Romance linguistic continuity in the former land of Dacia, ultimately of humanist origin and only coming under serious scrutiny in the period I am investigating. A Hungarian counter-myth, which I am going to call the myth of submerged Magyardom, boils down to the assertion that a significant proportion of the contemporary ethnic Romanians in Hungary, and in some areas their majority, descended from people that had once spoken Hungarian and belonged to Western churches. It is impossible to refute or corroborate this claim in practice, but it was always advanced together with clues that allegedly betrayed such roots, and these clues, some of which will be mentioned in later chapters, can be proven wrong. But once again, it is not the veracity of the myth that matters for my purposes here. The prima facie more plausible argument about the Serbian origins of Bosnian Muslims had similar functions, it became entangled in the same dynamic of the self and the other, and ultimately, it may have earned similarly few plaudits from ordinary Muslims when it was propounded in an arrogant nationalist dressing.20 According to the Lacanian political theorist Yannis Stavrakakis, the ultimate driving force behind nationalist historical imagination has been the desire to recapture the enjoyment stolen from the collective self, the core emotional content

10  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

of nationalism.21 The myth of submerged Magyardom will command special attention on this score since it pointed to a twofold definition of Romanians and other national minorities as the enjoyment lost to the Magyar/Hungarian nation on the one side, and as its enemies who had stolen said enjoyment on the other – or in more concrete terms, as the ones who have dissimilated ‘ours’ and the ‘ours’ who have become woefully dissimilated. This ambiguity helps to explain the double-edged discourse constituting national minorities at once as brethren and as invaders, as people invited to assimilate and as undesirable, as well as the nationality policies that were projected as integrative or assimilatory but were at the same time also exclusivist and repressive.22 Proper names will appear not only as projection screens for historical visions in the course of this work but also as sites for negotiating, affirming and representing history-based identities. In this sense, my book explores proper names of various sorts in a similar way as a trend in historical anthropology, which would by now fill an entire library, has done to memorials, celebrations and national holidays in recent decades. This trend has not only sought to unravel the often transitory and elastic meanings ascribed to contentious or consensus-creating monuments and festivals, but it has also dug up new sources related to them that can help to assess the level of popular mobilization and enthusiasm for this or that cause, with the national being chief. This attention turned to public memory has also enabled a slew of research in the field of late Habsburg historiography, although mostly about the Austrian (Cisleithanian) half of the monarchy.23 My approach to proper names intersects with this paradigm most closely in the study of commemorative street names, which can effectively be seen as verbal public monuments. For reasons of length, however, my study of street naming in the area has not been included in this book. The conflict between state nationalism and its antagonistic national agendas permeated most aspects of naming and renaming in Dualist Hungary. National elites competed to establish their titles of ownership over the spheres they claimed for their nations by renaming these in their normative self-image. They waged a symbolic struggle to enforce the equation ‘one nation–one onomasticon’ and ultimately to achieve what Bourdieu called a ‘monopoly of legitimate naming’ – in this case quite literally.24 Many nineteenth-century nationalists went to great lengths to purge what they understood as their national heritage of names from the numerous traces of historical entanglements with external linguistic resources, and they made prominent use of onomastic arguments to sustain their constitutive belief in a once ethnically pure homeland. The chapters of the book alternate between three categories of names; given names, family names and place names. In ways that go beyond the two main strategies described above, these categories of names probably differ more between them than they share common ground, notably as to how their resources could be exploited for nationalist goals. Therefore, I will briefly discuss the peculiarities

Introduction  |  11

of each where they turn up for the first time, and will later come back to reflect on the possibilities, typical contexts and limitations of their ideological uses. Bringing in parallels from nineteenth-century Europe and the world, my book will also draw attention to potential sources for future research, and will propose research designs for their study. Available onomastic studies have eased my burden of collecting primary data for some chapters, but they can give little theoretical guidance to the sociocultural historian. Onomastics has, by and large, continued its course as the discipline that establishes etymologies and organizes its data into neat taxonomies  – the same pursuits that lent it prestige in its heyday, which lasted until the First World War, when it was highly appreciated for its special contribution to the research of early history.25 It has preserved a somewhat higher professional standing in Germany, where it has also branched out into the study of naming fashions under the label Namensoziologie. Recently, promising new departures have been made towards a theoretically more informed, more critical and more interdisciplinary onomastics. This belated critical turn has been chiefly productive in the field of place names, in particular in street naming, place renaming, colonialism and decolonization as reflected in toponymy and the commodification of place names. So far, however, this line of interest has been rarely coupled with genuinely historical research questions, and certainly no sociocultural histories of proper names have been undertaken on this scale. On the other hand, I greatly benefited from my background in philology and comparative linguistics. I will not spare the reader Romanian, Hungarian and German examples, and more still are in the endnotes. Those familiar with these languages or acquainted with this kind of linguistic reconstructions may find them helpful and instructive, while others should feel free to skip them. Occasionally, I deconstruct etymologies and historical speculations based on them. This should not be taken as a gratuitous intellectual tour de force on my behalf, but as an avenue to the truth – a truth that does not reside in facts behind the myths, but in those who believed in them. Table 0.1 shows the linguistic make-up of the area’s population in terms of first- and second-language speakers. The inhabitants were overwhelmingly peasants. Romanian was the most widely spoken language over the major, central part of the area, while the Szeklerland in the East, along with a few contiguous groups of villages, as well as the north-western half of Bihar and the western half of Szatmár Counties in the West, stood apart as predominantly Hungarianspeaking. Cities again constituted separate linguistic contexts, with either Hungarian or German playing central roles in them; and the bigger a place was, the more likely it had a Hungarian or German linguistic majority. To orient the reader among the diverse linguistic micro-worlds of the land, a place-name index in the appendix indicates the relevant data of the 1880 census, and sometimes also of the 1910 census, next to each place.

12  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

Far from simply being bloodless categories created by nationalist discourses, censuses and ethnic maps, the mother-tongue groups shown in Table 0.1 were more or less also coextensive to ethnic categories of practice, operational both in elite and popular contexts. Rather than on categories, however, I prefer to focus on ethnic boundaries and distinctions, following a long and influential tradition in cultural anthropology that goes back to Fredrik Barth’s 1969 essay.26 This approach takes social constructionism for granted  – ethnic boundaries exist because people accept them as valid. They are reproduced by strategies of boundary maintenance; some of them ‘hard’, like residential segregation and the communal control of marital choices, while others of the ‘softer’ type, most notably stereotyping  – the discursive positioning and self-positioning of communities – and the symbolic marking of some segments of culture. My statement that the divisions between Romanians, Magyars and Transylvanian Saxons predated the advent of nationalism has become controversial by now and begs for an explanation. It apparently puts me at variance with much of the new literature on the late Habsburg Empire, which has rather presupposed a narrow modernist view. More recently, this latter position has been also argued for in clear-cut terms by Rok Stergar and Tamara Scheer, who assure us that ‘recent research has persuasively demonstrated that the nations in Central and South Eastern Europe were not a continuation of earlier ethnic communities’.27 Such an inflexible modernist stance makes sense as long as a researcher deals with Latin-rite Catholics from the early modern times who happened to speak German, South or Western Slavic dialects (or Hungarian ones for that matter), with men typically speaking both idioms wherever Germanand Slavic-speaking areas met. It would indeed be idle to attribute too great a significance to language in structuring local society under such circumstances. But it would be no less problematic to ignore the boundaries, say, between neighbours who owed allegiance to Islam, Byzantine Orthodoxy and Latin-rite Catholicism at a time when these differences were institutionally grounded and legally sanctioned, irrespective of conversions and the local forms of religious syncretism that were rampant in some areas. These were boundaries that nationalist movements often viewed as highly significant, and they magnified and built upon them. There are no one-size-fits-all models and scenarios for modern nation formation because the social fabric onto which nineteenth-century nationalist awakeners projected their ready-made ideas about nations was also greatly varied. With his last comments on nationalism, no less prominent a modernist in nationalism studies than Ernest Gellner conceded that ‘some nations have navels, while others don’t’.28 Let us add that these navels also differed between them. All this had little importance for Gellner, who insisted on what was common to all national projects, but earlier divisions become essential once we are engaged in closer scrutiny of the nationalization process.

Introduction  |  13

Table 0.1  Basic linguistic attraction-dependency model of the territory according to the 1880 census (people able to speak only). Language

Native speakers

In proportion to the entire population

Monolinguals among natives

Romanian Hungarian German

2,837,833 1,167,564 429,788

53.0% 28.6% 10.5%

92.7% 77.9% 40.1%

Speakers among the non-native population ~18–22%* 5.6% 5.8%

Source: The data, and all other census data from 1880, are taken from A Magyar Korona Országaiban az 1881. év elején végrehajtott népszámlálás eredményei [Results of the census conducted in the Lands of the Hungarian Crown, at the beginning of 1881], 2 vols (Budapest: Országos Magyar Kir. Statisztikai Hivatal, 1882). * Due to the incomplete processing of the 1880 data, these had to be controlled on the basis of the more relevant 1910 ones; Magyar Statisztikai Közlemények, new series, 61 (Budapest: Magyar Kir. Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, 1916), 296–392.

Both in envisioning and in bringing to life national communities, national activists in the area relied on pre-existing fault lines separating rural Romanians, Magyars and Transylvanian Saxons, grounded in the confluence between confession and language, and often underpinned by status differences. Confessional identity was people’s only institutionalized, legally enforceable and at the same time subjectively valid identity that transcended the local. Therefore, the fact that the area’s various religious communities used the vernacular – or a variety more or less close to the vernacular – in their liturgy, with the notable exceptions of Roman (and Armenian) Catholics and Jews, had a decisive influence on ethnic divisions. That the main languages were discretely contrasting (Abstand) languages in relation to one another, that most people were monolingual and that secondlanguage skills were distributed asymmetrically in contact settings (see Table 0.1 above) further increased the role that language played in constituting ethnicity. Although the high proportion of linguistically diverse villages in the area was uncommon even for East Central Europe, the various ethnolinguistic groups did not share the same space even there, but as a rule lived in ethnically segregated neighbourhoods. The rates of interfaith weddings were very low among peasants, with interethnic unions and individual conversions between Eastern and Western Christian denominations being exceedingly rare.29 Max Weber founded his definition of ethnicity on belief in common descent, in distant ancestors who are imagined to have already lived together as one group.30 This, in turn, is reflected in belief in a shared, distinct culture, inherited from common ancestors. I find this Weberian formula helpful because it opens up the definition to include status differences and the enduring impact of past migrations. Status readily flows into ethnicity, and in the area, it often reinforced the concurrence of religion and language, but it could also act powerfully on

14  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

its own. For the first plot, take the case of Transylvanian Saxons  – not only did their home language, their German Bible, confession and church set them apart from the Romanians, Roma and Magyars living close to them, but also, for the great majority, a separate legal standing and the relative wealth deriving from it. Saxons living in the privileged Saxon Land had not known serfdom and collectively formed one of the three estates (natio) in Transylvania. This was one reason, by the way, why the Saxon elite, although speaking High German to their children and giving them Germanic names, did not formulate German nationalist political messages until the 1890s, but rather concentrated on holding fast to the shreds of their former autonomy.31 On the second score, noble status raised ethnic boundaries that outlived the abolition of serfdom by at least a century and a half, and a good case could be made for regarding the political community of nobles – called natio Hungarica in both Transylvanian and Hungarian law – as an ethnic group in its own right. By nobility, one should not think of large landowning aristocrats, but rather of politically enfranchised free smallholders. The proportion of the ennobled in the population had been strikingly high in comparison with the rest of early modern Europe. Gradually co-opting Hungarian-speaking former serfs, the natio Hungarica ended up bequeathing important identity symbols to the modern Hungarian nation, similarly to the Polish case. Some fell between the new stools of national categories along this process, like the petty nobles of the Hațeg/ Hátszeg/Hötzing Basin, who may have known no Hungarian and may have even belonged to the Eastern rite, but could still very well claim to be Hungarian/ Magyar on account of their noble titles – or at least to prefer this designation over rumân, tainted by the connotation of ‘serf’. At the same time, the status division between nobles and commoners often also crossed through Hungarian-speakers belonging to the same confession. By viewing through the local lens, one can also pinpoint ethnic boundaries that were rooted exclusively in the enduring memory of arrival to a given place at different points in the past. The best-documented examples are probably the various groups of Austrian and Southern German Protestants forcibly resettled amid Transylvanian Saxons in the eighteenth century, whose late twentieth-century descendants still upheld strict boundaries, regulated by an intricate code of coexistence, towards their similarly German-speaking, Protestant neighbours.32 Such contexts, of which there were numerous, highlight the importance of migration for ethnicity. Where two constituents of collective identity cross-cut each other, ethnic boundaries tended to be fuzzier, like in the case of the Romanian-speaking petty nobles mentioned above, or fairly inconsequential, as between Orthodox ­speakers of Romanian and Serbo-Croatian in the South or between Greek Catholic speakers of Romanian and Ruthenian/Ukrainian in the North. As the reader will have noticed by now, most ethnic differences were not caught up in

Introduction  |  15

the wave of nationalization, and a few effectively faded away in its wake. A case in point for the latter are the Hungarian-speaking Szeklers, still a full-blown ‘ethnie’ before 1848, with neither a language on its own nor one religion in common, but complete with its myth of separate origins. Although Szeklerdom was regional in scale, it was based on legal status rather than territory, since former serfs living in the Szeklerland did not belong to it. Two dynamics can capture the changes that reshuffled this web of ethnic distinctions in the nineteenth century. First, the national was superimposed on the ethnic, at the beginning as a powerful language of political mobilization, which led to a two-tier structure of collective loyalties. National activists built on existing ethnic identifications and stereotypes, and reinforced linguistic-confessional boundaries, investing them with new stakes. But at the same time, this propaganda collapsed actual local groups into overarching, anonymous communities and offered explanations, projected solidarities and goals on a far wider scale than peasants were accustomed to in secular matters. Peasants’ inherited reference frames revolved around face-to-face rather than imagined communities, and what constituted typically Romanian or Magyar culture they also negotiated at the local level. Social proximity had decreased in concentric circles, but the widest of these had hardly spanned more than a day’s distance, and any person from farther away had been seen as a complete stranger – and a potential threat at that. So far, my understanding has by and large squared with the ethno-symbolist account of nationalism as synthesized in the works of Anthony D. Smith – I accept that ethnic differences based on religion, status, migration and language predated nationhood, that prenational symbols were sometimes recycled by activists to create broader solidarities and that ethnicity continues to undergird national ties.33 On one key point, however, I must part ways with ethno-­symbolism. While Smith suggested that the masses could not engage with nationalist accretions at odds with their pre-existing ethnic symbols and myths, my three nationalizing elites brought into circulation names and interpretations that belonged to just this kind of invented traditions, and these still found acceptance in the long run. In other words, the ‘ethno’ part of the ethno-symbolist approach can offer a partial explanation for earlier ethnic divisions and how they realigned along national lines, but the ‘symbolic’ part does not provide for the autonomy or independent dynamic of elite constructs, and it underestimates the flexibility of the peasant mind. Peasants did cherry-pick from the nationalist package and reinterpreted some of its elements, but as a group, they had limited leverage to impose new signifiers in the nationalist vein. Even where bits and pieces of peasant culture gained national significance, they did so with new meanings and on the intelligentsia’s initiative and terms. Peasants became national in response to the ideas promoted by the respective elites, simultaneously with the spread of literacy and the development of a

16  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

free-holding peasant identity.34 Nationalist frames of interpretation could reach out to them via the church pulpit, the schoolhouse and, by the 1890s, also the penny press. Although there were wide differences regionally, between 15 and 50 per cent of Romanians were reported literate in 1910, while virtually all grownup Transylvanian Saxons and the large majority of Catholic Germans knew how to read. Magyar peasants fell somewhere in between. Receiving elements of the message is one thing, but assimilating them into permanent national commitments is quite another. Catalysing this process were, among other factors: the example set by outgroup nationalisms; the servitude trials and conflicts over land consolidation between Romanian smallholders and Magyar landlords;35 the memory of the civil war of 1848–49; an associational life organized along ethnonational lines; and electoral campaigns (although in Transylvania, the Romanian National Party boycotted elections until 1903). In the Banat, the separation of Orthodox parishes and the long, drawn-out legal actions for the division of church property between Romanians and Serbs sometimes created boundaries where none had been perceptible earlier.36 Specific to non-dominant national movements was the nationalizing impact of everyday conflicts with the state bureaucracy. Of course, peasants of all stripes disliked the state  – that continually expanding tax-levying, overregulating, monopoly-holding, conscripting and often corrupt behemoth that impinged on their lives – but non-Magyars in Hungary carried the additional burdens of an imposed state language, with all its possibilities for abuse, and of occasional discrimination and humiliation.37 Ironically, widespread illiteracy could cushion the intensity of such encounters, as long as illiterate peasants did not even expect to understand the content of official documents. Reconstructing the changing ethnic concepts and stereotypes of a literate elite may be tricky at times, but it certainly does not pose a barrier to interpretation. When Mihály Cserei repeatedly maligned the late Transylvanian chancellor Mihály Teleki, calling him a ‘Wallach’ (oláh) in his memoirs around 1710, he did not insinuate that Teleki or his family had come from Wallachia, but he used the pre-1848 Hungarian ethnonym for Romanians (Romanian-speakers of the Orthodox faith), on the grounds of the chancellor’s dubious origins in some majority Romanian-speaking border area between Transylvania and Hungary.38 One can also assemble this interpretation from the text, but similar quotes can be multiplied ad libitum. The same task becomes daunting with regard to the peasantry, owing to their illiteracy and the resulting lack of ego-documents from the early stages, which drastically reduces our access to peasant ways of thinking.39 Usually, others wrote on behalf of peasants, mostly with a powerful performative thrust, filtering their experiences through a different culture and tailoring their arguments to the upper-class reader. Once people’s voices mattered, the clergy also did not hesitate to enlist their flock in the service of nationalist causes. Scores of Romanian

Introduction  |  17

priests, for example, sent letters in support of the nationalist leaders indicted in a much-publicized political trial in 1894, signing on behalf of their mostly illiterate parishioners.40 But for a long time, peasants would happily and lightly throw their voices behind distant causes that their priests canvassed for – even if, or rather because, they did not see its relevance for their lives. If one finds that these letters are conclusive about the national commitments of the undersigned, one should perhaps also consider the sixty thousand signatures that the Maltese Catholic clergy collected a few years later in protest against the threat looming for Italian as a public language, a number surpassing not only that of literate Maltese but also many times over that of Italian-speakers in the archipelago.41 In their reflections on their people’s national consciousness, nationalist activists typically swung between the exaltation of the peasantry as bearers of the national spirit in its purest form, even if it may have been slumbering in them, and disappointment at their pedestrian mindset and their failure to observe the national proprieties. The testimony one can get from outside observers is as a rule equally elusive since few raised the question in such terms, and comments by those who did may also reveal more about their own preconceptions or fears than about the subject. Finally, in the lucky cases where they can be retrieved, peasants’ words still present a confusing ambiguity; premodern elements and arguments often intermingle in them with modern ones, with no apparent logic. My third recurrent concern in this book will be to interrogate naming patterns and imageries attached to names about how peasants began to think and behave in national ways. Here, I engage with the ‘from below’ approach to the study of nationhood, which does not content itself by simply assuming that the nationalist indoctrination reached its goal, but sets out to collect direct and indirect evidence from the ordinary people it addressed, accepting additional methodological challenges. Thus I propose to put naming records in the same league as statistics about draft evasion, election results, attendance at rallies and national festivals, or Ellis Island declarations of ethnicity – the types of sources that this research paradigm has revalued.42 One feels at a loss to pin down when exactly the peasantry’s nationalization process started, but this does not seem all that meaningful a task after all. People assimilated national categories, beliefs, imageries and argumentation schemes while reacting to concrete situations, which usually had to do with ongoing, often local conflicts. Therefore, it should not be thought that peasants started behaving and thinking as conscious nationals at one fell swoop.43 At first, they may have simply accepted being framed as such, a choice for which they sometimes had to suffer bitter consequences. Their repertoire widened gradually. As mentioned, they were also selective in appropriating the elements proposed by nationalist elites, and they might also reinterpret and rearrange these for their own purposes.44 In addition, elite nationalisms kept on changing along the way, making nationalization an open-ended process, analogous to Tetris rather than

18  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

to the jigsaw puzzle, to borrow Edin Hajdarpašić’s metaphor.45 Truly, national communities are reimagined with each generation. The process also produced false starts, as it regularly did in the Eastern half of the continent, starting with the Greek Uprising of 1821. The ambiguities are particularly rife with regard to 1848, a year that certainly saw a countryside resonating with nationalist slogans and engaged in ethnic bloodshed. Should one feel inclined to point out the social-economic motives and – in the case of the 1848 Romanian jacquerie in Transylvania – the chiliastic religious overtones of peasant action, the question may also be raised as to whether ordinary people were ever mobilized in the nineteenth century on purely nationalist grounds and against their better interests. For the purposes of the present study, however, the commotions of 1848 can be safely considered a false start, not crystallizing into solid national commitments, but feeding back into the process to the degree that local events were being framed, in the retelling, as a fight for national liberation. From the perspective of names, the touchstone of a nationally conscious peasantry will be the extent to which they ingrained national historical myths and reproduced them. For that, they first needed to absorb a secular conception of time as opposed to cyclical time, sacred history and local living memory. Together with a cartographic conception of space, this reflected the widening scale of the imagination referred to earlier, but it need not make them behave as fervent (‘hot’) nationalists. I will not consider as ‘national’ basic or universal forms of linguistic loyalty (‘vertical’ or ‘heteronymous’, in Joep Leerssen’s terms), neither the myth of Latin origins among Romanians as long as its political relevance remained flexible and modest.46 The socially exclusive ‘noble nationalism’ and confessionally exclusive forms of Hungarian patriotism, such as the cult of the Hungarian saints and the Virgin Mary among Roman Catholics, or parallels between Old Testament Jews and Magyars among Calvinists, will similarly remain outside the scope of my definition. If it is not an easy task in practice to draw a neat dividing line between premodern and modern identities, that is in part because the peasantry’s first positive response to national propaganda was to mark their bodies, already the traditional place for ethnic marking. Newly freed Magyar serfs drew their Sunday costume closer to the noble attire, which initially may have had nothing to do with nationalism; but as a concomitant, it distanced them from their Romanian neighbours. Tricoloured ribbons appeared on peasant dress. As an outcome of the process, local peasant communities became Romanian and Hungarian in a new fashion, or Saxon as the case may be. Although nationalism was primarily meant for mobile and urban rather than rural and sedentary people, peasants, too, came to take it for granted that they should be governed by their conationals in some sort of an autonomous political entity. They got imbued with a national solidarity transcending social and geographical divisions, took pride in

Introduction  |  19

the civilizational achievements and military victories of their kin-states and paid allegiance to their ‘mother tongue’, including abstract linguistic authorities and, occasionally, in diasporic settings, even going through the pain of relearning the ancestral language. Critically, they also mastered new interpretations and symbolic uses of proper names. The book is divided into three major parts, according to the three levels of the analysis undertaken. In the first part, I will explore the prenational cultural groundwork by describing how the mostly illiterate peasantry’s concepts, practices and attitudes related to names and naming differed from what came to be accepted as the educated nationalist doxa. I will uncover the manifold linguistic entanglements that left marks on names later to be politicized. I will also make attempts to crack the notorious silence of the village and to gather first-hand evidence about the onset and dynamics of the peasantry’s nationalization process. I will evaluate the rising popularity of nationalist historical visions by comparing the expansion of national given names – Romanian Latinate, Hungarian historical, pagan Magyar and Germanic – among the elite and the peasantry, and I will take a closer look at vernacular place-name etymologies to find out about what cultural memory peasants tied to their places. Upper-class ideas and practices will take centre stage in the second part. This will feature public intellectuals’ thinking in their quest to discover national essence in the inherited cultural material, and projecting fantasies about familyand place-name histories to support historical myths in a nationalist mould. Particular emphasis will be placed on their strategies of accounting for external influences on family and place names. Here I will also interpret various forms of onomastic self-fashioning – most notably, family-name changes. I will review the wave of family-name Latinizations carried out by Romanian forty-eighters, a practice that came to a halt in the next generation with a paradigm shift in the ideology of the Romanian linguistic standard. I will engage more deeply with the social history of family-name Magyarizations. Although people of Romanian and Transylvanian Saxon birth or ancestry did not figure prominently among family-name Magyarizers, I will examine their clusters in the hope of finding clues either about administrative pressure or about the potential social avenues of assimilation into Magyardom. The last chapter of this part discusses dilettante scholarship, grassroots toponymic activism and Magyar tourist associations’ bid to replace the place-name cover. The third part will show Hungarian governments and administration tackling linguistic diversity, engaged in official practices towards the symbolic incorporation of names, and enacting policies of renaming. I start out by analysing the regulation of given names in official use that happened as the Hungarian state took over the registration of births, deaths and marriages, through designing an equivalence list for the given names current among minorities. Next, I turn to the transcription of family names across languages, which became a hotly contested

20  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

practice as Romanian family names continued to be respelt in Hungarian public documents. Finally, the many aspects and ramifications of the topic moved me to dedicate one-fifth of the book to the state-run campaign of settlement-name Magyarizations, which spanned the last two decades of the era.

Notes   1. Hungarian National Archives (henceforth, MNL OL) BM K156, box 55, 292.  2. R. Talbert, Rome’s World: The Peutinger Map Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, [2010] 2014), no. 1732 (TP 6A4); and F. Pesty, A Szörényi Bánság és Szörény vármegye története [History of the Banate of Severin/Szörény and Szörény County], Vol. 2 (Budapest: M. T. Akadémia, 1878), 325–36.   3. N. Stoica de Hațeg, Cronica Banatului [The chronicle of the Banat], 2nd edn (Timișoara: Facla, 1981), 58.  4. B. Petriceicu-Hasdeu, Etymologicum magnum Romaniae: dicționarul limbei istorice și poporane a românilor [Dictionary of Romanians’ historical and folk language], Vol. 1 (Bucharest: Minerva, 1972), 248–49.   5. Quoted in M.M. Deleanu, Manuscrisul de la Prigor (1879–1880): comentariu lingvistic și juridic-administrativ [The Prigor Manuscript (1879–80): a linguistic and judicialadministrative commentary] (Reșița: Eftimie Murgu, 2005), 78.   6. A.D. Xenopol, Une Enigme historique: Les Roumains au Moyen-Age (Paris: Leroux, 1885), 135.   7. I. Nădejde, ‘Istoriea romînilor (Vol. I) de dl. A.D. Xenopol’ [The History of Romanians, Vol. 1, by A.D. Xenopol], Contemporanul 6 (1887–88), 328.   8. I. Bălan, Numiri de localități [Settlement names] (Caransebeș: ‘Bibl. Noastre’, 1898), 6.  9. D. Dan, ‘Din toponimia romînească: studiu istorico-linguistic’ [From the field of Romanian toponymy: historico-linguistic study], Convorbiri literare 30(2) (1896), 323–35 and 504–15. 10. Á. Berecz, The Politics of Early Language Teaching: Hungarian in the primary schools of the late Dual Monarchy (Budapest: Pasts, Inc., Central European University, 2013). 11. I use Magyar in the ethnic sense and Hungarian in the civic, geographical sense for the post-1918 nation, as well as to denote the language, with the important proviso that the same distinction does not exist in Hungarian. 12. J. Chlebowczyk, On Small and Young Nations in Europe (Wroclaw: Ossolineum, 1980), 181. 13. A representative piece of this turn is J. von Puttkamer, ‘Kein europäischer Sonderfall: Ungarns Nationalitätenproblem im 19. Jahrhundert und die jüngere Nationalismusforschung’, in M. Fata (ed.), Das Ungarnbild der deutschen Historiographie (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004), 84–98. 14. Berecz, Politics of Early Language Teaching. 15. I use the term ‘inventory’ when referring to the ensemble of types, and ‘body’ or ‘corpus’ for the ensemble of tokens. 16. S.A. Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Blackwell, [1972] 1980). 17. For the topic, see my ‘Haszonállatok hívónevének kölcsönzése román, magyar és német anyanyelvű állattartók között a 20. század második feléig’ [Borrowing of names for

Introduction  |  21

domestic animals among Romanian-, Hungarian- and German-speaking livestock farmers until the second half of the twentieth century], Névtani Értesítő 40 (2018), 129–37. 18. W. van Langendonck, Theory and Typology of Proper Names (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2007), 92–93. 19. My usage of the term ‘myth’ is indebted to Raoul Girardet through Lucian Boia; L. Boia, Pentru o istorie a imaginarului [For a history of the imaginary], trans. T. Mochi (Bucharest: Humanitas, 2000). 20. E. Hajdarpasic, Whose Bosnia? Nationalism and Political Imagination in the Balkans, 1840–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015), 32–35 and 80–81. 21. Y. Stavrakakis, ‘Enjoying the Nation: A Success Story?’, in idem, The Lacanian Left: Psychoanalysis, Theory, Politics (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007), 198. 22. See the typology of language policies in I. Sachdev and H. Giles, ‘Bilingual Accommodation’, in T.K. Bhatia and W.C. Ritchie (eds), The Handbook of Bilingualism (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006), 363. 23. An early representative volume that laid out the future directions of research is M. Bucur and N.M. Wingfield (eds), Staging the Past: The Politics of Commemoration in Habsburg Central Europe, 1848 to the Present (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2001). One brilliant exception on Hungary is B. Varga, The Monumental Nation: Magyar Nationalism and Symbolic Politics in Fin-de-siècle Hungary (New York: Berghahn Books, 2016). 24. P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 239. 25. Y. Malkiel, Etymology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 36; and R. RoseRedwood, D. Alderman and M. Azaryahu, ‘Geographies of Toponymic Inscription: New Directions in Critical Place-Name Studies’, Progress in Human Geography 34 (2010), 455. 26. F. Barth, ‘Introduction’, in idem (ed.), Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The Social Organization of Culture Difference (Bergen: Universitetsforlaget; London: Allen & Unwin, 1969), 9–38. 27. R. Stergar and T. Scheer, ‘Ethnic Boxes: The Unintended Consequences of Habsburg Bureaucratic Classification’, Nationalities Papers 46 (2018), 577. 28. E. Gellner and A.D. Smith, ‘The Nation: Real or Imagined? The Warwick Debates on Nationalism’, Nations and Nationalism 2 (1996), 367–68. 29. M. Brie, Căsătoria în nord-vestul Transilvaniei (a doua jumătate a secolului XIX – î­ nceputul secolului XX): condiționări exterioare și strategii maritale [Marriage in north-western Transylvania (the second half of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries): external factors and marital strategies] (Oradea: Editura Universității din Oradea, 2009); Gh. Șișeștean, Etnie, confesiune și căsătorie în nord-vestul Transilvaniei [Ethnicity, confession and marriage in north-western Transylvania] (Zalău: Caiete Silvane, 2002); C. Pădurean and I. Bolovan (eds), Căsătorii mixte în Transilvania: Secolul al XIX-lea și începutul secolului XX [Mixed marriages in Transylvania: nineteenth and early twentieth centuries] (Arad: Editura Universității ‘Aurel Vlaicu’, 2005); and Magyar Statisztikai Közlemények, new series, vol. 7 (Budapest: Magyar Kir. Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, 1905), 56–57. 30. M. Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretative Sociology, trans. E. Fischoff et al. (Berkeley: University of California Press, [1968] 1978), 385–98. 31. For a succinct history of the Transylvanian Saxon elite’s political self-positioning under Dualism, see A. Möckel, ‘Kleinsächsisch oder Alldeutsch? Zum Selbstverständnis der

22  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

Siebenbürger Sachsen von 1867 bis 1935’, in W. König (ed.), Siebenbürgen zwischen den beiden Weltkriegen (Cologne: Böhlau, 1994), 129‒45. 32. See especially M. Bottesch, ‘Identität und Ethnizität der Landler: zum Selbstverständnis der Landler’, in M. Bottesch, F. Grieshofer and W. Schabus (eds), Die siebenbürgischen Landler: Eine Spurensicherung (Vienna: Böhlau, 2002), Vol. 1, 155–77. 33. A.D. Smith, Ethno-symbolism and Nationalism: A Cultural Approach (London: Routledge, 2009). 34. J.-P. Himka, Galician Villagers and the Ukrainian National Movement in the Nineteenth Century (Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988), 143–217. 35. I. Kovács, Desființarea relațiilor feudale în Transilvania [The abolishment of feudal relations in Transylvania] (Cluj: Dacia, 1973), 101–53. 36. A. Schenk and I. Weber-Kellermann, Interethnik und sozialer Wandel in einem mehrsprachigen Dorf des rumänischen Banats (Marburg: Marburger Studienkreis für Europäische Ethnologie, 1973), 32–33. 37. Friedrich Lachmann’s memorandum to the Viennese Ministry of Foreign Affairs; in E.R. Rutkowski, ‘Österreich-Ungarn und Rumänien 1880–1883, die Proklamierung des Königreiches und die rumänische Irredenta’, Südostforschungen 25 (1966): 274; and F. Nagysolymosi Szabó, Erdély és a román kérdés [Transylvania and the Romanian question] (Marosvásárhely: self-published, 1910). 38. M. nagyajtai Cserei, Históriája [Chronicle] (Pest: Emich, 1852), 98 and passim. 39. S. Mitu and E. Bărbulescu, ‘Romanian Peasant Identities in Transylvania: Sources, Methods and Problems of Research’, Transylvanian Review 22 (supplement 3) (2013), 269. 40. N. Josan, Adeziunea populară la mișcarea memorandistă (1892–1895): mărturii documentare [Popular adherence to the Memorandist movement: documentary evidence] (Bucharest: Științifică, 1996), 115–304. 41. G. Hull, The Malta Language Question: A Case Study in Cultural Imperialism (Valletta: Said, 1993), 46. 42. For a brief overview of the field, M. Van Ginderachter, ‘Nationhood from Below: Some Historiographic Notes on Great Britain, France and Germany in the Long Nineteenth Century’, in M. Van Ginderachter and M. Beyen (eds), Nationhood from Below: Europe in the Long Nineteenth Century (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 120–31. 43. Cf. P.M. Judson, The Habsburg Empire: A New History (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2016), 274 and 312. 44. K. Stauter-Halsted, The Nation in the Village: The Genesis of Peasant National Identity in Austrian Poland, 1848–1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001). 45. Hajdarpasic, 206. 46. J. Leerssen, ‘Medieval Heteronomy, Modern Nationalism: Language Assertion between Liège and Maastricht, 14th–20th century’, Belgisch Tijdschrift voor Nieuwste Geschiedenis/ Revue belge d’histoire contemporaine 34 (2004), 581–93.

Part I

Peasants

d

Chapter 1

Under Ancestral Masks Name-Giving Nationalized

d The Prenational Background Given names have several characteristics that make them eminently suitable for disseminating and naturalizing historical visions. They typically tolerate a great deal more referents (bearers) than family, let alone place names. Their body also changes more rapidly, as people are born and die. They do not develop spontaneously but are bestowed by small groups of persons of authority – parents and godparents. Whilst choices are not limited by the newborn baby’s personal traits, they are regulated on the social level by a distinct and finite set of possible names, traditionally embodied in the calendar, the first and for a long time the most widespread printed matter in the rural world.1 Note that the authority of this name inventory was not invested with actual, face-to-face communities, but it derived from wider metaphysical, and thus potentially ethnic, centres of power. This combination of otherworldly sanction and social recognition of a choice made by others while still an infant revealed the potential to root the political deep within the personal. Baby naming underwent radical change in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Europe, as naming patterns structurally rearranged to leave more space for individuation. The basic process, if not its pace, was similar in the various European nations, and it seems to lend support to cultural modernization theories.2 In early modern times, and in particular in the lower classes, three major factors influenced the choice of baby names: the calendar (the popular saint whose feast day fell closest to the baby’s birth), geography (local preferences for certain names) and name inheritance.3 Individual names waxed and waned in popularity, but at

26  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

a slow rate and with great regional differences.4 Then, within a few generations, fashion took the place of custom, and choosing a name for one’s baby became a matter of taste. The average popularity curve of names shortened enormously, the range of available choices widened both for boys and girls, and the gender gap in diversity got reversed in favour of girls. Variants of the same names were unified on the national level, while local and regional preferences for baby names converged into national patterns. The Reformation already reshuffled the given name corpus of Protestant communities by introducing more Old Testament names, and French revolutionary republicanism was arguably the first secular ideology to affect naming trends.5 It launched new names inspired in classical antiquity (Brutus, Ulysse, Achille) and brought others into fashion (Alexandre, Camille, Émilie, Julie).6 In the newly independent United States, there was a surge of such names as Jefferson and Washington. In post-Risorgimento Italy, urban people committed to democratic-republican ideas would give classical names to their children (Bruto, Aristotele, Ercole and probably Ettore), and some of them went one step further to choose more overtly ideological ones taken from recent national history. The popularity of such republican names reached a high-water mark between 1895 and 1915.7 While the shift to the modern paradigm of baby naming was, on the whole, a more piecemeal process in the core West European lands, the diffusion of what I will call national names brought a more abrupt shift on the peripheries of the continent. What was unprecedented about these new sets of names was that nationalist intelligentsias consciously adopted them to assert group belongings. As later discussion will demonstrate, the popularity of national names expanded top-down through class imitation and propaganda.8 In an initial period encompassing at least two generations, they functioned as sandwich boards that their early bearers wore day and night, gently but efficiently advertising a nationalist canon of history. Much of this power, inherited from the Christian rite of baptism, later faded away as name-giving was caught up in the by and large internally motivated logic of fashion. National names were usually drawn from putative national history, myths and Romantic literary works, but late-coming nationalisms sometimes showed idiosyncratic variations. Thus Turkish and Estonian national names were created from adjectives for personal traits, and from common nouns designating natural phenomena; some Estonian ones were even borrowed from the cognate Finnish language.9 Sabin(o) Arana, the father of Basque nationalism, single-handedly invented an entire new Basque name inventory, applying to Latin names the rules of phonological integration distilled from vernacular loanwords of Latin origin. Although his male names in -a completely went against tradition, they nevertheless gained currency after his onomastic work was published to great success in 1910.10

Under Ancestral Masks: Name-Giving Nationalized   |  27

Probably all successful nineteenth-century, catching-up national movements reshuffled the corpus of first names to some degree. If national names never even came close to completely replacing the traditional and mostly ‘international’ Christian ones, that was partly because native forms of these Christian names could also be perceived as singularly national. Simultaneously, increased social communication also nationalized name-giving by levelling out regional differences, but the shared cultural space of the nation has never wiped out social divergence in naming patterns. On the contrary, these patterns have constituted an important aspect of the way fashion works. The calendar, geography and name inheritance were also the factors traditionally governing name-giving in the territory under study. The calendar was the most important factor of the three, not only among Orthodox Romanians and Roman Catholics but among Calvinist Magyars as well.11 The traditional first names of Romanians, Magyars and German-speakers were overwhelmingly hagiographical and biblical in their origins; Romanian ones were based on a Byzantine, Greek-Slavic tradition, while Hungarian and German ones on Latin, Greek and Old Testament sources. Even though the pool of patron saints greatly overlapped, the forms differed between them and were apparently used as ethnic markers in the villages, although the purchase of marking typically remained local and did not add up to national patterns.12 On a related note, let me point out that the interchangeability between what today’s observer would see as variants of the same name was limited in the world of the village. Two sisters could be called Ilona and Elena (‘Helen’) or Maria and Marișca.13 Ionuț, Ionel, Ioniță, Nuț, Onișcă and Ianăș, all hypocoristics of Romanian Ioan/Iuon/Ion (‘John’) could behave as functionally unique, individuating their bearers within a given community.14 It also attests to this trend that after the establishment of the civil registry, parents often tried to give hypocoristic forms to their children in front of registrars. Romanian priests, who kept the official registers until 1894, commanded the expertise necessary to introduce more normative forms. As they had not recorded births and marriages with any consistency before the end of the eighteenth century, Romanian priests’ onomastic control was neither well established nor well coordinated. There is no evidence that their flock resented it, not only because it was less coercive, but also because Romanian peasants felt their ethnic churches incomparably closer culturally than the state. Some Romanian priests in Szatmár County grumbled when their parishioners chose what they understood as ‘Hungarian’ name variants for their children, but this only raised serious concerns if the parents insisted that these rather than their ‘proper Romanian’ equivalents should be entered into the books.15 Can the penetration of the national paradigm be measured by the spread of national given names? In general, the idea of quantifying nationalization seems awkward, since it is hard to think of any feature that can be boiled down

28  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

into a binary variable and that can adequately capture the range of the process. Whilst nationalism integrated ethnic and ethnicized non-ethnic segments of folk culture, peasants with a still essentially prenational mindset could also pick up new national symbols (such as the tricoloured) and adjust them to their needs. If anything, however, choices of national names probably stand closest to an ideal proxy for the spread of national ways of thinking among the peasantry. In the three ethnic first-name inventories studied, national names were certainly new additions and clearly did not fit well there. They originated in distinctly nationalist imaginaries, which made their cultural references unintelligible for the uninitiated. Even more to the point, the seriousness of the act of naming a child enhanced the cultural leap and the emotional investment that the choice of national names entailed, at least in an early phase. Certainly, national names cannot be used for drawing comparisons across national lines. There is no reason why their popularity would reach similar proportions in different national movements. Social and regional asynchronies in the spread of a particular set of national names, however, can point to different levels of openness to the nationalist ideology within a nation’s claimed constituency. Of course, not everyone from the rural nationalist vanguard gave national names to their children. But given the high rates of popularity that these names enjoyed among the three elites, and the uniform cultural patterns within the respective national movements, statistically significant regional differences should be put down to the reception of the nationalist message rather than to its varying regional understandings.

Latinate Names among Romanians The so-called Latinist paradigm, endorsed by the first generations of Romanian nationalists, fancied Romanians to be unmixed descendants of Emperor Trajan’s Roman colonists in Ancient Dacia, and it plotted out a course of national rebirth, including a radically puristic language-planning programme not unlike the ideal of Katharevousa designed for contemporary Greek. Romanian was to be brought closer to Latin on multiple levels. The shift from Cyrillic to Latin already served this purpose at mid century, and the so-called etymological orthographies, the first Latin-based writing systems created for Romanian, did not so much reflect the actual pronunciation as they highlighted the Latin etymologies of words. In fact, Latinism made a bid to steer pronunciation closer to the Latin model, and in particular to get rid of Romanian central vowels, which were allegedly the result of foreign influence. Words of non-Latin origin were similarly declared undesirable, and to replace them, language reformers churned out new coinages on a mass basis, drawing on Italian and French and, within the Carpathians, often inadvertently calquing German and Hungarian words.

Under Ancestral Masks: Name-Giving Nationalized   |  29

Latinism quickly became marginalized in the Kingdom of Romania during the 1870s, but it put down much stronger roots in Transylvania and Hungary, where literacy spread faster. As a result, while the spoken and written urban language was, in the next fifty years, swamped by French borrowings in Romania, a fair dose of Latinate creations survived into the interwar years on the other side of the Carpathians, where the separate institutional network also furthered this divergence.16 In conformity with the Latinist agenda, the forty-eight generation inaugurated a trend of Romanian Latinate first names referring back to Roman gentes (Claudiu, Liviu), prænomina (Caius, Marcu), common cognomina (Camil, Sabin), Roman emperors (Traian, Tiberiu), historical figures (Brutus, Cezar), mythical heroes (Romulus, Coriolan) and Latin authors (Ovidiu, Virgil), many of them also current in the literate classes of contemporary Italy. It was the cultural origins and not the particular referents of these names that mattered. They evoked a Latinity envisioned as national past, connected to the belief that the ancestors of nineteenth-century Romanians had borne such names. In resorting to them, parents made a bid to bring the new generation back to their true essence by a form of sympathetic magic derived from the earlier cult of patron saints. They presented name-bearers as quasi-Romans, not only to themselves, to the community and immediate outgroups, but also to Western public opinion, something that should deeply matter for all Romanians according to the leading public intellectual George Bariț: it can be in no way indifferent to our nation whether our children will in the future represent us to Western and Southern Europe under names like Bratu, Bucur, Ivan, Staicu, Paicu, Raicu, Vlad, Neacșa, Stana, Adelaida etc. or as Adrianu and Adriana, Aureliu and Aurelia, Antoniu and Antonia, Claudiu and Claudia, Corneliu and Cornelia, Iuliu and Iulia, Iustin and Iustina, Octavianu, -a, Octaviu, -a, Traian, Cecilia, Clara, Livia and a thousand other classical Romanian names.17

The social life of Ruthenian/Ukrainian national names in Galicia offers a close comparison to that of Romanian Latinate names in the intra-Carpathian space, and Jaroslav Hrytsak’s paper on them is a unique case study that probes the spread of new national names in nineteenth-century East Central Europe.18 The story began in 1848 in both contexts, but Ruthenian national names only gained popularity in the 1880s, even among the intelligentsia. They invoked rulers and princes of the Rurik dynasty and hetmans, and interestingly, their body partly overlapped with Polish national names. In the 1860s, Greek Catholic calendars adopted the two most popular resurrected names, Volodymyr and Ol’ha. As a novelty, however, the choice of such names remained little affected by the day on which the baby was born. Until the First World War, the trend remained largely urban, although priests did their best to popularize the new-old names in  the  countryside. As a successful example, Hrytsak mentions a village near

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Sokal/Sokal’ where Volodymyr and Ol’ha took root after the local landlord had acted as godfather to the first Volodymyr, the priest’s son, and the baptism was followed by a lavish banquet. Priests baptizing their children in pagan names and making propaganda for them to reluctant parishioners comes as a glaring incongruity. In 1819, the Constantinople patriarch still issued an encyclical to condemn the recent vogue of Hellenic first names.19 In the intervening time, however, several nationalist movements of the Byzantine cultural orbit had resurrected or coined ‘pagan’ names that lacked eponymous patron saints. Apart from these, Bariț could in 1872 hint at similar names among Magyars and Germans, and he added the argument that the Sinaxarion, the hagiographical compendium of the Orthodox Church, did not contain all the saints anyway.20 Romanians inside the Carpathians were divided equally between the Orthodox and the Uniate (Greek Catholic) churches. The two Romanian clergies made up the bulk of the Romanian intelligentsia, and their majority resonated with national ideas. They had a distinctly secular reason for embracing the cause of Latinate names; the idea that these names were more worthy of the ancient Latin glory followed from the early version of Romanian nationalism, and restoring them seemed to be putting things back on the normal track. Several names taken up by this Latinate trend, like Fabian, Felician, Silvestru, Terentie and Lucreția, had already enjoyed some currency in the Romanian peasantry, where they had entered through Uniate or Magyar channels.21 The Latinate names Valeriu, Aurel, Emilian, Lucian, Iulian, Ciprian, Longin and Claudiu even figured in the Sinaxarion (a circumstance that did not automatically prevent peasants’ opposition to them), while priests were able to moor Adrian, Cezar, Cornel, Marcel and Sabin to ecclesiastical names.22 Not least, there had always existed popular Romanian secular names unrelated to Byzantine hagiography (e.g. Florea, Bucur, Barbu, Mândra, Brândușa), with or without established equivalents among e­ cclesiastical names.23 Since many Latinate names did not occur among Magyars at all, and few of them were popular among them, they gave a welcome opportunity to the Romanian intelligentsia to emphasize their national otherness. Concurrently, learned Romanians also grew disaffected with given names that reflected Magyar noble tastes and were still popular in earlier generations, like Sigismund and Ladislau.24 To fully appreciate these choices as deliberate self-fashioning, let us also consider that the lay intelligentsia and thin leisurely class of Romanian birth were acculturated to the Magyar or German elites, intermarried with them, shared the same social spaces and often spoke Hungarian and German at home; despite this, they frequently faced a glass ceiling of stereotypes and confessional closure. This blocked mobility turned many an upper-class Romanian against the prevailing Magyar and German cultural patterns. Although this is what they achieved in practice, they did not consciously try to distinguish themselves from the Romanian peasantry by adopting new names.

Under Ancestral Masks: Name-Giving Nationalized   |  31

On the contrary, they sought to popularize these amongst the widest possible range of people. Not only did Romanian priests circulate lists of national names, but the nationalist association ASTRA also took action to recommend them to peasants in numerous popular lectures and brochures.25 Peasants, on the other hand, had manifold reasons to shun Latinate names. To begin with, most of these had no tradition of use in their ranks. In an early phase, parents could only hope that their children would later profit from a Latinate name as a form of symbolic capital if they destined them to enter higher schools; otherwise, it was feared such a name would become a handicap. Even parents who chose to mark their child with an uncommon name had a wide pool of traditional Christian first names at their disposal. They had little reason to resort to un-Christian Latinate names, which were also widely found improper because of their heathenness. Lacking a patron saint and a feast day in the calendar, their majority was not anchored anywhere in the course of the year, whereas peasants traditionally chose names whose feasts stood close to the child’s day of birth. Later, after Latinate names had become widespread among the elite, they were also shunned as being ‘lordish’ (domnesc).26 When providing data on the diffusion of Latinate names, scholars have often failed to specify whether the parents belonged to the village intelligentsia (priests, school teachers) or were peasants. Keener analyses have pointed to the late adoption of the trend by peasants, sometimes at the turn of the century or later. In 1875, in what would become Fogaras County the following year, a peasant boy was given a Latinate name  – this was the first such occurrence, and one not repeated until 1890.27 A synchronic study of first names in Purcăreți, a village alongside the Sebeș/Mühlbach/Sebes River, found that the three oldest villagers who bore Latinate names in 1957 had been born in 1913 and 1914.28 In the seven villages located upstream on the same river, such names only appeared in the 1920s.29 The upper-class origins of the trend were clear to the contemporaries. The Hungarian poet Endre Ady was apparently conscious of the class connotation of Romanian first names when he baptized the Romanian peasant characters of his short stories with such pedestrian ones as Von, Toader, Toma, Rafila, Zenobia and Maria, but the daughter of a Supreme Court judge Veturia and a priest Romulus. Traian was a popular Latinate name that contemporary Magyars felt was ‘exotic’; apart from Ady, who gave it to an elderly peasant, it also stirred the imagination of Margit Kaffka, another prominent writer of the same generation. From the three Romanian characters of her major novels, two are named Traian – the son of a village mayor and a servant in a convent.30 While Magyar political commentators did not miss the origins and message of Latinate names, they typically exaggerated their prevalence in the peasantry, particularly when trying to strike a pessimistic tone about the prospects of large-scale voluntary Magyarization. The Romanian-born, assimilationist

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ethnographer Grigore Moldovan/Moldován Gergely bemoaned what he saw as a warped situation: Before long, these upstarts will squeeze out the old, good-sounding Christian names. Even in the remotest mountain village, we already find the names Traian, Brutus, Aurelian, Valer, Cornel; Aurelia, Valeria, Veturia, Lucreția, etc. It is strange to my mind that such a religious, God-fearing people can so easily throw away the Christian names reminding them of saints and should take up lots of pagan names by baptism, assisted by the Church. Men in coats and women without aprons now despise names like Gligor, Maftei, Chifor, Gafta Todosia etc.31

Doubtless, the Independentist politician Miklós Bartha’s assessment about the political significance of Latinate names gave voice to a common sentiment in the Magyar elite when he concluded that ‘these Coriolans, Gracchuses, Traians, Suetoniuses and Brutuses would be much more honest and reliable people if they were still called Dumitru, Gavrilă, Niculae and Gligor’.32 In the rest of this chapter, I will supplement and check these opinions and partial findings against comprehensive hard data. In his quantitative-based analysis of naming fashions, the sociologist Stanley Lieberson credits large population databases, like the civil registry, for providing ‘an exceptional opportunity to study internal mechanisms of taste’ as a social phenomenon, and there is no reason why similar research should not be helpful in analysing a rural society in transition from premodern to modern  – rather different from Lieberson’s research object.33 The civil registry is not available from this era, but I can make use of two extraordinary databases, both created for historical research projects unrelated to the study of naming. My first dataset contains the matura exam takers between 1867 and 1914 who were either born in the territory studied or were born in unknown places but took the exam at a high school in the area.34 This student population makes up somewhere between 0.5 and 1 per cent of all people born in the area between the mid-1840s and the turn of the century. Whilst it comprises the elite in a broad sense, its contingent of peasant origins hardly represents the peasantry in its cross-section. Although a wide assortment of scholarship funds allowed for proportionally more needy Romanian boys to undertake higher studies than Magyars and Saxons, the upper layers of the peasantry are likely over-represented, inflating the share of Latinate names among peasant boys. For obvious reasons, the subset of matura takers does not go beyond the turn of the century. I have completed my Romanian data with the students enrolled in the interwar Romanian University of Kolozsvár/Cluj/Klausenburg, but this chunk contains an incomplete body of medical students and as good as no indication as to the occupation of fathers. Although the social make-up of Romanian university students in the first years of Romanian state sovereignty might not have been very different from that of earlier high-school student populations, the

Under Ancestral Masks: Name-Giving Nationalized   |  33

strong influx of students from the Old Kingdom invalidates a simple conflation of the two subsets. What is the choice of a Latinate name indicative of? It surely does not categorically show a more heightened national commitment on the side of parents as compared to all the rest who chose traditional names. But such peasant parents had overcome their aversions to symbolically challenge the solidarity of their close-knit communities. Latinate names had everything against them and only national ideology on their side. Before the First World War, their choice therefore implies identification with a national vision of history, which made the choice of a pagan name seem desirable and the investment of symbolic capital that it involved worthwhile, against all odds. The relative scarcity of cases will demonstrate how hard it was to cross that line and take that decision. I identified 15,610 students in the dataset as Romanian, including here all matura takers of the Orthodox and Greek Catholic confessions, except the gymnasia of the Banat and of Szatmárnémeti/Sătmar/Satmar/Sathmar, where I tried to sift out Serbs and Ruthenes based on their family and given names. While a certain number of Romanian students may have been lost that way, an unmistakably Latinate first name always gave away a student’s Romanian family, and this circumstance could minimally increase the percentage of Latinate names. The task was easier with interwar university students, as their mother tongues, nationalities and confessions are indicated in the records. Out of the altogether 15,610 Romanian students, the birthplace is known of 10,401 and the father’s occupation of 4,548. It is important to note that the latter data are geographically unevenly distributed, because only certain schools recorded it. Apart from Latinate names, the trend of Latinism also introduced new Latinate variants of traditional given names, leading to a duality between classical and vernacular forms, as were the pairs Basiliu ~ Vasile, Nicolau ~ Nicolae, Vicențiu ~ Vichentie, Emil ~ Emilian, Sabina ~ Savina.35 Unfortunately, I could not take such nuances into account as the sources reveal nothing about the actual name variants intended by the parents and used in the families. I was also faced with difficult choices when categorizing some first names in the dataset as to whether they were intended as Latinate.36 I excluded the ecclesiastical names Augustin, Clemente, Florian, Ilarian and Salvator, but I included a few rare names of Classical Greek origin.37 The widespread Latinate name Iuliu coincides with the Hungarian national name Gyula, which creates an awkward ambiguity because Hungarian, Romanian and Saxon high schools cross-translated given names in their documents. As will be shown later in the chapter, however, it is unlikely that more than a handful of Romanian students were actually baptized Gyula rather than Iuliu. In the chart on the following page, the distribution of Latinate names is indicated at six-year intervals according to the year of birth, and by social group, as determined by the occupation of the father. The curve representing sons of

34  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

Figure 1.1  The percentage of Latinate first names among Romanian students in time series, by family background. Figure created by the author.

middle- and upper-class fathers takes off in a steep climb, and by 1867 the rate of Latinate names has already reached 50 per cent in this cluster. They are later overtaken by sons of priests and elementary school teachers, whose curve rises to 60 per cent in the years between 1895 and 1901, the last interval from which class-specific data are available. These clusters are followed at a large distance by peasant boys, who, despite an upswing before 1873 and another after 1894, never approached to half the priests’ sons’ percentages, and remained closer to one-third of them. The single curve after 1901 represents the Romanian students of the interwar Ferdinand University. Since the university did not publish statistics about the social composition of its student body, it is hard to make sense of the apparent change. In the entire Romanian population, in which non-peasants only made up a tiny minority, it is fair to conclude that the overall diffusion of Latinate names was scarcely any quicker than among matura takers of peasant background. Indeed, if we assume that the upwardly mobile elements of the peasantry are over-represented in the sample, which seems highly probable, then the general trend is a much lazier slope. Map 1.1 shows regional differences in the popularity of Latinate names based on the students with known birthplaces. Hunyad County, the Apuseni Mountains, the Banat and the erstwhile District of Năsăud/Naszód/Naßendorf display the highest rates, while the Szeklerland, Bihar and Arad Counties display the lowest. With the possible exception of the high-scoring Hunyad and the low-scoring Arad Counties, these trends concur with contemporary stereotypes about the intensity of Romanian nationalist activities in the various regions. Owing to the missing data, the map cannot be broken down

Under Ancestral Masks: Name-Giving Nationalized   |  35

Map 1.1  Percentage of Latinate names among Romanian male students, by areas. Map created by the author.

to social groups, but the relatively few peasant boys baptized with Latinate names were distributed fairly evenly within the catchments of the schools that produced data on social background. The data show no preference for Latinate names endowed with patron saints. Except for Traian, which was relatively more frequent among the peasantry than among other groups, the top five Latinate male names were the same as in the elite: Aurel, Victor, Emil and Cornel. There is similarly no difference between the proportion of Latinate names among Uniates (28.6 per cent) and Orthodox (28.7 per cent). This is surprising, considering that Latinism as a language-planning paradigm arose from Greek Catholic circles before 1848 and its popularity lasted longer in the Greek Catholic clergy than among the Orthodox; however, from a strictly linguistic standpoint, a reader from Romania would have found Transylvanian Orthodox publications as outlandishly Latinate as Uniate ones at the eve of the War.38 The data also show that Latinate names were significantly more frequent among those Romanian students who took the matura exam in a Hungarian or Saxon high school (30.1 per cent) than among the matura takers of Romanian gymnasia (25.1 per cent). Again, owing to the missing data, it is impossible to tell whether this gap had to do with the different social structures of the Romanian students attending the two types of school. At any rate, this curious finding supports the

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general impression that sending one’s boy to a Hungarian or Saxon high school was not considered a transgression of norms in Romanian intellectual circles. While the student database offers a bird’s eye view on the peasantry, my second database, the Historical Population Database of Transylvania (HPDT), a demographic project still in the making as of this writing, gives an in-depth glimpse into the naming practices of some four dozen rural communities across Transylvania.39 The parish registers digitized as parts of the project confirm the great variability between villages as to the time when Latinate names appeared among peasants, but it was typically at some point between the 1870s and the 1900s.40 Usually, priests, schoolmasters, shopkeepers and craftsmen were the first to baptize their children with them, but they were often entered into the record in parentheses. If there were villages where they did not become properly established before the War, there were also two localities where the trend had already begun in the 1850s.41 Neither had a one-sided agricultural character – Görgényszentimre/Gurghiu was a market centre with significant home industry, and Marosújvár/Uioara a salt-mining town – and both were linguistically and confessionally mixed. Servants at aristocratic manors were another social group who picked up Latinate names early on. These latter are important findings, which underline what I hinted at in connection with the Romanian elite. Like the latter, domestic servants and the miners and craftsmen in case daily mingled with Magyars. Not only were they the first to encounter nationalism at close quarters, but its message also reaffirmed to them that their neighbours belonged to an alien culture and society. In this light, the early espousal of Latinate names by these groups was a strategy of ethnic boundary maintenance which, as might be expected on the basis of the Barthian model, can become a matter of urgency in contact situations. But the relevance of everyday contact with Hungarian or German-speakers as an explanatory factor stops in this early period, and it cannot be generalized for the peasantry. The two highest-scoring regions in Map 1.1, the Apuseni Mountains and Hunyad County, were overwhelmingly Romanian-speaking. On the evidence of the HPDT, the most frequently chosen Latinate female names were Victoria, Aurelia, Valeria and Cornelia, all of which had popular male counterparts. Upper-class girls, however, are all but lacking from my student dataset as very few girls took the matura exam. To somewhat make up for their absence, I have processed the first names of students at Romanian girls’ civil schools from every tenth school year between 1887/8 and 1917/8 inclusive.42 Only one such institution existed in 1887/8, maintained by the ASTRA in Hermannstadt/Sibiu/Nagyszeben, with a Greek Catholic one in Belényes/Beiuș joining it nine years later. Since no data are given about students’ families, one can only speculate that fewer of these girls came from peasant backgrounds than among matura-taking boys. I ignored the home-schooled and non-Hungarian citizens.

Under Ancestral Masks: Name-Giving Nationalized   |  37

Table 1.1  Trends of first names in Romanian girls’ civil schools. Entire sample Latinate names* Borrowings of modern   Western forms

1887/8

1897/8

1907/8

1917/8

75 32 (42.7%) 16 (21.3%)

122   39 (32.0%)   26 (21.3%)

213   91 (42.7%)   53 (24.9%)

254 118 (46.5%)   37 (14.6%)

* From the names occurring in the student body, I considered as Latinate names the following: Angela, Aurelia, Aurora, Bibiana, Blanca, Cecilia, Clelia, Constanța, Cornelia, Emilia, Ersilia, Fabiola, Florentina, Hortensia, Iustina, Laura, Leontina, Letiția, Livia, Lucia, Lucreția, Minerva, Octavia, Olimpia, Olivia, Otilia, Petronella, Sabina, Silvia, Valeria, Veturia, Victoria, Virginia and Volumnia.

A comparison here yields several interesting points. Modern Western borrowings, all but absent from the male dataset, had established themselves early with upper-class Romanian girls. Indeed, several popular female names were taken from Italian, making it hard to tell which names had been intended as Latinate. Western female names were by that time also widespread among the Romanian elite beyond the Carpathians, where, according to contemporary accounts, they overtook names of Roman matronæ in popularity after the turn of the century.43 Their numbers here attest to an earlier upsurge of modern name fashion in the domain of female names and, by implication, to more broad-mindedness among nationalist families in presenting women as national members. There were two striking differences in this respect between the two sides of the Carpathians. In Romania unlike in Hungary, Western names were also given to boys, and the pools of female names differed greatly. Just like in their reading habits, Romanians in the Kingdom of Hungary tended to orient themselves according to German rather than French models.44 Another new trend of first names after the turn of the century, more pronounced with boys than with girls, drew inspiration from medieval and early modern Romanian history and from folklore. Many of these names went back to Slavic and they had been typically upheld by the most traditional part of the peasantry. The names that can be grouped here (e.g. Mircea, Radu, Vlad) survived in the southernmost tracts of Transylvania among the peasantry, and it was in the same region that non-peasants progressively started to adopt them after 1888, until their popularity spilt out to other areas at around the turn of the century.45 Continuously on the rise, their share reached 2.8 per cent in the last six-year interval (between 1909 and 1916) of my student dataset. Just as with the earlier trend of Latinate names, this taste for old peasant names emerged from the upper classes. This new taste in name-giving can be regarded as a reflection of the broadly vernacularist linguistic ideology and language-reform paradigm that brought

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the demise of Latinism. Heralding the change was the Iași circle of the Junimea, which, thanks to the superior talent and erudition of its members, quickly established its views as the new mainstream about language and culture. Junimism valued organic development and spontaneity in language, put peasant speech on a pedestal, rehabilitated loanwords in so far as people’s use sanctified them, and rebranded Romanian writing by introducing a so-called ‘phonetic’ (in fact, phonemic) orthography. Later ideological currents, most notably Nicolae Iorga’s variety of integral nationalism, might have little in common with Junimism, but they shared the same fascination with peasant culture as a repository of authentic Romanian values. Should a comparable database from contemporary Romania exist, it could round out my analysis of Romanian name-giving. Significantly lower rates of Latinate names among the extra-Carpathian elite would underscore the role that opposition to the Hungarian regime could play in boosting their popularity. In any event, the above results confirm two important things about Latinate names. First, their dispersion was slow among the peasantry, compared to the instant popularity they enjoyed among the elite. At the same time, there can be no doubt that they had gained a real foothold among the Romanian masses by the turn of the century. Contrasted with the Ruthenian case as presented by Hrytsak, their diffusion may even seem like a true success story. Second, the rate of the number of children receiving Latinate names continued to increase, even after the Latinist reform entered a decline. It does not transpire from the statistics, but certain Latinate first names indeed lost favour after the 1870s, most notably double names like Tit Liv, as certainly also did the imitation of the trinomial Latin nomenclature. In ‘Revolution in Deceitville’ (Revoluția din Pîrlești), a satirical piece from 1873, the Romanian writer Ioan Slavici already ridiculed the figure of the flag-waving small-town power broker by calling him Iuniu Iuliu Marcu Brutu Catone August Spulberu, while in Marcu Tulliu Pițulă, the humourist A.P. Bănuț’s creation, an unseemly family name (Rom. pițulă ‘farthing’) produces an effect of bathos next to an evocation of Cicero.46 This slight reorientation of public tastes did not affect the most popular Latinate names, however. Although the data of interwar university students show a slight downward term in their frequency, the scattered evidence about their late adoption by the peasantry suggests that the preference for Latinate names grew unabated until the end of the era, and probably afterwards.

Historical and Pagan Names among Magyars To undertake an analysis of the spread of Hungarian national names, I decided to pare down the category of Magyar students in my first dataset to the two confessional groups that were exclusively Magyar: Calvinists and Unitarians,

Under Ancestral Masks: Name-Giving Nationalized   |  39

between them accounting for half of the Magyars in the area. This is not only because of the multitude of non-Magyar or assimilating parents among Roman Catholics, who could not be filtered out without running into serious inconsistencies, but also because the majority of Roman Catholic gymnasia did not keep records about the birthplaces of their students, making it impossible to eliminate those who had been born elsewhere. Hungarian national names had a slightly older and better-established tradition than Romanian Latinate ones, but their popularity never rose to such heights in any social group.47 I think it proper to distinguish two groups of names here, both of which owed their ascendancy to the Romantic nationalism of the decades flanking 1848. The first group consists of names vaguely drawn from medieval Hungarian history, which either had eponymous patron saints or were matched with one  – I will call these ‘historical names’. The popular male names Ákos, Aladár, Béla, Dezső, Elemér, Géza, Gyula, Imre, Jenő, Kálmán and Tibor belong here. Surprisingly, no unambiguous, non-pagan historical female name can be cited, unless Margit and Gizella are included here on account of their medieval Hungarian dynastic connections. With ‘pagan names’ bereft of patron saints, parents upped the ante. They gained acceptance in high-status groups, but even there, only three such male names became popular during the era: Zoltán, Árpád and Attila, after two pagan Magyar chieftains and a Hunnic ruler, and the first one also the protagonist of a much-loved Romantic novel. But parents committed to such names often tried to exhibit originality in taste, and reinvented a long list of male and female

Figure 1.2  Hungarian historical and pagan names among Calvinist and Unitarian students in time series, by family background. Figure created by the author.

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names taken from pre-Christian Magyar or Hunnic history and myths. Just like with Latinate Romanian names, this category is more ambiguous with regard to women. Etelka, originally the pagan princess character of a late eighteenthcentury literary hit, was later matched with the Christian name Adelheid. Jolán and Sarolta may have Hungarian etymologies from pre-Christian times, but they can also be treated as the borrowings of Yolanda and Charlotte. On the chart, I merged the two categories of male national names in the case of the two lower social clusters, because of the diminutive numbers of pagan names in both. The social trends seem very similar to those witnessed among Romanians, only on a lower scale. Geographically, there was no difference in the popularity of either historical or pagan names between the Szeklerland, the rest of Transylvania and Eastern Hungary (writ small). A comparison can also be drawn with Magyars in core-Hungary, thanks to Mihály Hajdú’s statistics on various Hungarian-speaking regions and towns. Although Protestant churches did not restrain their believers from giving any name they liked to their children, it seems that even Calvinist peasants resisted the vogue of pagan names. These were almost completely absent from the rural areas that Hajdú examined. By contrast, several historical names became popular among peasants during the second half of the century. Up from zero, Gyula, a name drawn from the early history of Magyars and matched with Iulius, skyrocketed between 1871 and 1895 to become the second most common given name in a tie in the multi-confessional, but linguistically homogeneous West Hungarian region of the Őrség, and the single most common one in the Calvinist peasant town of Békés on the Central Hungarian Grand Plain.48 For Transylvania, the HPDT confirms that both types of Hungarian national names were largely chosen by the elite and the socially mobile: craftsmen, miners, public employees and estate managers. The sole exception is Székelykocsárd/ Cucerdea, an important railway junction, where the native Calvinist peasantry probably adopted the names Etelka and Árpád from railway employee families as early as the 1880s. Again, I find it significant that the Magyar peasants of Székelykocsárd lived side by side not only with railwaymen and their families but also with a sizeable local minority of Romanians. In an 1869 contribution to the journal Familia, the folklorist Atanasie Marian Marienescu turned to his female readers, scolding Romanian parents who named their children Árpád and other foreign, pagan names, and posed the rhetorical question of whether they had ever heard about ‘pure Romanian names’ given to Magyar, German or Serb children.49 Certainly, non-Romanian families might choose names for their children that coincided with Latinate ones, but rather less likely with the purpose of giving a Romanian national name. Hungarian national names also occurred in assimilated and confessionally mixed families, and sporadically passed to Romanian peasants by cultural transfer. None of these added up to much, however, even combined.

Under Ancestral Masks: Name-Giving Nationalized   |  41

The handful of male examples in my student dataset prior to Marienescu’s article who bore such markedly Hungarian names were born into upper-class Hungarian cultural milieus, and four of them into Aromanian families assimilated as Magyars.50 Similarly, the first daughter of MP and subprefect Iosif Ambruș with a Magyar gentry woman was baptized Melinda after the female hero of Bánk bán, the trademark historical play of Hungarian Romantic literature.51 Few Romanian peasants took up industrial work in the cities. One of them, a soap factory worker from the Banat, spent the millennium years with his wife, a Calvinist peasant girl from the Grand Plain, in rented rooms in the Ferencváros/ Franzstadt district of Budapest. Getting under the spell of Hungarian national names, they named their children Nándor, Margit, Jolán, Kálmán, Etelka and Attila. The last one was among the few Attilas to receive the baptism in the Romanian Orthodox Church, and later in life, he became the great Hungarian poet Attila József.52 Some Romanians also borrowed Hungarian national names from Magyar neighbours, but rarely among the subsistence peasantry. In salt-mining Marosújvár, twenty-three babies were entered into the Greek Catholic register under such names between 1846 and 1914, and while some were born to mixed couples, for at least five of them both parents were Romanian Uniate.53 The Orthodox of the hamlets around Săcal/Szakál, on the western boundaries of the Romanian-speaking lands, picked up certain Hungarian national names from the Magyars in the village, in particular, Etelka. They also started to adopt Latinate names, but Hungarian pagan names outnumbered these by twentythree ­newborn children to seven between 1874 and 1913.54 The peasant nobles of the Hațeg Basin constitute a case apart. Clinging to their ‘Hungarian’ identity in the old, estate-based sense, no matter whether they spoke any Hungarian and no matter whether they were Calvinists or belonged to a Romanian confession, they seized on to the new Hungarian national names as ethnic markers to distinguish their offspring from their former serf neighbours.55 It is worth mentioning at last that for a more significant Hungarian influence on the contemporary Romanian elite’s first names, one must look elsewhere. Notably, in Latinate names, c was regularly pronounced /ts/ before front vowels, which ran counter to the extra-Carpathian norm but corresponded to the Hungarian pronunciation of Latin.56

Germanic Names among Saxons National names dominated the Saxon elite’s preferences to an even more striking degree than those of Romanians.57 The Saxon contingent of the student dataset is seriously incomplete – around half of Saxon students from the era are m ­ issing – but this trend is so robust that the missing data would hardly invalidate it.58

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Figure 1.3  First names of Transylvanian Saxon students, by family background. Figure created by the author.

Among sons of priests, elementary school teachers and middle- or upper-class parents, as many as 65.5 per cent received names of Germanic origin.59 The most popular of these were Adolf, Albert, Alfred, Carl/Karl, Erich, Ernst, Friedrich/ Fritz, Gustav, Heinrich/Heinz, Hermann, Ludwig, Otto, Richard, Rudolf/Rolf and Wilhelm. The Saxon elite did not initiate this trend but adopted it from coreGermany, where the popularity of Germanic names had taken off under the Napoleonic Wars. Another, at least as notable a feature, cannot be convincingly proven based on the dataset, not so much because of the large amount of missing data as because of the social exclusivism of Saxon gymnasia  – from the 893 Saxon students whose social background was recorded, only 53 came from peasant families. Fortunately, the philologist Adolf Schullerus analysed first names at the turn of the century in three Saxon villages that he presented as typical, and the sociologists Georg and Renate Weber in another one.60 In all these villages, peasants bore biblical and ecclesiastical names of Greek, Hebrew and Latin origin (Johann, Michael, Georg, Martin, Andreas and Matthias for men, and Anna, Katharina, Sara and Sophia for women), and there was little if any trace of Germanic names outside the intelligentsia.61 Out of the fifty-three peasant boys in the dataset, only five bore Germanic names. This wide gulf between the elite and the peasantry, together with the stable rates of Germanic names among the former throughout the timespan (except for some coming and going of certain names), strongly imply that beyond displaying national loyalty, these names also functioned as class markers. The percentage of Germanic names steadily averaged around 35 per cent in the entire student

Under Ancestral Masks: Name-Giving Nationalized   |  43

cluster, and between 50 and 60 per cent in the upper bourgeoisie. The preferences of the Transylvanian Saxon elite broadly tally with Munich Protestants between the 1840s and 1873, with Berlin gymnasia in the second half of the century and with a snapshot of the Wandsbeck Gymnasium near Hamburg from 1891.62 In comparison with three smaller Protestants communities from the German Empire that have been examined in the literature, the Saxon elite even appears as relatively early adopters.63 The trend of national names was the most salient new feature among given names, which I identified as the hinge between earlier, custom-based baby naming and the fashion-based paradigm of the twentieth century. I have presented in relative isolation the developments of male national names among Romanians, who have taken centre stage in this chapter, among Calvinist and Unitarian Magyars and Transylvanian Saxons, although influences between the three groups also called for cross-references. I have found a highly unequal distribution of national names between the elite and the peasantry in all three subpopulations, and the sharp rift between the first-name choices of the Saxon elite and those of the peasantry deserves particular attention. In the Romanian and the Magyar subpopulations, which allow for time-series analysis, the popularity curve of national names seems to have passed its peak in the elite before the First World War, while in the peasantry it was still very much on the rise, which corroborates the trickle-down hypothesis. Romanian peasants were initially and for a long time demonstrably unresponsive to the tide of Latinate names, although their priests and schoolmasters tried to set an example and popularize them. While the data do not allow for comparisons across ethnolinguistic boundaries, the spatial differences in the spread of Latinate names nevertheless reveal asynchronies in the process of nationalization. Another solid finding, namely the overall very similar trends among Greek Catholics and Orthodox Romanians, together with their continuing rise after the decline of the Latinate norm, shows that Latinate names got detached from the dynamics of the Latinist paradigm that originally inspired them. Upper-class Romanian parents followed different strategies in naming their sons and daughters. There appears to have been a sizeable group in the student body of Romanian female civil schools with first names borrowed from modern Western languages, primarily from German. This group of girls’ names had its male counterpart in the baby-naming trends of contemporary Romania, but not among Romanians in Hungary, which may indicate that a national vanguard highly alert to the symbolic value of given names was still more indulgent towards girls than boys. Here one may recall that, in a host of settings, it was easier for affluent Romanian girls to find suitable Magyar or German marriage partners than Romanian ones. The question remains open as to whether the smaller proportions that the trend assumed among Magyars had to do with the politically dominant position

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of Hungarian nationalism; and, a related question that would be theoretically easier to answer, how far political resistance could contribute to the spectacular success of such names in Romanian and Saxon elite quarters.

Translatability and Borrowing A firm tradition among the social and cultural elites of Dualist Hungary treated non-Hungarian given names with known Hungarian cognates – in other words, names pointing back to the same biblical or early Christian figures – as translatable.64 This translatability ultimately sprang from earlier diglossia in Latin, and corresponded to the wider European norm. Translation could take four directions in the public sphere. The Romanian press usually referred to notable Magyars by Romanian or Romanianized first names.65 In the same way, the Hungarian press regularly Magyarized the first names of prominent ethnic Romanians, and somewhat less consistently those of the lower classes.66 By default, educated Romanians and Saxons also readily used the Hungarian counterparts of their first names in Hungarian speech and writing.67 In turn-of-the-century photographs, shop signs are sometimes seen displaying the shopkeeper’s name in multiple variants. There is also some evidence that Magyar politicians, public intellectuals and entrepreneurs, on the rare occasions that they presented themselves in Romanian contexts, were not above referring to themselves by Romanian first names.68 They proceeded similarly when writing in German. Indeed, until surprisingly late, translating first names was standard fare in major Western languages.69 Beyond their easy-going attitude towards the translation of first names in the private sphere and in civil society, members of the minority nationalist intelligentsias also seldom challenged the official practice of adapting minority first names until this practice became enforced on the entire population, systematically affecting their kin peasantry. Even after the Hungarian state politicized the question of first names, it did not immediately transform the personal habits of the ethnic middle classes. In the case of Romanian nationalists, this contrasted dramatically with their increasingly frequent complaints about the common Hungarian spelling of Romanian family names in official documents. But the conversion of given names was no longer an uncontentious practice on the world scene, as becomes clear from a pamphlet by the great Graz-based linguist Hugo Schuchardt, who criticized the new Hungarian law on the civil registry on this count.70 For Schuchardt, a regular contributor to scholarly literature in Hungarian, Hungarian high culture represented an outlier in contemporary Europe with its excessive conversion of first names. He used the example of the celebrity linguist Max Müller, whose name even Italians revered enough not to alter, but who was known as Müller Miksa in contemporary Hungary.71

Under Ancestral Masks: Name-Giving Nationalized   |  45

Illustration 1.1  The shopfront of Dimitrie Proca’s grocery in bilingual Satulung/ Hosszúfalu (Brassó County), early twentieth century. From the collection of Zempléni Múzeum, Szerencs. Published with permission.

Apart from earning vicious snide comments from Jenő Rákosi, the father of Hungarian imperialism, who styled him Sukhárt Hugó in an unconventional and high-handed manner,72 Schuchardt’s paper also drew more serious answers on the columns of the linguistic review Magyar Nyelvőr.73 Because of the discursive nature of the matter, however, neither Schuchardt nor his Magyar opponents based their opinions on anything more solid than their subjective generalizations of contemporary European habits, and both opposing arguments stood on thin ice. It seems that Schuchardt anticipated an ongoing change when he insisted that the first names of foreign people were kept in the original in the German public sphere, while another contributor to the debate, his Czernowitz colleague Theodor Gartner, still found it natural to be called Gartner Tivadar in Hungarian journals.74 The non-elites of Hungary sided with Schuchard in treating first names as untranslatable, and thus a Magyar peasant called Jancsi likely remained Jancsi (Ioanci) rather than becoming Iuon in his contact with Romanian-speakers or after settling in a Romanian-speaking environment  – and vice versa for a Romanian peasant. When in 1896 the Magyar Nyelvőr submitted a survey question to its readers asking them whether peasants translated given names in multilingual areas, all five respondents answered in the negative; by their telling, peasants usually used the native forms.75 As regards Romanians, most of them lived in largely monolingual areas, not only speaking no Hungarian or German

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but also having relatively little general experience in crossing languages and at best a patchy knowledge of the Hungarian or German first name corpus. It may sound paradoxical, but peasants’ unfamiliarity with given names across ethnolinguistic boundaries can help to interpret the currency of some diminutive forms borrowed from Hungarian among Romanians until the First World War, and sometimes even afterwards. The Romanian nationalist elite also made ample use of Hungarian hypocoristics in the private sphere, but in completely different ways. They either addressed one another by pet names from high school or, as proficient bilinguals, freely borrowed from Hungarian resources to strike a jovial tone. Thus politician Alexandru Mocsonyi regularly addressed newspaper editor Vincențiu Babeș as Lieber Vityó in his letters (signed as Sándor, the Hungarian equivalent of his first name), fellow-Romanian friends called politician and lawyer Iuliu Maniu Gyulca or Gyuluca, his comrade Vasile Goldiș Laci, while Brassó/ Brașov/Kronstadt lawyer Alexandru Străvoiu also went by the name Sanyi, and Belényes lawyer Paul Pop as Pap Palcsi in Romanian circles.76 There is no hint that Romanian peasants did anything of the kind in this era. Some Hungarian name variants, on the other hand, were incorporated in the Romanian peasant onomasticon as full-fledged loans, where they could behave in an ethnically neutral way to the extent that people were not even aware of their origins. Romanian peasants were not borrowing when they chose such names as Ianăș (from Hun. János ‘John’) and Juja (from Hun. Zsuzsa ‘Susan’).77 On this point, they contrasted not only with the Romanian elite but with Transylvanian Saxons as well, who only made occasional and derogatory use of Hungarian diminutive forms among them.78 Suggestively, the only set of contemporary written records known to me where given names could have been translated, but were consistently written out in their original forms, emanated from the traditional artisanate, and it probably transmitted a plebeian sense of limited translatability. The parallel, German and Hungarian records of the Brassó bootmakers’ guild, conducted between 1871 and 1884, referred to master bootmakers from the other linguistic group under their native names, preserving not only the mother-tongue forms but the native name order as well, opposite in the two languages; thus, ‘Friedrich Reich’ (not ‘Reich Frigyes’) was the regular form for German bootmakers in the Hungarian version and ‘Konya Balázs’ (not ‘Blasius Konya’) for Magyars in the German one.79 The strict opposition of the Hungarian and German name order could only make sense in a city, however, where family name took on its full significance. As a matter of fact, it also indicates the official roots of the binomial naming pattern in the area that rural Transylvanian Saxons and the Romanians of Eastern Hungary and Northern Transylvania showed a leaning for the Hungarian name order and put their family names before their given names. Thus it seems that it was the elite who comfortably switched between various national versions of their given names, somewhat against their principles, and

Under Ancestral Masks: Name-Giving Nationalized   |  47

the peasantry who did not make use of such equivalences. This result will gain significance in Chapter 8, where I shall turn to the Hungarian state’s incursion into the field, which definitively politicized the matter.

Notes   1. W. van Langendonck, ‘Do Proper Names Have an Etymological Meaning?’, in J. Tort i Donada and M. Montaguti i Montagut (eds), Names in Daily Life: Proceedings of the XXIV ICOS International Congress of Onomastic Sciences (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya Departament de Cultura, 2014), 172–76.   2. S. Lieberson, A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), XVI.   3. M. Hajdú, Általános és magyar névtan: személynevek [General and Hungarian onomastics: personal names] (Budapest: Osiris, 2003), 402–6.   4. Lieberson, 66.   5. Hajdú, 407–9.   6. Ph. Besnard and G. Desplanques, Un Prénom pour toujours: La Cote des prénoms hier, aujourd’hui et demain (Paris: Balland, 1986), 26.   7. S. Pivato, Il nome e la storia: Onomastica e religioni politiche nell’Italia contemporanea [The name and history: onomastics and political religions in contemporary Italy] (Bologna: il Mulino, 1999), 45–46, 56–57, 66–67 and 169.   8. Besnard and Desplanques, 50; and Lieberson, 14–15.   9. D. Gürpınar, ‘What is in a Name? The Rise of Turkic Male Names in Turkey (1908–38)’, Middle Eastern Studies 48 (2012), 689–706; A. Hussar, ‘Changes in Naming Patterns in 19th Century Estonia: Discarding the Names of Parents and Godparents’, in W. Ahrens, Sh. Embleton and A. Lapierre (eds), Names in Multi-Lingual, Multi-Cultural and MultiEthnic Contact (Toronto: York University, 2009), 790–94; and George Kurman, The Development of Written Estonian (Bloomington: Indiana University, Research Center for the Language Sciences, 1968), 36. 10. P. Salaberri, ‘Politics and Onomastics in the Basque Country: Historical and Current Situation’, Onoma 45 (2010), 225. 11. V. Todinca and M. Bulc, Lumea satului românesc în răspunsuri la chestionarele Muzeului Limbii Române din Cluj (Zona Bihorului) [The world of the Romanian village in the responses to the questionnaire of the Museum of the Romanian Language in Kolozsvár/ Cluj/Klausenburg (Bihor/Bihar region)] (Cluj-Napoca: Mega, 2012), 382 and 387; S. Retegan, Drumul greu al modernizării: un veac din istoria unui sat transilvănean; Cuzdrioara, 1820–1920 [The hard road of modernization: a century from the history of a Transylvanian village; Cuzdrioara/Kozárvár, 1820–1920] (Cluj-Napoca: Argonaut, 2011), 58; and I. Cipu, Fragmentarium făgețean 1733–1920 [Fragmentarium from Făget/ Facsád/Fatschet: 1733–1920] (Lugoj: Nagard, 2008), Vol. 1, 43. 12. M. Gálffy, ‘Keresztneveink becéző alakjai a Borsavölgyén’ [The hypocoristic forms of our given names in the Borșa/Borsa Valley], in Az Erdélyi Tudományos Intézet évkönyve 1944 (Kolozsvár: Minerva, 1945), 64. 13. M. Țic, P. Balaj and P. Vasiu Verghelia, Cronica de la Ilia-Mureșană [Chronicle of Ilia/ Marosillye] (Deva: Călăuza, 2005), 268 and 270.

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14. I. Pop, ‘Maghiarisarea  – în justiție’ [Magyarization  – in the judiciary], Libertatea 13, 26 July 1902; and D. Loșonți, ‘Diminutifs et hypocoristiques utilisés dans la commune Bonțida, Département de Cluj’, Studii și cercetări de onomastică și lexicologie 7 (2014), 92–93. 15. D. Lostun, ‘Tipologia documentelor curente în administrația parohială în Biserica grecocatolică din a doua jumătate a secolului al XIX-lea’ [Typology of recurrent documents in the parish administration of the Greek Catholic Church in the second half of the nineteenth century], Satu Mare: Studii și comunicări, ser. Istoria–Etnografie–Artă–Restaurare– Conservare 32(2) (2016), 38. 16. Arguably the most informative books on the Romanian language reform to date are D. Doina, Limbă și cultură: română literară între 1880 și 1920, cu privire specială la Transilvania și Banat [Language and culture: literary Romanian between 1880 and 1920; with special attention to Transylvania and the Banat] (Timișoara: Facla, 1980), and I. Gheție, Baza dialectală a românei literare [The dialect basis of literary Romanian] (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1975), both written from a regional perspective. 17. G. Bariț, ‘Despre numele proprie, gentilitie, geografice, topografice, straine si romane’ [On proper, gentilic, geographical and topographical names, foreign and Romanian], Transilvani’a 5 (1872), 4. 18. J. Hrytsak, ‘History of Names: A Case of Constructing National Historical Memory in Galicia, 1830–1930s’, Jahrbücher für Geschichte Osteuropas 49 (2001), 163–77. I give thanks to Maciej Janowski for calling my attention to this paper. 19. P. Mackridge, Language and National Identity in Greece, 1766–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 140. 20. Bariț, ‘Despre numele proprie’, 4. 21. Al. Cristureanu, Aspecte ale onomasticii românești în secolele al XIX-lea și al XX-lea, influența curentului „latinist” în domeniul numelor proprii [Aspects of Romanian onomastics in the 19th and 20th centuries, the influence of the ‘Latinist’ current in the realm of proper names] (Cluj-Napoca: Napoca Star, 2006), 34; and Retegan, Drumul greu al modernizării, 57. 22. Cristureanu, Aspecte, 31. My source of information about contemporary Orthodox ecclesiastical names is Gh. Timus, Dicționar aghiografic cuprindênd pe scurt viețile sfinților [Hagiographic dictionary, including a short life of the saints] (Bucharest: Tipografia cărților bisericești, 1898). 23. I. Popovici, Rumænische Dialekte, Vol. 1, Die Dialekte der Muntenı˘ und Pădurenı˘ im Hunyader Komitat (Halle: Niemeyer, 1905), 62–63. 24. T. Mager, Ținutul Hălmagiului: monografie [The Land of Hălmagiu/Nagyhalmágy: a monograph], Vol. 3, Cadrul istoric [The historical framework] (Arad: Tipografiei diecezane, 1937), 39 and 48–49. 25. Șt. Pașca, Nume de persoane și nume de animale în țara Oltului [Personal and animal names in the Land of Făgăraș] (Bucharest: Academia Română, 1936), 41; and Cristureanu, Aspecte, 22. 26. Pașca, 40; and S. Pușcariu, Spița unui neam din Ardeal [The descent of a Transylvanian family] (Cluj-Napoca: Clusium, 1998), 46. 27. Pașca, 41. 28. Al. Cristureanu and A. Stan, ‘Prenumele locuitorilor din satul Purcăreți, raionul Sebeș, în 1957’ [First names of the inhabitants of Purcărești village, Sebeș Rayon, in 1957], Cercetări de lingvistică 5 (1960), 107.

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29. A. Stan, ‘Frecvența numelor de persoană masculine în Valea Sebeșului’ [The frequency of male first names in the Sebeș Valley], Cercetări de lingvistică 2 (1957), 267–80. 30. The short stories of Ady’s that I am referring to are A dumbravai lóvásár, Szelezsán Rákhel kísértete, A Zenóbia faluja, Benesán Mária zarándoklásai, Veturia asszony halála and A Puskásné Krisztusa. See e.g. Endre Ady, Összes novellái [Complete short stories] (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1977); Margit Kaffka in English, Colours and Years, trans. G.F. Cushing (Budapest: Corvina, 1999); and The Ant Heap: A Novel, trans. Ch. Franklin (London: Marion Boyars, 1995). 31. G. Moldován, ‘Alsófehér vármegye román népe’ [The Romanian populace of Alsó-Fehér County], in Alsófehér vármegye monographiája [Monograph of Alsó-Fehér County], Vol. 1/2 (Nagy-Enyed: Nagyenyedi, 1899), 760. 32. M. Bartha, Összegyüjtött munkái [Collected works], Vol. 3 (Budapest: Benkő, 1910), 484. Originally published in 1900. 33. Lieberson, XIII–XV. 34. The prosopographical database from which I derived my set of data was created in the framework of the research project ELITES08 (‘Culturally Composite Elites, Regime Changes and Social Crises in Multi-Ethnic and Multi-Confessional Eastern Europe: The Carpathian Basin and the Baltics in Comparison – cc. 1900–1950’, directed by Victor Karády), funded from the European Research Council Advanced Team Leadership Grant nr. 230518. Its administrators are Victor Karády and Péter Tibor Nagy. I am indebted to Prof. Victor Karády for making it available for the purpose of my research. Missing are the matura takers of the Saxon Lutheran gymnasia of Bistritz/Bistrița/Beszterce, Mediasch/ Mediaș/Medgyes and Schäßburg/Sighișoara/Segesvár, and the communal gymnasia of Petrozsény/Petroșani/Petroschen (from the 1905/6 school year onwards) and Orawitz/ Oravița Montană/Oravicabánya (from the year 1913/14). This translates into a very large quantity of missing data (around half of the student body) for Saxons, but the figure is much smaller for Romanians and negligible for Magyars. A slight minority of students whose birth years are unknown were assigned the means of the given high school cohorts’ known birth years by the developers of the original database. Social ranking was based on the occupation of fathers, given only in a minority of cases, but it was a minority large enough to allow significant conclusions. Unfortunately, this variable does not reflect the situation at the time of a student’s birth, but when the student was enrolled into the first year, at least ten years later. This difference, however, is hardly important in the case of peasant fathers. Occupations were categorized by the developers at several levels, which I further simplified for the sake of the present analysis. 35. Cristureanu, Aspecte, 30 and 32. 36. Similar difficulties arise with delimiting the inventory of French revolutionary first names: R. Bange, ‘Les Prénoms de l’an II et les autres: typologie des attributions de prénoms dans la France en révolution’, Annales historiques de la Révolution française 322 (2000), 61–86. 37. Here is a comprehensive list of the names that I considered Latinate: Abrațiu, Adrian, Aecius, Albin, Aurel(-iu/-ian), Axente, Brutus, Caius, Camil, Candid, Casian, Celestin, Cezar, Cicero, Ciprian, Claudiu, Coriolan, Cornel(-iu), Dante, Dioclețianu, Eliseu, Emil(-iu), Enea, Epaminanda, Fabian, Fabiu, Faustus, Felician, Felix, Filemon, Flaviu, Fortunat, Grațian, Horațiu, Iulian, Iuliu, Iuniu, Iustin, Laurean/Laurian, Laurențiu, Leo(n)(-te), Leonida, Liciniu, Liviu/Livius, Longin, Lucian, Lucilian, Lucin, Luciu, Marcel, Marcian, Marcu, Marian, Marius, Martiale, Martian, Nerva, Octav(-iu/-ian), Olimpiu, Oliviu, Onoriu, Ovid(-iu), Patriciu, Petrucius, Plinius, Pompei(-u), Pompiliu,

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Publiu, Quintiu, Remus, Romeo, Romul(-us), Sabin, Salustiu, Sempronius, Septimiu, Sever, Severian, Sextil, Sidoniu, Silvan, Silvestru, Silviu, Tarcviniu, Terenție, Tertulian, Tiberiu, Tit(-us), Tit Liviu, Traian, Tuliu, Ulpian, Ulpiu, Valentin, Valer(-iu/-ian), Vespasian, Victor and Virgil. 38. S. Pușcariu, Limba română [Romanian language], Vol. 1, Privire generală (Bucharest: Minerva, 1976), 415. 39. The part of the database that I am using here (by courtesy of Luminița Dumănescu) was available at http://hpdt.ro:4080 at the time of writing. On the sampling of settlements, see B. Crăciun, E.C. Holom and Vl. Popovici, ‘Historical Population Database of Transylvania: Methodology Employed in the Selection of Settlements and Micro Zones of Interest’, Romanian Journal of Population Studies 9(2) (2015), 17–29. 40. Feldioara Secuiască/Székelyföldvár and Harasztos/Hrăstaș, two villages with mixed Romanian–Magyar populations, are examples for the former, while Agârbiciu/Egerbegy and Muntele Rece/Hideghavas for the latter. 41. For the former, e.g. Hodac/Hodák. 42. On the basis of the school yearbooks. 43. Al. Cristureanu, ‘Prenume de proveniență cultă în antroponimia contemporană românească’ [First names of erudite origin in contemporary Romanian anthroponymy], in Em. Petrovici (ed.), Studii și materiale de onomastică [Studies and materials of onomastics] (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1969), 25; and Pașca, 42. 44. Cristureanu gives Aneta, Beatrice, Bianca, Georgeta, Marieta, Mirela, Nicoleta and Simona as examples from the Kingdom of Romania. I encountered none of these in the school yearbooks, but Albertina, Alexandrina, Aloizia, Amalia, Carolina, Dorina, Eleonora, Elvira, Eugenia, Gabriela, Ida, Irma, Lia, Malvina, Margareta, Matilda, Natalia, Olga, Paulina, Sultana and Wilhelmina. 45. I categorized into this group Bogdan, Bujor, Doru, Dragoș, Florin, Horea/Horia, Răzvan, Șerban, Sorin, Stan and Viorel, plus Basarab, a historical name, and Dorin, which seems to have originated as a nativist coinage. Other traditional peasant names that were potential candidates, but did not come into style, include Bucur, Florea, Lupu, Nechifor, Oprea, Păun, Trandafir, Trifon and Voicu. Cf. Cristureanu, ‘Prenume de proveniență cultă’, 26 and 32–33. 46. I. Slavici, ‘Revoluția din Pîrlești’ [Revolution in Pîrlești], in Opere [Works], Vol. 8, Romane [Novels] (Bucharest: Scriitori Români and Minerva, 1976), 751–90; and A.P. Bănuț, ‘Elocvința frachelui Ladislau’ [The eloquence of brother Ladislaus], in Tempi passati: umor și satiră din Ardealul de ieri [Tempi passati: humour and satire in yesterday’s Transylvania] (Bucharest: Bucovina, 1931), 3. 47. On Hungarian national first names, see T. Farkas, ‘Creating a National Given-name Stock: A Chapter from the Modern-day History of Hungarian Personal Names’, in O. Felecan (ed.), Name and Naming: Sacred and Profane in Onomastics (Cluj-Napoca: Mega and Argonaut, 2017), 137–46. 48. Hajdú, 492–94. 49. At. M. Marienescu, ‘Numele de botezu si prolec’a: unu apelu câtre femeiele romane’ [Christian name and family name: an appeal to Romanian women], Familia 5 (1869), 361. 50. The Ghicas/Gyikas of the Banat and the Poynars/Poynárs of Nagyvárad. 51. B. Pálmány (ed.), Az 1848–1849. évi első népképviseleti országgyűlés történeti almanachja [Historical almanac of the first Hungarian representative parliament of 1848–49] (Budapest: Argumentum, 2002), 45.

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52. M. Szabolcsi, Fiatal életek indulója: József Attila pályakezdése [March of young lives: the start of Attila József’s career] (Budapest: MTA Irodalomtörténeti Intézet, 1963), 10–18 and 33–34. Aron Iosif Magyarized his surname in 1903, the year his daughter Etelka was born. 53. HPDT. 54. B. Ștefănescu, ‘Ioan și Maria, Gheorghe și Floare sau despre numele de botez la Săcal (Ungaria) (1874–1923)’ [Ioan and Maria, Gheorghe and Floare, or on Christian names in Săcal/Szakál, 1874–1923], Romanian Journal of Population Studies 4 (supplement) (2010), 207–21. 55. Al. Cristureanu, ‘Prenumele de la Livadia și Rîu-Bărbat (țara Hațegului)’ [First names in Livadia and Râu Bărbat/Borbátvíz (Land of Hațeg)], Cercetări de Lingvistică 4 (1959), 159–69; M. Gregorian, ‘Graiul din Clopotiva’ [The Clopotiva dialect], Grai și Suflet 7 (1937), 149–50; and O. Densusianu, ‘Graiul din țara Hațegului’ [The dialect of the Land of Hațeg], in Opere [Works], Vol. 1 (Bucharest: Editura Pentru Literatură, 1968), 403. 56. Cristureanu, Aspecte, 38. It was sometimes also spelt ț; e.g. Fl. Grapini, Enea Grapini și ziua cea mare [Enea Grapini and the great day] (Bucharest: Constantin-Titel Petrescu, 1999), 21. 57. Cf. B. Pukánszky, Erdélyi szászok és magyarok [Transylvanian Saxons and Magyars] (Pécs: Danubia, 1943), 150. 58. I took as Saxons all Lutherans with German family names born in Transylvania or taking the matura exam in a Saxon gymnasium, and Lutherans outside Transylvania with typically Saxon family names. I was not able to complete the dataset with the missing gymnasia or to examine trends of female national names because, as a rule, yearbooks of Transylvanian Saxon schools do not contain student rosters. 59. Including Nordic (Scandinavian) names, a group in some respects similar to Hungarian pagan names. 60. Siebenbürgisch-sächsisches Wörterbuch (henceforth, SSWb), Vol. 1 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1924), 114 and 138; and G. Weber and R. Weber, Zendersch: Eine siebenbürgische Gemeinde im Wandel (Munich: Delp, 1985), 412. Cf. F. Rosler, Agnetheln in den sechziger Jahren des 19. Jahrhunderts: Kulturhistorische Bilder (Agnetheln: Schmidt, 1920; reprint, Helbronn: HOG Agnetheln, 1991), 71. 61. The chronicler of a Saxon community suggests that the popularity of the name Franz in the village rose during the Dualist Era owing to Francis Joseph, and that of Wilhelm owing to Emperor William; G.E. Schuster, Marpod: Ein Dorf in Siebenbürgen (Munich: Siebenbürgisch-Sächsische Stiftung, 1998), 35. 62. M. Wolffsohn and Th. Brechenmacher, Die Deutschen und ihre Vornamen: 200 Jahre Politik und öffentliche Meinung (Munich: Diana, 1999), 176 and 206; and N. Pulvermacher, Berliner Vornamen: Eine statistische Untersuchung, Vol. 1 (Berlin: Gaertners, 1902), 5 and 8. 63. J. Gerhards, The Name Game: Cultural Modernization & First Names (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2005), 36–37 and 47. 64. Compare with Hans Ungar’s historical note on the earlier translatability of family names: ‘früher der Familienname, wie der Taufname auch jetzt noch, wenn übersetzbar, ebenso wie jedes andere Wort im Verkehr behandelt und einfach aus der einen Sprache in die andere übersetzt wurde’  – Hans Ungar, ‘Ungarisches Lehngut im SiebenbürgischSächsischen’, Die Karpathen 5 (1911/12), 565. Cf. T. Farkas and M. Slíz, ‘Translating

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Family Names in Hungarian: A Diachronic Survey’, Hungarian Cultural Studies 6 (2013), 82–95. 65. It may be telling that even in his private journal, the Romanian Greek Catholic metropolitan Victor Mihályi referred to his Magyar colleague Kornél Hidasy, Bishop of Szombathely, as Corneliu (the latter did not necessarily correspond to a different pronunciation in the etymological orthography); ‘Ziarul întâmplărilor mai momentuoase din viața Episcopului Victor Mihályi al Lugojului, scris cu mâna-i proprie în următoarele’ [Bishop Victor Mihályi’s journal about the more momentous events in his life, written by his own hand as follows], in N. Bocșan and I. Cârja (eds), Memoriile unui ierarh uitat: Victor Mihályi de Apșa (1841–1918) [Memoirs of a forgotten high priest: Victor Mihályi de Apșa, 1841–1918] (Cluj-Napoca, 2009), 241. 66. On the evidence of its three years between 1904 and 1906, editors of the Déva/Deva-based Hungarian paper Hunyadvármegye tended to leave peasants’ first names in Romanian, but translate those of the middle classes. 67. The Déva-based advocate Francisc Hossu Longin later remembered: ‘Otherwise, I always introduced myself as Francisc Hossu Longin and in Hungarian as Longin Hossu Ferenc’; Amintiri din viața mea [Memories from my life] (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1975), 194. What he stresses here is that he used his Latinized family name (he was born Hossu/Hosszu) in the same way in Hungarian as in Romanian. 68. For instance, Conservative politician and literary author János Asbóth put his name as ‘Joane de Asbóth’ both in his letter to George Bariț and on the cover of the Romanian translation of a parliamentary speech; the passionate Hungarian nationalist Jenő Gagyi signed his contribution to the Romanian journal Transilvania as ‘Eugen Gagyi de Etéd’; and Lumina, the short-lived Romanian newspaper of the Independentist Party, launched in 1906, referred to party politicians by forms like ‘Francisc Kossuth’ and ‘Ludovic Bay’. See Gheorghe Bariț magyar levelezése, [Gheorghe Bariț’s correspondence in Hungarian] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1975), 155; Vorbirea deputatului Joane de Asbóth din cercul Sasca pentru libertatea religiosa a poporului crestin [Speech by János Asbóth, deputy of the Sasca/Szászka constituency, in defence of Christians’ religious freedom] (Budapest: Hornyánszky, 1894); and Transilvania 1911, 38–61. 69. A historical monograph in English published as late as 1984 by a prestigious academic press rendered the names of its figures in forms such as Alexander Cuza and Nicholas Pavlovich Ignatiev; B. Jelavich, Russia and the Formation of the Romanian National State 1821–1879 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984). 70. H. Schuchardt, Sind unsere Personennamen übersetzbar? (Graz: self-published, 1895). 71. The translation of Max Müller’s name confuses today’s Hungarians. 72. -ő [Jenő Rákosi], ‘A keresztnév’ [The given name], Budapesti Hírlap, 21 November 1895. 73. B. Tóth, ‘A keresztnevek fordítása’ [The translation of given names], Magyar Nyelvőr 25 (1896), 11–15 and 145–51; Gy. Zolnai, ‘A keresztnevek kérdése’ [The question of given names], ibid., 77–78; and H. Schuchardt, ‘A keresztnevek “fordítása”’ [The ‘translation’ of given names], ibid., 97–107. 74. Theodor Gartner’s article ‘Sind unsere Personennamen übersetzbar?’ in Bukowiner Nachrichten, quoted by Zolnai (see previous endnote). 75. János Kóbori from Hermannstadt (Romanian–German–Hungarian), István Kaprinay from Karlburg/Oroszvár/Rosvar (German–Hungarian–Croatian), Károly Kovács from Novi Sad/Újvidék/Neusatz (Serbian–Hungarian), Károly Schäfer from the Bačka

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(Serbian–Hungarian) and János Berencsy from Levoča/Leutschau/Lőcse (Slovak– German–Hungarian); Magyar Nyelvőr 25 (1896), 137–39 and 188. 76. P. Dan and G. Cipăianu (eds), Corespondența lui Vincențiu Babeș [The correspondence of Vincențiu Babeș], Vol. 1, Scrisori primite [Letters received] (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1976), 146–55; V. Babeș, Corespondența [Correspondence], Vol. 2, Scrisori trimise [Letters sent] (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 1983), 86–94; Hortensia Goga to Octavian Goga, on 25 February 1912 and Ilarie Chendi to the same, on 4 January 1911, in Octavian Goga în corespondență: documente literare [Octavian Goga in correspondence: literary documents], Vol. 1 (Bucharest: Minerva, 1975), 76 and 170; Al. Vaida-Voevod, Memorii [Memoirs], Vol. 1 (Cluj-Napoca: Dacia, 2006), 122; ‘Din ziarul profesorului Aurel Ciortea’ [From Prof. Aurel Ciorta’s diary], Țara Bârsei 8 (1936), 422 and Hossu Longin, 48. 77. Other widespread examples are Ghiuri, Ghiurca, Lați, Mișca, Șandor, Catița, Iulișca, Juji and Marișca. N.A. Constantinescu, Dicționar onomastic romînesc [Romanian onomastic dictionary] (Bucharest: Editura Academiei, 1963); Al. Cristureanu, ‘Nume de familie și prenume din localitatea Țaga’ [Family and first names of Țaga/Cege], in I.  Mârza (ed.), Monografia comunei Țaga [Monograph of Țaga commune] (n.p., 2009), 431–32; Todinca and Bulc, 382; I. Lazăr and A. Herban (eds), Densușienii: corespondență [The Densușianu family: correspondence] (Cluj-Napoca: Argonaut, 2011), 105–95; Mager, 20; Marienescu, 361; Em. Petrovici (ed.), Micul atlas lingvistic român [Small linguistic atlas of Romanian], new series, map 1268; M.I. Loghin-Bosica, V.Șt. Tutula and V. Lechințan, Fântânița (1297–2012): studiu monografic [Mezőköbölkút/Fântânița (1297–2012): monographic study] (Cluj-Napoca: Casa Cărții de Știință, 2012), 94–99; Pașca, 38; M. Pintilie, ‘Copilăria și adolescența în Dăbâca la sfârșitul secolului al XIX-lea și prima jumătate a secolului al XX-lea’ [Childhood and adolescence in Dăbâca/Doboka at the end of the 19th and in the first half of the 20th centuries], Anuarul Institutului de Istorie Orală 3 (2002): 62; Popovici, Rumænische Dialekte, Vol. 1, 64–74; Țic, Balaj and Verghelia, 268–91; I. Silaghi, Satul bihorean la început de secol XX: însemnări etnografice [Village life in Bihor/Bihar at the beginning of the twentieth century: ethnographic notes] (Cluj-Napoca: Mediamira, 2002), 25, 33, 51, 82 and 89; L.M. Gomboșiu, Valeria Dr. Pintea: un roman familial [Dr Valeria Pintea: a family novel] (Timișoara: Marineasa, 2013), 6 and 41; Biblioteca Academiei Române, Manuscript Collection, Manuscrise românești 4554, 431v and 432f; P. Vesa, Parohia ortodoxă română Lalașinț: monografie istorică [The Lalașinț Romanian Orthodox Congregation: historical monograph] (Timișoara: Eurostampa, 2015), 190; V. Valea, Miniș: istorie și cultură [Miniș/Ménes: history and culture] (Arad: Editura Fundației ‘Moise Nicoară’, 2006), 41; and I. Mușlea, Șcheii de la Cergău și folklorul lor [The Șchei (Bulgarians) of Cergău and their folklore] (Cluj: Ardealul, 1928), 16. 78. Djirko for Georg, Martsi for Martin, Matsi for Matthias, Miši or Miška for Michael, Pišto for Stefan and Šāri for Sara. SSWb, vols 3 and 7; and Ungar, 731. Cf. Antal Horger, ‘A bánsági sváb nyelvjárás magyar szavai’ [Hungarian loanwords in the Banat Swabian dialect], Egyetemes Philologiai Közlöny, new series 7 (1899): 714, and P. Kottler et al., Wörterbuch der banater deutschen Mundarten, Vol. 1 (Munich: IKGS, 2013), 188 on Banat Swabian hypocoristics borrowed from Hungarian. 79. Arhivele Naționale ale României (henceforth, ANR) Direcția Județeană Brașov, Fond Breasla cizmarilor din Brașov, bundles 45 and 46.

Chapter 2

Family Names on the Ground

d Who Needed Family Names? In this chapter, I will first dwell on the gap between the official and vernacular personal nomenclatures, and will then map out the archaeology of a cluster of family names that gained political significance in the nineteenth century, those originating in some form of language contact. The exposition of these topics will serve as a backdrop for the ideological uses of the matter in contemporary discourse, which I will discuss in chapters 4 and 8. The fact that illiterate peasants seldom used their official family names will qualify the impact that the related policies could make on people, and will highlight the agency of the nationalist intelligentsia in raising consciousness about the issue. The diverse origins of family names will help to interpret the discourses based on them as historical fantasies inspired by a new, nationalist vision of the past. In Transylvania and Hungary, Magyars and Saxon commoners started to inherit surnames in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, whilst Romanians did so in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For a long time, these surnames were in a state of constant flow, and only the authorities sought to enforce continuity on them, with more success as bureaucracy evolved and as priests started to record births and marriages after 1784.1 The turn of the nineteenth century saw a series of regulations in Europe that prescribed the inheritance of family names.2 Katherine Verdery draws a parallel between the state’s institution of family names and its more general work of codifying and promoting rigid identities, necessary for overseeing large populations as ‘one cannot keep track of people who are one thing at one point, another thing at another’.3 James C. Scott, who gives a summary of the process as it unfolded earlier in the Philippines, describes it as an example of the way that the state imposed ‘legibility’ on its subjects against their will.4

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The belated and state-induced development of stable family name regimes was a common feature across the Balkans, just as on another European periphery, Scandinavia, where its vicissitudes have been thoroughly documented.5 Left to themselves, the village community was inclined to disrupt the chain of inheritance and to allocate new surnames taken from some slice of reality related to the individual.6 People’s constant impulse to remotivate their family names defied the efforts of feudal domains and churches to stabilize the system, supported by enlightened Habsburg absolutism. Serfs who escaped their landlords had a vital interest in assuming a new name, but freedmen also often did so after moving to a new place. The Transylvanian Romanian poet George Coșbuc’s earliest known ancestor on the paternal line, who had moved to his native Hordou, had been known under the surname Ungur, and later as Tipora. The family started calling itself Săcuieț in Hordou, until one of their descendants was renamed Coșbuc.7 In the case of other cultural heavyweights, one need not go back this far to discover the origins of family names. Consider, for instance, the Magyar polymath Sámuel Brassai (literally, ‘from Brassó’), whose grandfather had indeed been a Saxon from Brassó, or the Romanian writer Ion Agârbiceanu (‘from Agârbiciu’), whose grandfather had moved to Agârbiceanu’s birthplace from Agârbiciu/Arbegen/Egerbegy.8 Beyond the Carpathians, Romanian family names reached the final stage of consolidation at an even later stage, already under the independent Kingdom of Romania, and then demonstrably under bureaucratic pressure.9 In place of fixed surnames, Romanian peasants made widespread use of a more flexible, genealogical nomenclature made up of one’s given name or distinctive hypocoristic tagged by a reference to the person’s lineage. The latter could contain one or two patronymic elements standing for one’s father and grandfather (less commonly for one’s mother or grandmother) or an (unofficial) hereditary surname in the plural, with each element linked to the rest with genetic markers (lui/lu/a lui/a lu, de-al lui etc. or -lui/-ei). The possible combinations were more varied still in women’s married names.10 To complicate things, the same person could be called different names by different branches of their family, and a person’s name could also change during a lifetime – indeed, this happened regularly to women after they got married. It sometimes happened to men too, for Henri H. Stahl described an idiosyncratic variety of the system from the foothills of the Făgăraș Mountains, where the locals anchored their genealogies to house plots, and husbands obtained the genealogical tags of their in-laws after they married into a house.11 And the intricacies of vernacular naming do not stop there, as peasants also used bynames in addition to this primary nomenclature, hereditary or not, but rarely their official surnames. The main advantage of the genealogical system over the binomial pattern was that it more aptly showed one’s place in a kinship network to those in the know.12 Perhaps only city-born Romanian children did not receive genealogical names.

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Social climbers started out by being called ‘sons and grandsons of this and that’, and continued to be referred to in this way in their native villages; for example, the county official Moise Branisce as Sica lui Moisica lui Moise (Moisica’s Sica, Moise’s grandson) and the politician Petru Nemoianu as Pătru alu Costa alu moș Avram (Costa’s Pătru, Uncle Avram’s grandson).13 This vernacular nomenclature could be extended to non-Romanians even; after settling in a Romanian village, the family name of one Gábor Csató was reinterpreted as a patronymic element, leaving him with the Romanian name Gabor a Ciatăului.14 Family names, which Romanian peasants have possessed since the early nineteenth century at the very latest, remained outside the sphere of everyday social interactions. If their family names did not correspond to their informal surnames, then they only mattered to the largely illiterate peasants to the extent that legal transactions dictated, and these grew in importance only with the abolishment of serfdom in the wake of the 1848 revolution.15 In contrast to numele zis, ‘the spoken’ – that is, the vernacular name – the family name was thought of as numele scris, ‘the written name’.16 Note, however, that this very connection that people made between literacy and family names foreshadowed a growing relevance for the latter. The percentage of Romanians who could read and write, quite insignificant at the outset of the Dualist Era, rose sharply in the following decades, in sync with the increasing number of identity documents and other official records. If there were still Romanians who did not know their family names, the spread of schooling and administration could not fail to make new generations more conscious of them.17 Magyar and Saxon peasants also held a parallel nomenclature of unofficial hereditary surnames for daily use, which were more amenable to change than family names. In some Szekler villages of Csík County, men normally handed down their personal bynames to their children, who then wore them until acquiring their own.18 In the Kalotaszeg area in the second half of the twentieth century, all Magyar men had bynames, 60 per cent of which were passed on to the next generation.19 Hungarian and German family names had a somewhat more established usage than Romanian ones. But here again, the modern system of binomial nomenclature was reserved for formal contexts, while bynames, inheritable surnames and patronymic elements did the job of identification in everyday interactions. A book on everyday life in Agnetheln/Agnita/Szentágota in the 1870s described the role that family names held among the Saxons of this market town as peripheral, although the fact that the author deemed this worthy of note in 1920 suggests a change along the way.20 Nobles constituted one group to whom family names had traditionally mattered. A permanent family name could guarantee the unbroken transmission of their privileges and offered them a means to control their legitimate lines of descent. These functions bestowed much greater continuity on family names, and local legal custom could sustain them even after the families died out on the

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sword side, as happened to several ‘first occupant’ families in a Calvinist petty noble community of Hunyad County.21 It is noteworthy that the church and secular administrations, otherwise the main promoters of the binomial name pattern, sometimes made concessions to popular usage and appended vernacular elements to family names in their records to disambiguate people with identical official names. Full homonymy between different people caused frequent trouble to local authorities, something that could be solved by recourse to the vernacular nomenclature. Thus, before drawing up the electoral rolls in 1903, the Orăștie/Szászváros/Broos town hall issued a certificate attesting that ‘Oprean Georg’, a voter registered at earlier elections, was the same person as ‘Oprean Gyeorgye l. Iuan gornicu’.22 Ambiguities were especially rife in villages with a limited pool of official family names, a difficulty that obliged the Greek Catholic priests of Cuzdrioara/Kozárvár and the Calvinist pastors of Magyarvalkó/Vălcăul Unguresc to enter patronymic tags and bynames into the parish registers.23 In the secular domain, the Romanian lawyer Toma Ienciu kept track of his peasant clients under names like ‘Domka Juon lui Ádám’, the district administrator Branisce reported on the whereabouts of a certain ‘Bursan Alexandru alui Veronicii’, a passport was released in 1889 to the name of ‘Ioana lui Iuon Resinar’, and in 1891 the Kolozsvár Court of Appeal passed sentence on ‘Patitul Mária lui Stéfán’.24 In the 1886 list of the biggest taxpayers of two mining towns there occurs, alongside Romanian semi-vernacular names and mixed Hungarian–Romanian forms like ‘Kornya Josi lui Ferencz’, the unmixed Hungarian ‘Szabó János a Gyurié’.25 The administrative committee of Beszterce-Naszód County picked this ‘family name + Hungarian form of first name + definite article + father’s name in the possessive’ pattern from Hungarian peasant dialects to replace the vernacular Romanian nomenclature with corresponding Hungarian forms. They encouraged its use in the public registry, and from there it began to gain some wider currency.26 I have pointed out how little family names meant for the peasants, especially for the illiterate. The vernacular naming system that people actually used was, at the same time, not ethnically neutral  – quite the opposite, as its genetic markers anchored it more firmly in language than the urban, binomial system. In bilingual and biconfessional villages, therefore, two self-contained bodies of vernacular names existed next to each other; although, as the above example shows, the patterns were similar, and they could be extended to members of the other community. That is because the most common bilingual configuration in the area involved two or more communities, each with its own language. Of course, various types of societal bilingualism were present in rural areas. There were those that did not create divisions  – a case in point is communities undergoing language shift. Some non-agricultural livelihoods, most notably mining, could also create internal cohesion that overrode ethnic differences.

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Within most bilingual places engaged in agriculture, ethnic boundaries were not ‘hard’ because of the low rates of bilingualism but because the linguistic division – actual or ancestral-liturgical – intertwined with most or all of the other factors enumerated in the introduction: confession, legal status, past migration and spatial segregation. Local ethnic ingroups doubled as congregations, moral and economic communities and marriage pools for their members. They sustained separate communal memories and myths. Moreover, in linguistic contact zones (Sprachgrenzen ‘language borders’ in nationalist parlance), bilingualism was not an equal resource for everyone. Bilingualism was often the object of pride and a building block of a positive self-image for the local community, but it was rarely distributed equally across mother-tongue groups or genders. Language knowledge was often tied up with mobility and, as a general feature, women tended to be monolingual. With this, we turn to my second argument in this chapter to show that a family name was not a foolproof sign of ancestry – at least not in the sense that most educated people assumed.

Hungarian-Influenced Romanian Family Names In what follows, I use the makeshift term ‘contact-influenced family name’ as a shorthand for family name types that go back to language contact at various removes. It helps me to keep terminological precision and avoid sloppy terms of the ‘family name of foreign origin’ kind, which would suggest extraneous naming  – in other words, naming solely based on linguistic resources outside the name-bearer’s mother tongue. Operationalizing all names that contained other-language stuff, on the other hand, conveys the casual, lay vantage point and embraces all family names regarded as ‘foreign’ from this perspective. Apart from names that typically go back to extraneous naming, I will therefore also include here surnames converted from loanwords or based on borrowed given-name variants. I must add the proviso, however, that although the various name origins and scenarios of naming can be delineated with precision, individual tokens cannot be mechanically assigned to this or that type. With notable regional differences – the strongest in the north-west and the weakest in the Banat – the dominance and cultural hegemony of Hungarian in the area left its mark on Romanian family names. The asymmetry of contact was not limited to the scale but was also reflected in the multiple routes of the influence.27 In the following, I first give a detailed typology of Hungarian-influenced Romanian family names and then briefly go through the remaining combinations. These latter will, however, only play a secondary role in ensuing chapters. The most peculiar characteristic of Hungarian-influenced Romanian family names is that a very substantial part, perhaps the majority, of them could well be

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internal creations in Romanian, based on elements borrowed from Hungarian. The point to be taken is that such names were not of Hungarian origin as names, but standing in non-suffixed forms, they made apparent their indebtedness to Hungarian to anyone who spoke that language. For the following classification, I draw heavily on the name scholar Jenő Janitsek.28 To begin with, around one-third of Hungarian-influenced Romanian family names in the Romanian gymnasia went back to Hungarian loanwords.29 Since the corresponding nouns were widespread in Romanian dialects, the first bearers could receive them from their Romanian peers in the villages, and the secular and church authorities later enforced their inheritance. Many names belonging here designate occupation or office, like Suciu (‘furrier’), Săbău (‘tailor’), Cătană (‘soldier’), Birău (‘village headman’), Deac (‘scribe’), Pușcaș (‘rifleman’), Vaida (‘voivode’), Șuteu (‘baker’), Lăcătuș (‘tinsmith’). Slavic-origin words served as the ultimate bases for a few such occupational surnames, like Covaci (‘blacksmith’) and Cadar (‘cooper’), but these words were likely transmitted through Hungarian in the intra-Carpathian context. Some names of the category were initially nicknames, such as Bolog (‘lefty’, hence Bologa), Cioanca (‘maimed’), Vereș (‘read-headed’) and Pogan (‘sturdy’). Finally, several ethnonyms were also borrowed from Hungarian into Transylvanian Romanian dialects, and thus indirectly names like Sas/Sasu (‘Saxon’), Raț/Rațiu (‘Serb’) and Oros (‘Ruthenian’). Hungarian-origin variants of given names or hypocoristic forms turned into surnames (so-called patronymic surnames) account for 20 per cent of the cluster. Variants like Tamaș/Tămaș (‘Thomas’), Balint (‘Valentine’), Ilieș (‘Elijah’) and Miclăuș (‘Nicholas’) evolved from Latin ecclesiastical names, and the substitution of Latin /s/ by /ʃ/ in many of them has been a distinctive feature of Latin loans in Hungarian. They may or may not have Greek- and/or Slavic-influenced equivalents in Romanian, but were quite common among Romanian peasants in Transylvania and Hungary. It has retrospectively enhanced their ‘Hungarian’ flavour that they were left out from the normative canon of Romanian name variants. To these should be added two Hungarian secular (pre-Christian) names adopted early on by Romanians: Mogoș (˂ Hun. magas ‘tall’) and Farcaș/Fărcaș (˂ Hun. farkas ‘wolf’).30 Again, my default assumption is that such given names became hereditary surnames in a Romanian-speaking environment. A host of names were converted from Hungarian nouns not attested as bona fide loanwords in Romanian dialects, and it stands to reason to suppose that these were the results of Hungarian naming. This category is the most difficult to pin down, and it certainly intersects with families whose ancestors once spoke Hungarian. Between them, they made up around one-third of Hungarianinfluenced names in Romanian gymnasia. Such family names have often been attributed to the concern of Magyar estate administrators for registering people. This seems an especially plausible explanation for the most common such names that had to do with physical appearance – for example, Chiș (˂ Hun. kis ‘small’),

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Fodor (˂ Hun. fodor ‘curly’) and Feier (˂ Hun. fejér ‘white’). Surnames derived from place names (called local surnames) with the Hungarian suffix -i could just as easily be given to Romanian serfs by Magyars, especially if the toponyms denoted regions or manorial centres that could stand for whole estates: Silaghi (˂ Hun. Szilágyi ‘from Szilágy/Sălaj’), Chereji (˂ Hun. Körösi ‘from the River Körös/Criș’), Halmaghi (˂ Hun. Halmágyi ‘from Halmágy/Hălmagiu’). This type was the most frequent in the large estate-heavy Eastern Hungary, which reinforces the hypothesis of extraneous naming. It fell upon the shoulders of Romanian priests to stabilize these external labels as official family names.31 Similar extraneous naming took place in countless colonial settings, as well as in Finland, where the bulk of family names had been linguistically Swedish until nationalist zeal substituted them, and in the zimbrisch village of Lusern/Luserna in South Tyrol, where the German-speaking locals bore Italian family names in the 1890s.32 Surnames with the -i suffix emerged in another setting as well. Uniate Romanian students who aspired to become priests formerly often received Hungarian surnames from their teachers, based on their birthplace or, less commonly, on some personal trait. This practice was customary not only in Latin high schools but even in the Romanian Greek Catholic centre of Blaj/Balázsfalva/Blasendorf.33 As an extreme example of Hungarian influence on Romanian clerics’ names, let me quote the Romanian signatories, mostly priests, of an 1865 petition that requested the separation of the Máramarossziget/Siget/Sighet/Sygit Greek Catholic parish between Romanians and Ruthenians. The Romanian elite of Máramaros County can be regarded as a marginal case – due to its strong noble contingent, it was heavily marked by Magyar/Hungarian cultural hegemony and was hardly reached by the onomastic self-fashioning of Romanian fortyeighters. From the twenty-seven on the Romanian side of the debate, nine had family names derived with -i from Hungarian names of nearby, Romanian or Ruthenian-speaking villages; nine from Hungarian nouns (whether through borrowing or not); eight from personal names, seven of which reflected Hungarian influence; while the family name of one signatory was an Eastern Slavic form.34 This gives hardly any linguistically Romanian surname among the pro-Romanian clergy of a region that had been firmly Romanian-speaking since the fourteenth century. Pap/Papp ‘priest’, the Hungarian equivalent of Romanian Pop or Popa, had become one of the most common family names among Romanian Uniate priests via the same channel. It also features prominently in the dataset. This and other typical priestly names  – phonologically unintegrated ones and local surnames derived from the names of places known to be Romanian-inhabited in the early modern era – add up to a full 15 per cent of the cluster. Priestly families tended to preserve the Hungarian spelling of such names, and until the mid nineteenth century, they regarded them as specifically clerical rather than Hungarian.

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Romanian noblemen of Máramaros County had taken up surnames suffixed with -i (Petrovai/Petrovay, Săplănțai/Szaplonczay, Iodi/Joódy etc.) starting with the late medieval period. Since extremely few Romanians had family names around that time, a Hungarian derivation from names of estates should not be seen as a token of political or cultural loyalty, but simply as the readiest means at hand to secure a family name for a noble progeny. The same pattern was also operational in the Hațeg Basin. The conclusion that these names were created by Romanians in Hungarian may go against commonsensical assumptions about the ‘ethnicity’ of family names, but to give two examples from the area, they had their parallels in the Hungarian family names assumed quite early on by Transylvanian Armenians and in the early-modern fashion of name Latinizing among the Saxon intelligentsia (see below).35 The transmission of the landlord’s family name to his or her serfs is a wellattested practice in Western feudalism, with parallels in classical and AfricanAmerican slavery. It only occurred sporadically in the area, producing Romanian names like Racoți, Zeicu, Corniș and Bornemisa from the aristocratic surnames Rákóczi, Zeyk, Kornis and Bornemisza. Only a dozen students represent this type in the dataset. Finally, let me round off contemporary perceptions by presenting a group that I will call ‘duck-rabbit’ names.36 These were identically or near-identically sounding, parallel results of unmixed Hungarian and Romanian naming, which contemporaries could attribute to either language, depending on their biases. To these duck-rabbit names belonged: (1) family names converted from Christian names that sounded similar in the two languages despite their separate historical transmission (Latin in Hungarian, Byzantine Greek and Slavonic in Romanian): Rom. Aron/Hun. Áron, Cozma/Kozma (‘Cosmas’), Demian/Demján (‘Damian’), Lazăr/Lázár (‘Lazar’), Mihai/Mihály (‘Michael’) etc.; (2) family names converted from South Slavic secular names, borrowed into both languages: Rom. Boca/ Hun. Boka, Bota etc.; and (3) chance homophones, e.g. Rom. Borcea (˂ Cumanic Borča)/Hun. Borcsa (diminutive of Borbála, Hungarian for Barbara), Borz (from a Cumanic name or Hun. ‘dishevelled’, ‘badger’), Rom. Golea (˂ gol ‘naked’)/ Hun. Gólya (‘stork’). All these types combined still leave a host of Hungarian names common among Transylvanian Magyars that have not normally occurred in parallel or in phonologically adapted Romanian forms.37 With all the uncertainties in the details, this typology gives no reason to suppose that any more than a relatively small proportion of the Romanian family lines bearing Hungarian-influenced names were ever Hungarian-speaking (this is worth reiterating because I will devote considerable space to voices to the contrary in Chapter 4). On the other hand, it also seems unlikely that a majority of such names arose as the brainchildren of Magyars in power, as educated Romanians liked to insinuate.

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Last but not least, the frequency of such names is slightly out of proportion with the uses that the contemporary Magyar elite made of them. From the more than three thousand Romanian students who took the matura exam in one of the four Romanian gymnasia between 1867 and 1914, around 15 per cent bore Hungarian-influenced names, and 5 per cent duck-rabbit names. Several examples in Chapter 4 will show how Magyar authors were able to delude themselves, and stretch their notion of a ‘Hungarian name’ beyond even this loose understanding.

Other Combinations A brief overview of the rest of the language pairs will flesh out my main point in the first section of the chapter, that official surnames were of secondary importance to illiterate peasants. It will also complement the previous section by showing that other-language material entered family names through various means and with varying frequency across language pairs. If the names of Magyar and Saxon peasants fit West European patterns better in this respect, that has at least as much to do with the social institutions as with the respective peasants. Around 3 per cent of Transylvanian-born Roman Catholic students, and 1.7 per cent of Calvinists and Unitarians, bore Romanian-influenced names. The higher score of Roman Catholics can largely be put down to Magyarized Transylvanian Armenians. Many of them inherited Romanian names from their forefathers, who had lived for centuries in Moldavia.38 Even in the group of Calvinists and Unitarians, where the percentage of new assimilants was relatively small, more than three times as many matura takers had German or Slavic names. However, it is clear that the proportion of names of German and Slavic origin would be much lower were the composition of the student body less skewed towards the elite. Romanian-influenced names were not only much less frequent among Magyars than Hungarian-influenced names were among Romanians, but their origins were also different.39 Putting Armenians aside, their great majority presuppose an assimilated Romanian name-bearer at some point in family history, based as they are upon Romanian nouns40 or given names41 that did not exist among Magyars and in Hungarian dialects. The conversion of the given name into a family name could still well belong to a Hungarian-speaking community, but only a few names allow for the possibility of Hungarian naming.42 It is impossible to quantify the German influence on Magyar surnames based on the student dataset, owing to the multitude of first- and second-generation Magyars. Again, not a single matura taker’s name could come about as the product of Hungarian naming based on a German loanword, and the German names worn by Magyars were also not specific to the area. Outside the dataset, a few

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such names were more typical among Magyars in Transylvania than elsewhere, but only one, Gocsmán (‘sexton’), can be traced back to a Hungarian dialect word of German origin. The inclusive concept of contact influence needs to be narrowed down when discussing the Slavic influence on Romanian family names. Slavic names were a major source for the Romanian inventory of given names, from which a large portion of family names later developed, not unlike Latin names for Hungarian and German. To be sure, the ancestor who received a name such as Bogdan and passed it on to his offspring likely spoke no more Slavic than the Latin-rite Christians who received names like Márton (< Latin Martinus), and turned them into inheritable surnames, spoke Latin. More to the point, it would also make little sense to take into account this indirect Slavic influence from the viewpoint of contemporary perceptions, as in most cases it was hidden to non-specialists. Slavic names in a narrow sense, those suffixed with -ič/-vič (-ić/-vić), -ik, -ski, -ko, -ev or -ov, account for a mere 3.6 per cent of Romanian matura takers. The origins of these names are more ambiguous, and not only because one of the suffixes may have also been productive in some remote Romanian area. The -ici and -iciu (< South Slavic -ić) endings were widespread among Romanians in the Banat mainly due to the diglossic or ethnically Serb clergy who recorded the names of their parishioners using Serbian patronymics.43 A local historian traced fifty-three Romanian family lineages appearing first under Romanian and later under Serbian patronymic surnames in the Orthodox parish registers of Tschakowa/Ciacova/Čakovo/Csákova (with a population of about 4,200). Attributing these changes to priestly interference alone does not seem convincing, however, as most of the families affected lived in the Serbian neighbourhood of the town, where their neighbours could also stick Serbian names on them.44 It is important in this respect that many bilingual parishes of the Banat were only split up between Serbs and Romanians decades after the separation of the Orthodox hierarchy in the 1860s. Priestly families not yet committed to Romanian identity had in particular been subject to this onomastic influence of Serbian, and no matter what language they or their flocks had spoken, because they had usually absorbed Serbian culture and had been overseen by a Serb or Serbianized hierarchy until mid century. The frequency of -ici among Romanian Orthodox and of Hungarian names among Uniate priests prompted the furious tirade from Atanasie M. Marienescu that ‘their surnames, which should be a mirror of Romanity, are the ugliest and the most muddled’.45 On the other hand, there was also a sizeable Serbian-speaking peasant population in the Banat that adopted the Romanian language during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In one of the Montenegrin communities settled around 1730 in the hills south of Lipova/Lippa, no inhabitant had declared a Serbian mother tongue by 1880, but names ending in -ici had survived both in the

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parish register and in the usage of their bearers.46 In the south-eastern Banat, many South Slavic toponyms were recorded for the first time at the turn of the eighteenth century in areas where later no South Slavic-speakers could be found. Several times during the eighteenth century, Orthodox South Slavs were also settled into Romanian-speaking environments. Although the institution of the family name was scarcely more established at the time among Serbs than among Romanians, it is possible that some of the Romanians’ South Slavic names descended from such populations. German-influenced family names represent a paltry 0.4 per cent of Romanian matura takers in Romanian gymnasia. Going beyond the dataset, the majority of widespread German-influenced Romanian names can be ascribed to Romanian naming, similarly to the Hungarian-influenced ones. They cluster around the Saxon Land, where the underlying loanwords were used.47 The anthropologist Steven L. Sampson dropped an interesting clue about another possible route through which German names could enter Romanian communities without the actual assimilation of a single Saxon. Between 1867 and 1895, 10 per cent of newborn Romanians in the village Sampson studied were godfathered by their fathers’ Saxon employers, and some of them later inherited their godfathers’ (unofficial) German surnames.48 Thus, while Romanian and Hungarian family names differed in the ways other-language material typically ended up in them, they behaved consistently regarding both donor languages. In Saxon village communities, by contrast, Romanian and Hungarian linguistic influence was repressed and almost entirely confined to bynames and unofficial surnames. Few Saxon peasants had been serfs to Magyar landlords, but even they had family names centuries before Romanians and thus could remain immune to the naming activity of estates. Further, it can be concluded that Saxon pastors, who already took care of adjusting their parishioners’ names to High German, replaced ‘foreign’ surnames with German ones. In Deutschtekes/ Ticușu Vechi/Szásztyukos, half of the Lutheran community were descendants of Szeklers who had settled in the village following the ravages of a Tatar raid in 1658. In the nineteenth century, many local families that still used Hungarian surnames figured under German ones in the parish registers.49 On this hypothesis, the very few relevant examples included in Fritz KeintzelSchön’s dictionary of Saxon family names, all but one from the ethnic contact zone along the two Küküllő/Târnava/Kokel rivers, could well belong to assimilated Magyar paternal lines.50 The same dictionary contains just a single Romanian-influenced family name,51 but the first volume alone of Schullerus’s Saxon dialect dictionary cites three dozen examples of unofficial surnames of Romanian origin, recorded from across the Saxon territory.52 At the same time, Hungarian-influenced unofficial surnames were frequent only in Saxon communities near the Szeklerland.53

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Although in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Saxon elite had the habit of translating their family names in Hungarian contexts, this practice left no mark on the names. There were hardly more Hungarian- or Romanianinfluenced family names among them than in the peasantry – out of 1,568 Saxon matura takers, the former totalled seventeen and the latter merely two or three.54 A view universally shared among contemporary writers and later anthropologists is that there existed tight social boundaries, watched over by the Lutheran clergy, that separated Transylvanian Saxons from their Romanian and Magyar neighbours. The normative aspects and disciplinary mechanisms that reproduced these boundaries have been amply studied. The negligible Hungarian and Romanian influence on official Saxon family names, in comparison with the more abundant Hungarian and Romanian forms among Saxon bynames and unofficial surnames, lends support to this idea. Among the matura takers, these also contrast strangely with the thirty-seven Slavic (mainly Western Slavic) family names, especially that Lutheran Slavs came in short supply in the entire Habsburg Monarchy. Saxon bearers of Slavic names may have partly descended from Zipsers (Upper Hungarian Germans – there had been a constant flow of migrants from Upper Hungary to the Transylvanian towns) or may have had Prussian or Silesian ancestors. Apart from Slavic family names, the many Latinized names of the types Jekelius/Paulini/Molitoris were another remarkable feature of the Saxon elite, and they were nearly absent from the ranks of the peasantry. The humanist fashion of name Latinization, once prominent in all German-speaking lands, had gone defunct by the nineteenth century, and yet around 11 per cent of students born to middle-class Saxon families had such names. And whilst this earlier trend does not seem to have had any impact on the mid-nineteenth-century self-Latinization of Romanian intellectuals, its traces surface among Magyars; in my dataset, there are Magyar students with the family names Fábry, Kusztos and Szutor (< Lat. fabri genitive ‘smith’, custos ‘warden’, sutor ‘cobbler’). My argument in this chapter has by no means been that there was no crossing of ethnic lines and that no Magyars assimilated as Romanians in the early modern era. Individual families did shift languages and religions. Family names, however, are not always a reliable proof of this process, and the ones borne by Romanians that derive at some remove from Hungarian are a consistently bad indicator of Magyar origins. Such names may offer hints to a careful observer cognizant of the underlying borrowing and of the motifs and settings of naming in the area, but the accidental etymologists who will be presented in Chapter 4 as taking a plunge into ethnic pseudo-history did not fit into this category. Besides, the peasantry’s family names were relatively young, and the peasants themselves did not care too much about them. Neither prevented nationalists from insisting that they carried antiquity and national essence, drawing confident assumptions from their supposed linguistic origins about the true identity of their bearers. Granted, such assumptions would have been unfounded even if the linguistic

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and historical analysis behind them had been accurate. Later discussion will show how influential this logic proved to be. These first two chapters have dealt with personal names, with each directing its focus on one particular aspect: on the social distribution of nationally inspired naming as an indicator of the spread of national consciousness, and on the integration of linguistic material across languages. The next chapter will introduce place names as a new topic, and I will give them a more ecumenical treatment. Not losing sight of the cross-linguistic dimension, I will investigate it as one facet of a broader social variation. Besides variation, indexicality will be another key concept, as I will interrogate a new source base, the place-name etymologies returned in Frigyes Pesty’s toponymic survey, to map out what cultural memory peasants invested with their place names, and what relation it had to ethnicity and national canons.

Notes   1. Hajdú, 417, 734 and 750; F. Keintzel-Schön, Die siebenbürgisch-sächsischen Familiennamen (Cologne: Böhlau, 1976); and Pașca, 62–64.  2. J.B. Walkowiak, Personal Name Policy: From Theory to Practice (Poznań: Wydział Neofilologii UAM, 2017), 189–95.   3. K. Verdery, ‘Ethnicity, Nationalism, and State-making: Ethnic Groups and Boundaries, Past and Future’, in H. Vermeulen and C. Govers (eds), The Anthropology of Ethnicity: Beyond ‘Ethnic Groups and Boundaries’ (Amsterdam: Het Spinhuis, 1994).   4. J.C. Scott, Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 64–71.  5. Walkowiak, Personal Name Policy, 212; C.J. Jireček, Das Fürstenthum Bulgarien: seine Bodengestaltung, Natur, Bevölkerung, wirthschaftliche Zustände, geistige Cultur, Staatsverfassung, Staatsverwaltung und neueste Gechischte (Prague: Tempsky and Leipzig: Freytag, 1891), 71; O. Degn, ‘The Fixation of the Danish Patronymics in the 19th Century and the Law’, Onoma 34 (1998–99), 59–76; K. Willson, ‘Linguistic Models and Surname Diversification Strategies in Denmark and Sweden’, Onoma 47 (2012), 299–326; G. Clark, The Son Also Rises: Surnames and the History of Social Mobility (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 25; and S. Wikstrøm, ‘Surnames and Identities’, in B. Helleland, Ch.-E. Ore and S. Wikstrøm (eds), Names and Identities (Oslo: University of Oslo, 2012), 258.   6. Cf. the response of Miklós Sükösd, village secretary of Cioara/Csóra, to Frigyes Pesty’s questionnaire in 1864: F. Pesty, Pesty Frigyes helynévgyűjteménye, 1864–1865: Székelyföld és térsége [Frigyes Pesty’s collection of toponyms, 1864–65: the Szeklerland and its environs], Vol. 4 (Budapest: Országos Széchényi Könyvtár and Sepsiszentgyörgy: Székely Nemzeti Múzeum, 2015), 22.   7. N. Drăganu, George Coșbuc la liceul din Năsăud și raporturile lui cu grănicerii [George Coșbuc at the Năsăud gymnasium and his relationship with the frontierspeople] (Bistrița: Matheiu, n.d. [1926]), 2; and A. Szabó T., ‘A Coșbuc-család ősei Hordón’ [The ancestors of the Coșbuc family in Hordou], Erdélyi Múzeum, new series 52 (1947), 134–37.

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  8. J. Szinnyei, Magyar írók élete és munkái [The life and works of Hungarian writers], Vol. 1 (Budapest: Hornyánszky, 1891); and M. Zaciu, Ion Agârbiceanu (Bucharest: Minerva, 1972), 17.  9. Al. Graur, Nume de persoane [Personal names] (Bucharest: Editura Științifică, 1965), 90–91; C. Firică, ‘Onomastică românească: probleme teoretice privind categoriile antroponimice; poreclă și supranume’ [Romanian onomastics: theoretical problems concerning anthroponymic categories; byname and surname], Studia Romanica et Anglica Zagrabiensa 52 (2007), 5; and L. Gecsényi, ‘Ein Bericht des österreichisch-ungarischen Vizekonsuls über die Ungarn in der Moldau: Jassy, 1893’, Ungarn-Jahrbuch 16 (1988), 179. 10. I. Roșianu, ‘Observații asupra sistemului popular de denominație personală în Transilvania’ [Observations on the folk system of personal nomenclature in Transylvania], Limbă și literatură 12 (1966), 360–68. 11. H.H. Stahl, ‘The Onomastic System of the Village of Dragus (Transylvania, Romania; –1934)’, in P.H. Stahl (ed.), Name and Social Structure: Examples from Southeast Europe, trans. C. de Bussy (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1998), 94. 12. Cf. P.H. Stahl, Household, Village and Village Confederation in Southeastern Europe, trans. L.S. Alcott (n.p.: East European Monographs, 1986), 22. 13. V. Braniște, Amintiri din închisoare [Memoirs from prison] (Bucharest: Minerva, 1972), 5; and P. Nemoianu, Amintiri [Memoirs] (Lugoj: Tipografia Națională, 1928), 49. 14. O.C. Tăslăuanu, Spovedanii [Confessions] (Bucharest: Minerva, 1976), 20. Cf. I. Agârbiceanu, Din vieața preotească: schițe [From the life of a priest: sketches] (Arad: Librăriei diecezană, 1916), 75. 15. Valea, 42; and Cipu, Fragmentarium făgețean, Vol. 1, 45. 16. G. Kligman, The Wedding of the Dead: Ritual, Politics, and Political Culture in Transylvania (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 39–40; Retegan, Drumul greu al modernizării, 59; and Braniște, Amintiri din închisoare, 5 and 90. 17. G. Moldován, ‘Alsófehér vármegye román népe’, 753; and Braniște, Amintiri din închisoare, 90. 18. I.T. Nagy, Csikmegye közgazdasági leirása [Economic description of Csík County] (Budapest: Pesti Könyvnyomda, 1902), 16. 19. J. Jankó, Kalotaszeg magyar népe: néprajzi tanulmány [The Magyar folk of Kalotaszeg: an ethnographic study] (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1892), 126; and P.B. Gergely, A kalotaszegi magyar ragadványnevek rendszere [The system of Hungarian nicknames in Kalotaszeg] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1977), 77. 20. Rosler, 57. 21. K. Kós, ‘A nemzetségi szervezet nyomai Rákosdon’ [Traces of clan organization in Rákosd/Răcăștia], in Népélet és néphagyomány: tíz tanulmány [Folk life and folk tradition: ten studies] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1972), 238–52. 22. ANR Deva, Fond Primăria orașului Orăștie 2/1903. 23. Retegan, Drumul greu al modernizării, 58; and J. Nagy, Család-, gúny- és ragadványnevek a kalotaszegi Magyarvalkón [Family names, nicknames and bynames in Magyarvalkó/ Văleni, Kalotaszeg] (Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület, 1944), 5. 24. ANR Deva, Personal Fond Toma Ienciu, folders 2 and 3; ANR Alba Iulia, Fond Primăria orașului Sebeș (inv. 33) 39/1889, 96 and 313; and ANR Bistrița, Fond Judecătoria cercuală Rodna 1/1881 [recte 1891!], 112–13. 25. ANR Alba Iulia, Fond Primăria orașului Abrud, Acte inventariate 1/1886, 1–5.

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26. Decree 10,855/1895 of the prefect of Beszterce-Naszód County; ANR Bistrița, Fond Primăria orașului Năsăud, XIX, Stare civilă 2/1895–1898, 13; and e.g. ibid., XVII, Personal, 2/1910–15. 27. Constantinescu, XVI. 28. J. Janitsek, ‘A magyar eredetű román családnevekről’ [On the Romanian family names of Hungarian origin], in P.B. Gergely and M. Hajdú (eds), Az V. Magyar Névtudományi Konferencia előadásai [The lectures of the 5th Hungarian Conference of Onomastics] (Budapest: Magyar Nyelvtudományi Társaság; Miskolc: Miskolci Egyetem Bölcsészettudományi Kara, 1997), Vol. 1, 101–7. I have also used L. Tamás, Etymologischhistorisches Wörterbuch der ungarischen Elemente im Rumänischen: Unter Berücksichtigung der Mundartwörter (London: Mouton & Co., 1967) and Constantinescu. For assessing the frequency of names, I have consulted the map of Romanian family names at http:// nume.ottomotor.ro; last accessed 12 September 2019. See also Al. Viciu, Etnografice [Ethnographic writings] (Blaj: Tipografia Seminarului Teologic greco-catolic, 1929), 18 and 40–41. 29. I use the same database that I presented in Chapter 1 on name-giving. For the present purpose, I have narrowed it down to Romanian gymnasia, to filter out arbitrarily Magyarized forms. Unfortunately, data about the fathers and birthplaces of students are so deficient that I cannot use them for analysing the social or territorial distribution of names. 30. On the popularity of the name Farcaș/Fărcaș among Romanians in the early-modern Eastern Banat, see K. Hegyi, A török hódoltság várai és várkatonasága [Fortresses and garrisons of Ottoman Hungary] (Budapest: História and MTA Történettudományi Intézete, 2007), Vol. 1, 338. 31. See e.g. G. Moldován, A magyarországi románok [The Romanians of Hungary] (Budapest: Nemzetiségi Ismertető Könyvtár, 1913), 498. 32. S. Paikkala, Se tavallinen Virtanen: Suomalaisen sukunimikäytännön modernisoituminen 1850-luvulta vuoteen 1921 [That ordinary Virtanen: modernizing Finnish family names from the 1850s to 1921] (Helsinki: Suomalaisen Kirjallisuuden Seura, 2004), 797– 809; and J. von Pock, Deutsche Sprachinseln in Wälschtirol und Italien: mit besonderer Berücksicksichtigung der Enclaven Tischelwang, Sauris und Bladen (Innsbruck: Wagner, 1892), 6. 33. Z. I. Tóth, Az erdélyi román nacionalizmus első százada [The first century of Romanian nationalism in Transylvania] (Csíkszereda: Pro-Print, 1998), 163–65; and Lazăr and Herban, 14–19 and 26–27. 34. The names as they stand in the petition are (grouped by the above categories) Bazil Karácsonyi, János Csobay, Gergely, György and Demeter Petrovay, Péter Lipcsey, Mihály Kökényesdy, Pál Lipcsei, Miklós Joódy, Bazil Szüts, Péter and Mihály Szálka, József Gyenge, Zsigmond Visói Papp, Gábor Deák, Péter Bondor, László and Mihály Kiss, Péter Mihály, Miklós Fabian, Emanuel Sándor, István Visói Simon, György and Gyula Vincz, Gábor and Fülöp Mihálka and Péter Ilniczky. In Comitetul Asoțiațiuniei (ed.), Analele Asoțiațiunei pentru Cultura Poporului Român din Maramurăș 1860–1905 [Yearbooks of the Association for Romanian People’s Culture in Máramaros/Maramorosh/Maramureș/ Maramarash/Marmarosch] (Gherla: Aurora, 1906), 154–60. 35. K. Szongott, A magyarhoni örmény családok genealogiája [The genealogy of Armenian families in Hungary] (Szamosújvár: Aurora, 1898). 36. Following E. Karagiannis, Flexibilität und Definizionsvielfalt pomakischer Marginalität (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2005), 158; quoted by J.B. Walkowiak, ‘Minority Language

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Policy Regarding Personal Names: An Overview’, ESUKA – JEFUL 2(1) (2001), 373. The term goes back to the late Wittgenstein. 37. Like Ábrahám, Adorján, Ágoston, Albert, Andrási, Antal, Bakos, Balázsi, Barabás, Barta, Bartalis, Bartók, Bencze, Benedek, Benkő, Bereczki, Bernád, Bertalan/Birtalan, Bodó, Bodor, Boldizsár, Both, Buzás, Csáki, Cseh, Cseke, Csiki, Csoma, Daróczi, Demeter, Dénes, Dézsi, Dobai, Egyed, Enyedi, Erdei, Erdős, Erős, Ferenczi, Filep, Gálfi, Győrfi, Hajdu, Hunyadi, Imre, Incze, István, Jakab, Jancsó, Jánosi, Juhász, Kálmán, Karsai, Kelemen, Király, Kolozsi, Kóródi, Kristóf, Kun, László, Lénárd, Márton, Megyesi, Mikó, Molnár, Móricz, Mózes, Németh, Nyíri, Osváth, Ötvös, Pál, Pálfi, Pásztor, Péntek, Péter, Péterfi, Rákosi, Salamon, Sárosi, Sebestyén, Simó, Soós, Szántó, Széles, Szigeti, Szőke, Szőllősi, Tamási, Tóbiás, Tordai, Tőkés, Török, Váradi, Vári, Varró, Vásárhelyi, Vass, Vígh, Vincze, Virág, Vizi, Zilahi, Zöld and Zsigmond. 38. Szongott. 39. On Hungarian family names of Romanian origin, see A. Benő, Kontaktusjelenségek az erdélyi magyar nyelvváltozatokban [Contact phenomena in the Hungarian language varieties of Transylvania] (Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület, 2014), 66–73. A useful frequency list of today’s Hungarian family name corpus in Romania, among them family names of Romanian origin, can be found in L. Murádin, Erdélyi magyar családnevek [Hungarian family names in Transylvania] (Nagyvárad: Europrint, 2005). 40. Rusz, Krizsán/Krisán, Albu, Kolcza, Árgyelán. On Romanian loanwords in Hungarian dialects, see Gy. Márton, J. Péntek and I. Vöő, A magyar nyelvjárások román kölcsönszavai [Romanian loanwords in the Hungarian dialects] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1977), and F. Bakos, A magyar szókészlet román elemeinek története [History of Romanian elements in the Hungarian lexicon] (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1982). The examples given throughout the chapter are not from the database, but represent an attempt to list the most widespread names of the respective categories. 41. E.g. Ráduly, Bokor, Váncsa, Vaszi, Opra, Sorbán. 42. E.g. Berszán/Burszán, Boér, Borbáth, Bács, Muntyán. 43. Constantinescu, XV; and I. Hatvani, Szózat az oláhfaj ügyében [Speech in the cause of the Wallachian race] (Pesten: Magyar, 1848), 21. 44. W.J. Merschdorf, Tschakowa: Marktgemeinde im Banat: Monographie und Heimatbuch (Augsburg: Heimatortgemeinschaft Tschakowa, 1997), 303. 45. Marienescu, Numele de botezu si prolec’a, 362. 46. L. Stepanov and N. Ignea, Chizdia-Coșarii: repere monografice [Chizdia-Coșarii: monographic details] (Timișoara: Banatul, 2010), 40 and 67–68. 47. Maier, Fleșer, Henter, Paler, Bugner, Chirvai. Some names are of uncertain German origin: Flondor, Brote, Golda, Goldiș and Han with its derivatives. 48. S.L. Sampson, National Integration through Socialist Planning: An Anthropological Study of a Romanian New Town (Boulder, CO: East European Monographs, 1984), 142. 49. P. Binder, Közös múltunk [Our shared past] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1982), 73. The Magyar district administrator hinted at a similar situation in the north-eastern Transylvanian Saxon community of Birk/Petelea/Petele in 1864; OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 63. 50. Benki, Bolind (< Bálint), Botradi (< Bótrágyi), Gätsi (< Géczi), Gubesch (< Gubás), Konyen (< Kónya), Palku (< Palkó) and Schebesch (< Sebes); Keintzel-Schön, 200. Further to the south in Reichesdorf/Rechișdorf/Riomfalva, at a fair distance from any Hungarianspeaking village, Csaki, spelt in this form, was the name of a well-established local

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Saxon family, and Hamrodi (< the place name Homoród, dial. Hamaród + -i) that of another to the south-east in Weißkirch/Viscri/Szászfehéregyháza; Andreas Nemenz (ed.), Reichesdorf: Eine Ortschaft im Weinland Siebenbürgens; Beiträge zur Ortsgeschichte (Munich: Siebenbürgisch-Sächsische Stiftung, 1999), 270–71; and S. Van Der Borght, A. Goția, M. Markel and T. Roesems, ‘Soziale Einrichtungen’, in H. Van der Haegen and P. Niedermaier (eds), Weisskirch (Deutsch-Weißkirch / Viscri): ein siebenbürgisches Dorf im Griff der Zeit; Zur Siedlungsgeschichte Rumäniens (Leuven: Instituut voor Sociale en Economische Geographie Katholieke Universiteit, 1997), 94. 51. Bursen (< Bârsan). 52. SSWb, Vol. 1, 235 and 249–50. Cf. ibid., 679, and A.-L. Nistor, Rumänisch-deutsche/ siebenbürgisch-sächsische Sprachinterferenzen im Südwesten Siebenbürgens (Iași: Demiurg, 2001), 178–79. 53. SSWb, Vol. 1, 249–50; and E.H. Philippi and W. Weltzer (eds), Sächsisch-Regen: Die Stadt am Berge; Lebensbilder aus der Vergangenheit einer kleinen Stadt in Siebenbürgen (Bochum: self-published, 1991), 151. 54. Again, the dataset is the most lacunary with respect to Saxons, as three out of the five Saxon gymnasia are missing.

Chapter 3

Place Names and Etymologies from Below

d The concept of place does not refer to a physically pre-existent given, but to a space delimited and invested with meanings by humans. Places are created and sustained by linguistic practices, chief among them naming and the use of place names.1 The lifespan of places varies in function of their size and their type, but it is typically longer than a lifetime, and so is the lifespan of a place name. Human settlements, for example, only rarely take on entirely new names in the same language, and the forces of continuity are so powerful that settlement names are sometimes kept even if villages move some distance, as frequently happened in the Ottoman occupation zone of early modern Hungary. When people moved to live in an entirely new environment, they often took the name of their earlier village with them.2 Places had always acted as the essential props for recalling the stories that make up the various layers of collective memory, which in their turn have provided the formative basis for group identities.3 As they survived unchanged or with small changes for many generations, place names, as mere tags, were thus able to organize and symbolize local identities, which became building blocks for ethnonational identities in the modern era. The very form of place names, however, only turned into an object of controversy in the nineteenth century, as the nationally conscious felt the need to legitimize and anchor the presence of their group in a given place or to assert their symbolic ownership over that place.4 Behind contemporary opinions as to whether a place name fitted harmoniously into a language (in fact, into the corresponding onomasticon), three yardsticks can be identified: semantic transparency, phonological well-formedness and falling into analogical patterns. A form is semantically transparent if an ordinary speaker can attribute a lexical meaning to it. Forms devoid of such meaning will be called opaque. Unlike most

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personal names in the European tradition, the majority of place names originally derived from an attribute of their referents, and they may even describe them adequately after centuries.5 Note, however, that this apparent meaning need not actually be the etymon of the name, but it can arise as the result of a mere coincidence or folk etymology, a tendency in language to give opaque forms new meanings. While short settlement names had a higher chance of making sense in several local languages (e.g. Apa Hun. ‘father’ and Rom. ‘the water’; Buza Hun. ‘wheat’ and Rom. ‘the lip’), folk etymology did its part to bring about longer transparent pairs, as may have happened in Hun. Csomafája (‘Csoma’s tree’)/ Rom. Ciumăfaia (‘the Devil’s snare’, a toxic plant) and Hun. Katona (‘soldier’)/ Rom. Cătina (‘the sea-buckthorn’). When nineteenth-century historicism foregrounded the historical perspective of place names, their pointing back to the time of naming, then transparency came to be regarded as evidence of the unity of the linguistic nation across time, and of its rootedness in the given place. Place names borrowed from other tongues will more likely be devoid of meaning, and folk etymology is not an all-powerful instrument after all. Ioan Slavici noted that peasants of his native region had a hard time making sense of their place names, which descended from languages alien to them.6 In more general terms, the Romanian nationalist newspaper editor Ioan Russu-Șirianu told his readers from the Kingdom of Romania that around one quarter of all Romanian-inhabited places in Hungary ‘lacked a Romanian name’, with another quarter having names derived from Hungarian.7 A meaningful place name was a boon for the nationalist, but not necessarily for the dwellers. One can argue that opacity is precisely what makes for a good name. The very nonsensicality of an opaque name can underline its status as a name, whereas a transparent one inevitably redirects attention to its etymological, ‘frozen’ meaning. A meaningless place name was probably also more impervious to neighbours’ ill will and mockery, leaving more room for the locals to negotiate their public face. At any rate, for the majority of place names that did not have any retrievable meaning, phonological well-formedness and falling into analogical patterns could serve as yardsticks of conformity with the corresponding ethnic languages and onomastica. I will engage with these criteria in depth when analysing the formal means of place-name Magyarization. Suffice it to note in advance that such attributes as ‘Hungarian-sounding’ or ‘foreign-sounding’ appealed to fuzzy concepts, ranging from phonological constraints to euphony, and they only set loose limits to acceptability. Arguably, place names allow for fewer referents than either first names, family names or the two combined. Some recurrent landmarks will be called differently across various scales; ‘the Marketplace’ or ‘the Magyar church’ will refer to the ones in the village, whereas those in another village need to be specified. Similarly, the single watercourse may be simply called ‘the Brook’ locally, but

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locals can resort to a more individuating name if the need arises. As will be discussed, the codification of toponymy entailed, among other things, imposing the flattening perspective of a top-down administrative gaze upon local mental maps, which required that all the major features should bear unique names on the scale of the national community. In the following, I will adopt a variationist perspective for describing the social life of place names. This description will serve as a benchmark against which to interpret the discourses in Chapter 6 and the renaming in Chapter 9. The distribution of free linguistic variants is, according to this model, controlled by social and situational factors. Such variation is therefore far from ‘free’; the variants are not entirely interchangeable, as a strictly formal linguistic analysis would suggest. Reviewing the social variation of place names in its various dimensions will relativize strong claims about the true and only vernacular names. The conceptual precisions to be given will also qualify my own flexible use of terms, sometimes necessary in the rest of the book. People used to pronounce place names in their local accents, and the name of their village or town made no exception from this rule. In writing, however, place names have been brought into line with standardized phonology since the earliest times. The written forms of place names, as found in most sources and as I reproduce them, are therefore idealized renderings. But this is only one general consequence of the high–low scale. Local variants are often unpredictable on the basis of dialect phonology alone. In Appendix A, Table A.1 gives examples of such variation, with the names as they circulated in writing and perhaps in the speech of outsiders shown in the first column, and exclusively local forms shown in the second. Literacy perpetuated the use of conservative forms, making it exceedingly difficult for newer, innovative variants to take over. Hungarian tends to eliminate word-initial consonant clusters, but Barassó, apparently the default variant in the speech of surrounding Magyars, did not replace the well-established form Brassó in the standard. Neither did Brașeu dislodge Brașov as the Romanian name of the city, although, if we are to believe Nicolae Densușianu’s respondents, Romanians everywhere outside of Brassó called it that way.8 Moreover, some locally used names had nothing to do with the more widely known ones (see Appendix A, Table A.2). These examples were still untouched by nationalism, which, as will be shown, later multiplied this kind of variants. It also occurred that not the locals but the dwellers of neighbouring villages used another, unrelated name. In Bihar County, Țigănești/Cigányfalva was also known as Iancești/Jankafalva for its surroundings, while in the Banat, the Swabians of Șemlacu Mare/Morava/Großschemlak called the adjacent, German-speaking Kleinschemlak (Schumlich in the speech of the locals) Prnjawa.9 In the Parâng Mountains, the same peak bore the name Cibanu for the Romanians living to the North, and the name Huluzu for those to the South.10 The latter constellation

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was also present in the Făgăraș Mountains, where different Romanian villages would call the same peaks differently.11 Microtoponymy was in a constant state of flux. Not only did field names often change from one generation to the next by remotivation, folk etymology or simply by their referents ceasing to be places, but peasants also made use of ad hoc orienting clues referring to recent events, which surveyors understood as names, but not the people themselves.12 Field names could even alternate cyclically, like in the case of shepherds on the slopes of the Negoi in the Făgăraș Mountains, who switched the names of depressions from year to year depending on where they grazed the rams and where the sterile ewes.13 Concurrently, there was also a good deal of conservatism to the microtoponymy, as the names of well-individuated geographical features and places of abiding significance for the community could survive for centuries. The frequent field name Tó (Hun. ‘pond’), for example, preserved the memory of erstwhile bodies of water – used as fishponds or for retting hemp – long after these had been drained off and transformed into ploughlands,14 and minor toponyms often persisted for centuries after speakers of the language in which they originated had disappeared from the site. Hungarian-origin field names were preserved next to Romanian settlements,15 as were names of Saxon origin in Hungarian-speaking market towns16 and Romanian villages,17 and South Slavic names in the Eastern Banat.18 The cross-linguistic dimension of variation is commonly captured in terms of place-name borrowing and the exonym–endonym divide. The Austrian dialectologist Eberhard Kranzmayer invented a tripartite typology for the study of this variation; approaching names that refer to the same place from the side of their genesis, he used the term Übersetzungspaare (‘translation pair’) for the semantically equivalent ones (e.g. Abbazia/Opatija/Abtei ‘abbey’), Entlehnungspaare (‘loan pairs’) for those similar in form (e.g. Trieste/Trst/Triest) and stemming from borrowing, and called freie Paare (‘free pairs’) those names that go back to unrelated etymons.19 In the Cisleithanian (Austrian-at-large) lands that Kranzmayer studied, this latter type was by far the least frequent among the three, while the proportions between the other two varied widely, with Entlehnungspaare being the commonest everywhere (see Table 3.1). To meaningfully compare Kranzmayer’s data with mine, it would matter whether he included names concocted in government offices or editorial rooms. I deliberately disregarded artificial German names, which tended to translate the Romanian or Hungarian endonyms. The results thus obtained are in any event much at variance with Kranzmayer’s. The share of freie Paare (Rom. Stremț/Hun. Diód ) was similarly low in the area; name pairs without a connection between them or with a connection so obscured as to be unrecognizable amounted to 6.3 per cent, or 229 pairs and 6 triplets.20 The curious part is that Übersetzungspaare (Ger. Seligstadt/Hun. Boldogváros ‘merry town’) appear even less numerous; my

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Table 3.1  Distribution of the cross-linguistic variation of settlement names by types in four Cisleithanian crownlands.

Bohemia (Czech–German) Carinthia (Slovenian–German)* Istria (Italian–Slovenian) South Tyrol (Romance–German)

Übersetzungspaare (‘translation pair’)

Entlehnungspaare freie Paare (‘loan pairs’) (‘free pairs’)

11% 41% 11% 30%

58% 58% 80% 50%

 6%  1%  6% 10%

Source: E. Kranzmayer, ‘Zur Ortsnamenforschung im Grenzland’, Zeitschrift für Ortsnamenforschung 10 (1934), 114, 125, 141 and 143. * According to a different calculation, the corresponding figures were 36% Übersetzungspaare, 60% Entlehnungspaare and 3% freie Paare – A. Ogris, ‘Zweisprachige Ortsnamen in Kärnten in Geschichte und Gegenwart’, Südostdeutsches Archiv 28–29 (1985–86), 131.

rough count found seventy-five of them, accounting for just 2 per cent of all settlements of the area, and a few cases where parallel meanings extended to more than two languages.21 Taking into account that I examined more than one pair per settlement, the predominance of Entlehnungspaare (Rom. Călan/Hun. Pusztakalán) is sweeping. The vast majority of coreferential settlement names in the area stood in close historical relationship with one another. Übersetzungspaare were more widespread in the microtoponymy, because some salient physical attribute frequently served as the basis of naming, even though, as already mentioned, microtoponymy was on the whole more fluid than settlement names. Somewhat simplifying matters, the surface of linguistically mixed settlements was covered by as many parallel toponymies as there were languages, usually with a large overlap between them consisting of loans, calques and half-calques.22 Once again, since language coaligned with other factors of social division and with residential segregation, these ideally corresponded to the various local communities, but this equivalence was much sloppier than in the case of personal names. Cadastral maps not only flash-froze a process of change at one time-section but they also inevitably accorded privilege to one ethnic place-name cover over the other. The Romanian monographer of Schirkanyen/ Șercaia/Sárkány grumbled that cadastral surveyors had recorded the German field names in the 1870s, whereas, he claimed, Saxon farmers themselves made more frequent use of the Romanian ones.23 Since the turn of the millennium, and thanks to the debates of the Working Group on Exonyms inside the United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names, the usage of the exonym–endonym dichotomy has taken a radical shift towards a definition that makes more sense in the context of a microhistorical or anthropological analysis.24 Earlier understandings of this dichotomy valued the sovereignty of nation-states over everything else, and contrasted official names, interpreted as endonyms, with whatever other names existed in recognized

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languages, in practice the national languages of other nation-states. Going by such definitions, Litzmannstadt was the endonym of Łódź in 1940, Orașul Stalin the endonym of Brașov/Brassó/Kronstadt in 1951, whereas speakers of non-dominant languages have invariably called their homeplaces by exonyms.25 Recent definitions, in contrast, have given prominence to the viewpoint of local communities: ‘a toponym can only truly be an endonym if it is endorsed by popular consent and fits comfortably into the voluntary everyday spoken and written vocabulary of at least one significant section of the locally settled social community’, Paul Woodman specifies.26 The endonym–exonym dichotomy is thus detached from the official or unofficial character of a name. The Hungarian names of Romanian-speaking villages in the Kingdom of Hungary are recategorized as exonyms, irrespective of whether or not they had existed for centuries or were invented after 1898, in the same manner as the new Romanian names introduced after 1918 for Szekler and other Hungarian-speaking villages. Certainly, this redefinition raises almost as many problems as it solves. It fails to distinguish between exonymy within and across languages (or onomastica), which becomes a real issue in the case of discretely contrasting languages. Moreover, the various formulations of this view have so far missed the complexity of the standard–dialect continuum. The geographer Peter Jordan brought an example from my area for an endonym/exonym pair in one language: the endonym Mieresch, the (once) usual name of the Maros/Mureș River for Transylvanian Saxons, versus the exonym Marosch, the name of the same river for Germans more widely, borrowed from modern Hungarian.27 But Mieresch is itself an abstraction to some degree; not to mention that, on the evidence of Google Books, these are rather two forms competing for standard status. One hopefully does not wish to confine the category of endonym to the sometimes mind-bogglingly diverse array of locally pronounced forms, and it is possible to pursue a modicum of standardization without losing sight of local acceptance as the main criterion. On the social side, from what size can speakers of a language be said to make up a ‘significant’ section of the local population? This is a particularly touchy point given that endonymy has been the target of conflicting political claims. Further, should a variant that belongs to a group not living permanently in the place but frequenting it regularly, say, as its weekly marketplace, count as an endonym? Because of all these uncertainties, I want to stress the gradual nature of the endonymy–exonymy divide before adopting it in the above sense for a brief discussion of cross-linguistic variation. In localities where more than one language was spoken, the names customary in each of these languages were endonyms. For the sake of convenience, in so far as a linguistic group made up a ‘significant’ section of the population, the name variant used by them is interpreted here as a separate endonym even if it differed little in form. In that way, settlements could possess up to four or five endonyms

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in various languages. The definition allows for local uses of exonyms in some contexts, which takes on special significance with Transylvanian Saxon villages, where the villagers were key to maintaining the High German names. How did cross-linguistic exonyms come to be? In the simplest scenario, they stemmed from historical endonyms. This was doubtless the case with the Hungarian and Saxon names of many ethnically Romanian villages, as well as with the Saxon names of a few dozen formerly Saxon, later Hungarian-speaking ones. For these to remain in use, there was a need for a sustained presence of native speakers in the region, or at least for a more or less unbroken administrative control – a reason why old Hungarian settlement names survived as exonyms in Transylvania, but not in the Banat, where the Ottoman invasion had interrupted the use of Hungarian for nearly three centuries. Besides, and somewhat more commonly, exonyms could also arise through borrowing and phonological adjustment by residents of the surrounding villages, the seigniorial personnel or the county administration. These exonyms later continued on their separate paths and underwent further modifications, or, conversely, they preserved earlier forms of the endonyms no longer in use locally. It would appear that before increased social communication and state intervention codified national onomastica, people felt freer to improvise exonyms instead of attempting to use local forms, in a way that is not done today, except humorously. During his journey across Poland by foot, the seventeenth-century travel writer Márton Szepsi Csombor and his travel companions had called the town of Nieszawa Görgő, after a similarly onion-producing village from Szepsi Csombor’s native Abaúj County in Upper Hungary, while in his autobiography written before 1730, the soldier-scientist Ferdinando Marsigli referred to the castle of Görgény in Transylvania by the Italianized name Georgino.28 Hence also the facility with which learned people had Latinized place names in Latin texts, a practice that incidentally supplied models for Romanian exonyms of Western Hungarian towns (Agria→Agriu ‘Eger’, Cassovia→Cașovia ‘Kassa/ Košice’, Strigonium→Strigoniu ‘Esztergom’).29 Some exonyms had no more than a fleeting existence. Saxons from the neighbouring villages invented the name Palensdorf for Magyar–Romanian Kerelőszentpál/Sânpaul in the 1850s, which fell into oblivion afterwards.30 In the early twentieth century, a group of Magyar herdsmen from around Szeged were indentured in the Retezat Mountains and altered the name of the local brook Slăvoi to Szellevény for their use, transferring the name of a village on the Hungarian Grand Plain.31 The Hungarian exonyms of their places sneaked into the daily lives of Romanian villagers through multiple channels. Vinerea/Felkenyér/Oberbrodsdorf, for instance, a Romanian village surrounded by other Romanian villages, used a capital F, the initial of its Hungarian name, for branding its cattle.32 Village secretaries of the 1860s were sharply aware of even subtle differences between

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the locally used name variants and the ones under which their villages were supposedly known more widely, as existed between, to quote the respondents’ spellings, Romanian Bujor (:Buzsor:) and Hungarian Bozsur, Romanian Ilteu and Hungarian Iltyó, Romanian Pestyire and Hungarian Pestere, and Romanian Olt Bogátá and Hungarian Olt Bogát (all Romanian-speaking villages).33 These village secretaries not only knew the codified toponymy inside out from professional practice, but also played an essential role in sustaining it – especially in the Banat where, because written transactions in Hungarian could not look back to a long history, they even contributed to its codification. In Romanian monolingual areas, the clear-cut distinction between endonyms and exonyms – as far as the reported forms stood for distinct pronunciations  – was sometimes of recent vintage; it often grew out of a variation of a different sort, and was reinterpreted by the administration to suit the low/local vs high/national opposition. Through the respondent returns to Frigyes Pesty’s toponymic survey of 1864, the bulk of which have remained unpublished to this day, one gets a unique insight into a vernacular style of decoding place names, which did not endow them with special ethnolinguistic significance. With his survey, for which he somewhat surprisingly enlisted the assistance of the Habsburg bureaucracy, Pesty’s main goal was to collect the whole microtoponymy of contemporary Hungary and Transylvania, which he hoped would yield an abundance of clues on the topography and ethnic relations of the land prior to the Ottoman conquest. Before the blank sheets reserved for the microtoponymy, he inquired about the possible origin and meaning of the settlement’s name.34 Sporadic references to peasant etymologies in a wide range of published material partly confirm and partly complement the testimony of these returns. One should, however, beware not to essentialize the different interpretive horizon that comes to light from these sources as the prenational or premodern vernacular lore about place-name origins, if only because etymological guesses of learned provenience constantly trickled into folk knowledge. It would be no less uncritical to assume that the village secretaries who drafted the responses to Pesty’s questionnaire always transmitted local beliefs when they did not draw on written sources. Although the instructions circulated by county authorities called on them to collect information from the oldest men and office holders, there probably were village secretaries who thought they knew better than unlettered peasants, and so substituted local traditions with their own ­etymologies  – all the more, since village secretaries typically attended to the affairs of several (up to a dozen or so) villages, and thus, if rigorously abiding by this point of the instructions, would have required to make extra rounds of their circles. In most cases, village secretaries did not provide any etymology for the ­settlement names. How to interpret this fact? To be fair, they often skipped other questions as well, or answered them evasively, out of indifference or prudence,

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confused as they were about the real purpose of the survey and the type of answers expected from them. To the question of where the village had populated from, most of them gave answers such as ‘it was populated from itself’ or ‘from the surrounding villages’. Did then village secretaries pooh-pooh existing traditions about settlement names as idle nonsense? Were the villagers ashamed to own up to their legends in front of higher authority? Or should we take at face value that a great many village communities did not have such traditions? To better appreciate the role that village secretaries could play in transmitting and filtering local public opinion, one has to keep in mind that the years of Pesty’s survey saw a higher proportion of Romanians among these officials than at any time during the Dualist period, to the extent that, judging by the names, Romanian secretaries administered around half of the Romanian villages. Many of them, and some of their non-Romanian colleagues, drafted their responses in Romanian, following the contemporary Latinate norm. Moreover, at the time of the survey, Magyars and other non-Romanians did not usually reject the idea of Romanians’ continuous settlement in former Dacia. Indeed, they formed a slight majority among those who asserted the folk’s descent from Trajan’s conquering Romans in their responses, but their formulaic declarations often betray that they did not transmit folk knowledge. Probably the vague resemblance to the name of Trajan led the German-surnamed circle secretary to believe that Troaș, one of the youngest localities in the county, was the most ancient.35 In a word, village secretaries may have withheld local opinions, but less likely such as aligned with canonical narratives. Whether they originated among the peasantry or the rural literate caste, the etymologies returned to Pesty show little resemblance to learned Romantic ones, and can be smoothly described as prenational. They also nicely dovetail with the peasant etymologies that appear as such in early ethnographic works. The most recurrent type rooted the origin of place names in dialogue settings, usually at the time of the founding. This framing, which allowed for reliance on inflected word forms, had been common in early modern humanist etymologies. In reality, of course, place names are hardly ever born out of shreds of dialogues, and this strategy to interpret them had also lost credit with nineteenth-century scholars. Table 3.2 on the following page gives some examples. Another result, the space conjured up in peasant etymologies was confined to the perimeter of the village or at best to conflicts with neighbouring villages, unlike in the wider-ranging visions of insider etymologists. If anything, village people bound their place names to local myths and used them as sites of local memory. Typical in this regard is Surul (Rom. ‘the grey one’), the name of a peak in the Southern Carpathians, originally likely referring to its colour, but for the twentieth-century Romanian dwellers of Avrig/Freck, already harking back to a legendary grey horse that their ancestors had allegedly given in exchange for the mountain to their Racovița neighbours.36

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Table 3.2  Vernacular place-name etymologies embedded in dialogues. Name

Proposed etymology English meaning

Context attributed to it

Solduba (Rom)

s-aude doba

Early eighteenth-century wars between the Habsburgs and Prince Ferenc Rákóczia

the drum is calling

Săcărâmb (haideți) să cărăm (Rom) Eresztevény ereszd a vént! (Hun)

(come on) let’s haulb

Atyha (Hun)

give, if (you have)

adj, ha (van)!

let the old one(s) go

A Tatar khan to his soldiers, referring to the old and invalided among captive Christiansc The youngest child to his father at the division of the family estate (set in the seventeenth century)d

a Mayor Costa Andracu, 1864, in L. Mizser, Szatmár vármegye Pesty Frigyes 1864–1866. évi Helynévtárában [Szatmár County in Frigyes Pesty’s place name directory, 1864–66] (Nyíregyháza: Szabolcs-Szatmár-Bereg Megyei Levéltár, 2001), 97. b E. Armeanca, Săcărâmbul: monografia parohiei române unite de acolo [Săcărâmb/Sekerembe/ Nagyág: monograph of the local Romanian Uniate parish] (Lugoj: Tipografia Națională, 1932), 10. In fact, from Rom. scoroambă ‘blackthorn’, originally as a lieu-dit. c B. Orbán, A Székelyföld leirása történelmi, régészeti, természetrajzi s népismei szempontból [Description of the Szeklerland from historical, archaeological, natural and ethnographic viewpoints], Vol. 3 (Pest: Ráth, 1869), 175. d S. Réső Ensel, Jr, A helynevek magyarázója [Interpreter of place names], Vol. 1 (Pest: selfpublished, 1861), 29.

It may appear to contradict what I have just said about the narrow horizons of peasant etymologies, but Pesty’s informants very often derived place names from another language, one not spoken locally. That Magyar village secretaries, district administrators and noblemen asserted the Hungarian origins of village names should come as no surprise, but several Romanian respondents also presented Hungarian etymologies for names of Romanian-speaking villages. Obviously, these did not necessarily mirror the opinions of local peasants. Thus a Romanian Orthodox priest related the Hungarian name of his parish, Dobolló (Rom. Dobârlău), to the sound of its brook (Hun. Doboló, ‘drumming’), and three Romanian village secretaries argued that the names of their villages came from Hungarian, although one of these does not even have a transparent Hungarian meaning.37 The response from Ciucea/Csucsa, signed on behalf of the local community, derived the name from Hungarian csucsok (dial. csucsak) (‘peaks’). It is worth noting, however, that Pesty himself encouraged etymologies across languages by explicitly inquiring about the origin and meaning of each ethnic name variant separately. Other cross-linguistic etymologies also occur. The Romanians of Alioș/ Aliosch, according to a later observation by the village monograph, firmly

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believed that the name of their village commemorated a Turkish pasha called Ali.38 Slavic etymologies were rarely advanced, but respondents sometimes hinted at various foreign tongues in which their locality names allegedly meant something.39 Crucially, however, Latin etymologies quoted as local folk opinions are conspicuous by their absence; a mere four or five respondents advanced Latin place-name etymologies. Romanian peasants may have tried to explain opaque place names based on Romanian, but not from Latin, and the Latinist etymologies that will be touched upon in Chapter 6 had not yet infiltrated local knowledge.40 Concerning landscape forms, peasants ultimately drew upon the Book of Genesis to populate the earliest past with giants and Jews.41 At the same time, they told and retold stories about the first settlers of their villages, and they often used these stories to structure kinship networks and legitimize social differences. The circumstance that the founding ancestors were often said to have arrived from the Szeklerland to inner Transylvania, from Transylvania to Eastern Hungary and from Oltenia or Wallachia to the Banat does not make the logic of these stories any more historical, as these regions existed independent of history for the narrators. Thus Pesty’s survey from 1864  – the single (if admittedly faulty) snapshot of contemporary popular etymologies – shows a peasantry who were none too excited about the origins of place names, especially not the Romanian segment. On the whole, it seems that their explanations were not meant very seriously, and revolved around those recurring elements that structured local histories beyond three generations, the interval encompassed by living (or as Jan Assmann calls it, communicative) memory: the founding and the relocation of the village, major convulsions such as Tatar raids (which continued until the eighteenth century in the region), occasionally some vague reminiscences of the Ottoman times, the creation of the Military Frontier, and the inescapable rivalries with immediate neighbours.42 Foundational stories encapsulating etymologies of settlement names did not feature the magnificent troops of chieftain Árpád or Emperor Trajan, as Romantic etymologies so often did; peasants in the 1860s did not yet have their villages founded by either Roman veterans or fearsome, pagan horse-meat eaters, but instead by feudal landlords, shepherds, refugees, occasionally by highwaymen and thieves, and Magyars outside the Szeklerland often by Szeklers. Other sources, however, suggest that in the proximity of remains from Roman times, the collective memory of Romanian peasant communities had by that time adopted the figure of Emperor Trajan. This conjecture would also help to explain the relatively early popularity of the name Traian. The peasants behind the responses were either ignorant of or did not care about grand history (likely both), and in any event, they did not use it for constructing identities. They also did not insist on deriving local place names

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from their mother tongue, much less from Latin, as educated Romanians did. On both counts, it is clear that peasants did not spontaneously nurture the same values that were paramount for national awakeners, making it harder for the latter to latch their propaganda onto peasant culture. Unlike in Anthony D. Smith’s ethno-symbolist model, nationalist master narratives and identity symbols did not find many precedents in ethnic cultures to which to connect, and at that stage, nationalists had not yet appropriated either religious or genuine folk imagery – which is not tantamount to saying that the peasants under question did not have an ethnic worldview. Here, some qualifications are in order. In the District of Năsăud, professional administration had dated from the time of the Military Frontier, and some responding officials provided exhaustive local histories covering the previous century. Traces of a secular group identity that transcended the local, complete with its historical myths, did turn up in responses from the Szeklerland. There is no reason to suspect that these were additions by village secretaries, although the etymological explanations that relate here may well reflect a highbrow, as against a vernacular, tradition. As pointed out in the Introduction, Szeklers, unlike native Hungarian commoners in the rest of Transylvania, were a privileged group with a separate legal standing, political organization and, critically, an institutionalized cultural memory. Against this background, elderly Szeklers and local office holders of the 1860s can be credited with proudly perpetuating legends about Szeklers’ common, Asian origins.43 The fact that the mindset of Pesty’s informants had not yet absorbed nationally framed historical myths does not exclude the possibility that they allied with or supported nationalist activism. Cultural memory – the body of information that constant reiteration made instantly retrievable for community members – was open to incorporate single bits from literate sources, but as a whole it was too unwieldy to be quickly geared towards Romantic nationalism. It changed at a slower pace, and nationalist master narratives would only slowly infiltrate, remodel or dislodge local foundation myths later on. Part I of this book has surveyed the uses and meanings of names among the peasantry and garnered data on the top-down spread of national culture. From the sources, there emerges a prenational peasant culture at the outset of the era, which reacted only very gradually to nationalist propaganda in the ensuing fifty years, and with significant spatial disparities. It is now time to move to the next level and examine the stories and interpretations that nationalized elites created and circulated about the peasantry’s names.

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Notes   1. Y.-F. Tuan, ‘Language and the Making of Place: A Narrative-Descriptive Approach’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 81 (1991), 684–96.   2. P. Engel, A temesvári és moldovai szandzsák törökkori települései: 1554–1579 [Settlements of the Temesvár and the Moldova Sanjaks in the Ottoman Era, 1554–79] (Szeged: Csongrád Megyei Levéltár, 1996).   3. J. Assmann, Cultural Memory and Early Civilization: Writing, Remembrance, and Political Imagination, trans. D.H. Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 44–45.   4. H. Georgelin, ‘Thrace Orientale et Anatolie: territoires à nommer et à saisir, à la fin du XIXe et au XXe siècle’, in G. de Rapper and P. Sintès (eds), Nommer et classer dans les Balkans (Athens: École française d’Athènes, 2008), 205.   5. Kripke, 31–32.   6. I. Slavici, ‘Lumea prin care am trecut’ [The world I lived in], in Opere [Works], Vol. 9, Memorialistica, Varia (Bucharest: Scriitori Români and Minerva, 1978), 182.   7. I. Russu Șirianu, Românii din statul ungar: statistică, etnografie [The Romanians of the Hungarian state: statistics, ethnography] (Bucharest: self-published, 1904), 145.   8. Romanian Academy Library, Manuscript Collection, Manuscrise românești 4554, 64f, 77v, 80f, 91f, 434f and 448f.  9. Circle secretary János Májer, Örvénd/Urvind, 1864; Pesty Frigyes kéziratos helységnévtárából, 1864: Bihar, Vol. 1, 137; and H. Freihoffer, Kleinschemlak: Das Werden und Vergehen einer donauschwäbischen Gemeinde im Südbanater Heckenland (Deggendorf: self-published, 1972). 10. E. de Martonne, ‘Sur la toponymie naturelle des régions de haute montagne, en particulier dans les Karpates Méridionales’, Bulletin de géographie historique et descriptive 15 (1900), 88–89. 11. A.B. Szalay, ‘Der Kamm des Fogarascher Gebirges’, Jahrbuch der Siebenbürgische Karpathenverein 47 (1934), 14–15. 12. Cf. N.M. Wolf, An Irish-Speaking Island: State, Religion, Community, and the Linguistic Landscape in Ireland, 1770–1870 (Madison: Wisconsin University Press, 2014), 74–81. 13. G. Bácskai and F. Wild, Fogarasi-havasok: hegymászó- és turistakalauz [Făgăraș Mountains: a guide for mountaineers and tourists] (Budapest: Kornétás, 2012), 43. 14. Cf. N. Penko Seidl, ‘Engraved in the Landscape: The Study of Spatial and Temporal Characteristics of Field Names in the Changing Landscape’, Names 67 (2019), 20. 15. Șematismul veneratului cler al Archidiecesei metropolitane greco-catolice române de AlbaIulia și Făgăraș pre anul domnului 1900 de la sânta unire 200 [Gazetteer to the venerable clergy of the Romanian Greek Catholic Metropolitan Archdiocese of Alba Iulia and Făgăraș for ad 1900, 200 years since the Holy Union] (Blaș: Seminariului Archidiecesan, n.d.), 287; and Slavici, ‘Lumea prin care am trecut’, 184. 16. A.T. Szabó, Dés helynevei [The place names of Dés/Dej] (Turda: Füssy, 1937), 4; and idem, ‘Adatok Nagyenyed XVI–XX. századi helyneveinek ismeretéhez’ [Data on the toponymy of Nagyenyed/Aiud/Enyeden from the sixteenth to twentieth centuries], Erdélyi Múzeum, new series 38 (1933), 227 and 240. 17. I. Stanciu, Spicuiri din trecutul comunei Luduș (jud. Sibiu) [Gleanings from the history of Ludoș commune, Sibiu County] (Sibiu: Tipografiei arhidiecezane, 1938), 4; I. Beju,

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‘Monografia comunei Apoldu de Jos’ [Monograph of Apoldu de Jos commune], in J.D. Henrich, I. Beju and I. Câmpineanu (eds), Apoldu de Jos: texte monografice [Apoldu de Jos: monographic texts] (Sibiu: Techno Media, 2007), 135; and M. Drăgan and M.  Drăgan, Săsăuș: monografia unui sat românesc [Săsăuș: monograph of a Romanian village] (Sibiu: Anastasis, 2010), 31. 18. As in Banat Swabian Bakowa/Bachóvár/Bacova; H. Wettel, Der Buziaser Bezirk: Landschaften mit historischen Streiflichtern (Temesvar: Südungarische Buchdruckerei, 1919), 49. 19. E. Kranzmayer, ‘Zur Ortsnamenforschung im Grenzland’, Zeitschrift für Ortsnamenforschung 10 (1934), 11. 20. The six triplets are Beschened/Kisdengeleg/Cerzi, Gusu/Gieshübel/Kisludas, Hammersdorf/ Gușteriță/Szenterzsébet, Țapu/Abtsdorf/Csicsóholdvilág, Tăure/Tóhát/Neudorf and Zeiden/ Codlea/Feketehalom. 21. Satulung/Hosszúfalu/Langendorf, Rothberg/Roșia/Veresmart and Weißkirchen/Bela Crkva/ Biserica Albă/Fehértemplom. 22. For an overview of the bilingual microtoponymy of a Saxon–Romanian village, I. and W. Sedler (eds), Zied: ein Dorf und seine Geschichte, Vol. 1 (Ludwigsburg: self-published, 2003), 75–87. 23. G. Maior, O pagină din luptele românilor cu sașii pe terenul social, cultural și economic: Șercaia, 1809–1909 [A page from Romanians’ struggles with Saxons in the social, cultural and economic spheres: Schirkanyen/Șercaia/Sárkány, 1809–1909] (Bucharest: Universala, 1910), 12. 24. Zs. Bartos-Elekes, ‘The Discussion on Terminology of the Terms Exonym and Endonym’, Review of Historical Geography and Toponomastics 3(5–6) (2008), 61. 25. P. Woodman, ‘The Naming Process: Societal Acceptance and the Endonym Definition’, in idem (ed.), The Great Toponymic Divide: Reflections on the Definition and Usage of Endonyms and Exonyms (Warsaw: Head Office of Geodesy and Cartography, 2012), 16. 26. Ibid., 17. 27. P. Jordan, ‘Towards a Comprehensive View at the Endonym/Exonym Divide’, in Woodman, The Great Toponymic Divide, 24. 28. M. Szepsi Csombor, Europica varietas (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1979), 111; and M. Holban (ed.), Călători străini despre țările române [Foreign travellers on the Romanian lands], Vol. 8 (Bucharest: Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică, 1983), 55. 29. All examples from C. Diaconovich (ed.), Enciclopedia română [Romanian encyclopaedia], 3 vols (Sibiiu: ASTRA, 1898–1904). 30. F. Pesty, A helynevek és a történelem [Place names and history] (Budapest: M.T. Akadémia, 1878), 5. 31. Gy. Barthos, Elhagyott Ádámok: kívül a Paradicsomon; korabeli vázlatok a kárpáti erdőkben dolgozók küzdelmes életéről; naplójegyzetek alapján, 1907–19 [Forsaken Adams: out of Eden; contemporary sketches about the laborious life of people working in the Carpathian forests; based on diary notes, 1907–19] (Budapest: Országos Erdészeti Egyesület Erdészettörténeti Szakosztály, 2000), 124. 32. Abbildung der in den sächsischen Ortschaften bestehenden Viehbrandzeichen nach den einzelnen Stühlen und Districten geordnet (Hermannstadt: Lithographisches Institut, 1826), unpaginated. 33. Sándor Philippovits, OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 35; ibid., reel 2; Sándor Mártonffy, in Pesty Frigyes kéziratos helységnévtárából, 1864: Bihar, Vol. 2, 433;

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and village secretary Sándor Hegyi, mayor Ștefan Achim, senior locals Gheorghe Leoca, Cati Onea and Radu Nica, in Pesty Frigyes helynévgyűjteménye 1864–1865: Székelyföld, Vol. 1, 183. 34. Á. Csáki, ‘Előszó’ [Preface], in Pesty Frigyes helynévgyűjteménye 1864–1865: Székelyföld, Vol. 1, 7–14. 35. OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 2. 36. M. Seidler, Freck: Orte der Erinnerung; eine Ortsmonographie (Dössel: Stekovics, 2004), 36. 37. Copru, Crihalma and Dăișoara. Pesty Frigyes helynévgyűjteménye 1864–1865: Székelyföld, Vol. 1, 43; Iacob Silviu from 1864; OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 18; Georgiu Pop Gridanul from 1865; ibid., reel no. 20 and ‘Ioan Bokutia’ from 1865; ibid. Kapor means ‘dill’ and királyhalma ‘king’s mound’. 38. I.D. Suciu, Comuna Alioș din punct de vedere istoric, biologic și cultural [Alioș/Aliosch commune from the historical, biological and cultural viewpoints] (Bucharest: Societatea de Mâine, 1940), 13. 39. Among those that do not seem to originate from village secretaries, only the mayor Joseph/József Ackerman from Lipova traced back his settlement name (correctly) to the Slavic word for ‘lime tree’ as one of his parallel explanations; OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel 61. 40. The village secretary Vasile Bran’s bizarre suggestion for Bărlești: bărr exhortatory cry for driving sheep + Rom. lese ‘wattle fence’ (Mizser, 30), Pál Mattolay’s down-to-earth interpretation of Pișcari as the plural of dialectal Rom. pișcar ‘loach’ (ibid., 81), and the Greek Catholic parish priest Ioan Bariț’s deriving of Petrid from Rom. petriș ‘gravel’ (Pesty Frigyes helynévgyűjteménye 1864–1865: Székelyföld, Vol. 4, 126), to which I add the mayor Daniil Bucur’s etymology in his village chronicle from 1919: Lancrăm < Rom. *La Crâng ‘near the grove’; A. Lupu, File de cronică din Lancrăm [Files from the chronicle of Lancrăm/Langendorf/Lámkerék] (Alba Iulia: Aeternitas, 2008), 26. Bărlești < Rom. Bârlea personal name + -ești. The earlier Romanian name of Lancrăm was Lacrăng, which in its turn is a reflex of dialectal German Lânkräck (‘long back’). 41. Cf. I. Ghinoiu (ed.), Habitatul: Răspunsuri la chestionarele Atlasului Etnografic Român [Habitat: Answers to the questions of the Romanian Ethnographic Atlas], Vol. 2 (Bucharest: Etnologică, 2010), 87–88 and Vol. 3 (2011), 109–10. 42. Assmann, 34, 37 and 42. 43. On Szekler origin myths, see G.M. Hermann and Zs. Orbán. Csillagösvény és göröngyös út: mítosz és történelem a székelység tudatában [Star path and lumpy road: myth and history in the consciousness of Szeklers] (Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület, 2018).

Part II

Nationalisms

d

Chapter 4

Faces of the Self-Other Contact-Influenced Family Names in Discourse and Practice

d You’re really a Bulgarian, aren’t you? C’mon, admit it. You’re all Bulgarians, but you’re trying to turn yourselves into Serbs! —Aleko Konstantinov, Bai Ganyo1

As Chapter 2 made clear, family names were neither particularly old in the area nor were they treated as ethnic markers by the rural society. Nationalist intelligentsias, however, wished to find a kernel of national essence in them, perhaps enclosed in a rotten shell, but apt to be released. When nationalist ideology imputed a millennial continuity to family names, the confusion about scale was the same as in the case of the larger national programme that contemplated folk culture (or rather its representative fragments) as remnants from the nation’s golden age. I also tried to show how audacious it was in the given context to draw conclusions about people’s ethnolinguistic ancestry from the etymologies of their surnames. Yet both points often went unchallenged in contemporary discussions, and the combination of the two could lead to bizarre results. Family names are still widely taken to be signs of ethnic origins, sometimes even for scholarly purposes. Since 1950, the US Census Bureau has compiled a ‘List of Spanish surnames’, with data improved and updated every ten years, to better capture the Hispanic population there.2 But note that in this case, the terminus post quem is the transfer of Mexican territories to the United States in 1848, and statisticians have been neither interested in nor tempted by the foolish task of using names to determine the more remote Native American or settler ancestry of the 1848 stock. Similarly, nobody mistakes Asian, African or Afro-American people for descendants of Europeans on the grounds that they have European family names. When done with due cognizance of its limitations

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and on historically unrelated onomastica, there is nothing improper about this method. Indeed, it is often an inescapable strategy to delimit or sample datasets of people who belong to historically intertwined naming traditions, and I also resort to it in chapters 1 and 5. It is a different and often unrelated question what uses contemporaries made of the supposed indexicality of family names. Sabin(o) Arana, for example, the already mentioned inventor of Basque nationalism, set it as a condition for membership in the association Euzkeldun Batzokija to have all four grandparents with Basque family names.3 This alone makes it clear that he defined the Basque nation on ‘racial’ grounds. Whether he was right in connecting Basque family names to Basque-speaking ancestors does not modify that, and it cannot be answered without specific knowledge of the subject. He appears to be blindly assuming, though, that neither a ‘racially’ Basque ancestor had ever taken on a Spanish surname nor an ‘encroaching’ Spaniard had ever taken on a Basque one, and this is once more revealing of his worldview. Contemporary authors found no problem projecting family names back a thousand years or more. The Lugoj/Lugosch/Lugos archpriest Gheorghe Popovici linked the family name Got to an erstwhile Gothic population in the Banat, eager to show Goths becoming Romanians there during the Migration Era.4 But mixed origins could easily be presented as a liability, and when the school inspector Lajos Réthi attributed some strange Romanian surnames from Hunyad County to Hunnic and Avar ancestors, he meant it as a snide remark to Romanian nationalism.5 Moreover, it seems that he regarded Huns and Avars as subspecies of Magyars.6 In a more innocuous fashion, the Greek Catholic provost Nicolae Brînzeu, being aware that the Romanian villages around Orăștie had been founded by Saxons in the Middle Ages, believed his Romanian Greek Catholic schoolmates Rudi Neumann, Pompi Neustätter and others with German names to be descendants of the erstwhile Saxon settlers.7 Since the villages in question had been destroyed by marauding Turks in the fifteenth century and had quickly been repopulated by Romanians, Brînzeu’s belief (as far as the names are concerned) would require that the oral tradition of the locals, likely with no German, had transmitted these High German family names through three centuries, under conditions in which family names played at best a peripheral role in their lives (not to mention that, in the fifteenth century, the social institution of inheritable surnames had not yet stabilized among Saxons either). It seems more reasonable to suppose that in the previous century and a half, the Saxons of Orăștie had given German names to their Romanian farmhands or herdsmen from the ­surrounding villages, which Romanian priests later made official. If we are to believe the Magyar writer Józsi Jenő Tersánszky, this primordialist view of family names, together with the intense nationalization of the era, led to a positively peculiar result in the mining district of Nagybánya/Baia Mare:

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a group of purely self-constructed ‘Poles’, at 380 kilometres from the closest Polish-speaking lands.8 As a third factor, the colourful imagery attached to the Polish gentry and Polish émigrés in contemporary Hungary also needs to be mentioned, as the family names on which these people based their Polishness were, in fact, Slovak rather than Polish.9 Besides his father, a mining entrepreneur, Tersánszky quotes two other men from his family’s circle of acquaintances who considered themselves Poles in turn-of-the-century Nagybánya: one called Kuszkó and the other Ádám Krizsovánszky, Greek Catholic by religion. Tersánszky’s father, who was so passionate about his Polishness that in a maudlin state of mind he would sometimes kneel to recite the lines of ‘Poland Is Not Yet Lost’, was born in Rodna/Radna to a mother of Szekler and a father of Slavic origin, and brought up as a Roman Catholic. His son brings up the vernacular Romanian name he was known by in his birthplace, Ianoș a Totului, as a detail allegedly supporting his Polish roots; however, tot means Slovak.10 Like most Roman Catholics in Rodna, his parents spoke Romanian at home, and he did not learn Hungarian until he moved away after turning twenty. Significantly for his rejection of Magyar identity, the Church and the Hungarian state (maintainer of a local school and proprietor of the local mines) joined forces in the time of his youth to nationalize the Roman Catholic miners of Rodna.11 In Nagybánya, he came to profess pro-Romanian and anti-Magyar political sympathies, and apart from his ‘fellow Poles’, he mostly befriended Greek Catholic Romanians. Tersánszky’s father apparently took his Polishness seriously. His case demonstrates that above a certain standard of living, even those caught between two antagonistic national identities could not escape the imperative of national belonging, although the odd expedient of a Polish identity was an option available only for the few with plausibly Polish-sounding surnames. Tersánszky Senior’s repudiation of Magyardom, a national category with which he could have identified himself seamlessly, must be seen as a form of political protest. With his Roman Catholic religion and his Western Slavic family name playing against the more obvious choice of taking up a Romanian identity, Slovakness could have fulfilled the same function; but the Slovak national movement was weak, and in the borderlands of Transylvania and Hungary, even a politically nonconformist mining entrepreneur could turn sceptical ears to the argument that Slovaks constituted a nation apart. The self-claimed Poles of Nagybánya are a useful reminder that people could develop rich and unpredictable shades of do-it-yourself identities in reaction to contending nationalisms, but the most common uses to which the supposed ethnic indexicality of family names was put were less innocent and more enmeshed in mainstream political ideologies. Most notably, and here I am again wading deep into the murky waters of historical imaginary, the frequency of Hungarian-influenced family names among ethnic Romanians fuelled the myth

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of submerged Magyardom. The argument was aptly summed up by the British traveller Arthur J. Patterson: [T]he main ground for the assertion so often made that half a million of Transylvanian Magyars have changed their nationality, and become wallachized, is the prevalence of Wallachian-speaking peasants of genuine Magyar family names, such as Pap, Kis and the like. To this, it has been objected that the Wallach serfs, having originally no family names at all, have had such Magyar names imposed upon them by their Hungarian lords.12

From this perspective, villagers with Hungarian names, or with what a given author considered as such, appeared as survivors of a medieval Magyar population from before the deluge of ‘foreign elements’, who assimilated linguistically, changed religions, but somehow retained their ancient, Hungarian family names. The degradation of these people was imagined to have been continuous since the Ottoman period. The authors did not necessarily reclaim them for Magyardom. Instead, the reader often gets the impression that the primary function of these Magyars in disguise was rather to call up a gruesome past, ridden with undisclosed mysteries; and their supposedly mistaken ideas about their true selves reinforced this atmosphere. The Magyar authors who played out this card were often extraordinarily liberal in finding Hungarian names, especially where Magyars lived or had lived in the past. Also, any name that a Magyar peasant could bear would fit, including but not restricted to the duck-rabbit names presented in Chapter 2. Names that sounded vaguely similar to Hungarian names, unrelated or hypothetical, could also be exposed as distorted forms.13 In Szatmár, Szilágy and Bihar counties, where the percentage of Hungarianinfluenced names was among the highest, this strategy could indeed present the bulk of the Romanian population as estranged Magyars on the pen of Cornel Maroșan/Marosán Kornél, the chronicler of the Magyarizing Széchenyi Association: Would anyone dare doubt that Komjáti, Harsányi, Rákóci, Gyülvészi, Balog, Sugár, Hosszu, Kiss, Csáki, Néki, Kolbász, Bán, Török, Bojthor, Takács etc. used to be Magyars earlier? And there are villages where the majority bear such names. Now, if we add to these names those that once sounded pure Hungarian, but in the course of time have been, deliberately or unwittingly, distorted …, isn’t it a proven fact that the villages where these people live, and the people themselves, used to be of a purely Hungarian mother tongue?14

In a monoethnic region more at bay from outside cultural influences, such as the Jiu/Zsil Valley before the boom of coalmining, the visitor could find fewer Hungarian-influenced names, which would imply fewer paternal-line ancestors who had, we are told, merged into the ‘Romanian torrent’ by the fifteenth

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century: ‘[T]he only, unexpected signs of assimilation, showing up now and then among these sheepskin-hatted alpine rustics, are a few family names with ancestral sounding roots and the corresponding physical type’.15 Although phenotype and cultural characteristics were also looked at through an ethnonational prism, family names had a critical significance for these authors. They were sometimes deemed to have such evidential power that they needed no further comment: In many of these villages, the inherited Magyar elements are recognizable in the external and internal traits of the houses, but it is in Wallachian that the old and the young of the household talk or frolic at the gates. You only feel a warning shove from the depths of the past when you learn that the old farmer is called Gavrilla Barcsai or Juon Mészáros. It is truly worth to examine the traces of Magyardom; they would allow us to detect its terrible decrease.16

For some authors, it had little importance what village they happened to visit; if the dwellers spoke Romanian, they could reliably find errant Magyars. It could just as well be Corbu/Gyergyóholló, a place dating from the eighteenth century when it was probably settled from Moldavia and was thus particularly unlikely to accommodate Magyars from medieval times: ‘Irén Muzsdai, János Mikó, Flóra Labonc, Mrs. Szilvási … But look, there comes Demeter Ungurán as well. … I want to call out to them: ‘You are Magyars! Awake! Awake!’17 The person presented here as ‘Muzsdai’ perhaps bore the name Mujdei, from Romanian mujdei, a garlic sauce eaten on fast days, while the word ungurean referred to a migrant from Transylvania settled in the Romanian Principalities, without ethnic implications. On the Transylvanian side of the Carpathians, it entailed settling and resettling in family history. This (probably unconscious) cooking of the raw data, however, is far overshadowed by the self-delusion of the archaeologist Gábor Téglás, who visited Paroș, a poverty-stricken Romanian village in the foothills of the Retezat Mountains, to explore prehistoric remains in a nearby cave. It is doubtful whether he could convince even his well-intentioned readers to regard the name Băcălete as Hungarian: Soon after, there appeared the owner of the place, János Bekeletye, with his brothers Mihály and Péter, but in spite of their good Hungarian-sounding name (probably Bekelettje), they don’t speak a peep of Hungarian, and only their physiognomy reveals that they got drifted into the whirlpool of this foreign element by poverty and ignorance.18

Bekelettje is not only no more plausible a Hungarian name than Bekeletye, but it makes no more sense as a word form, something Téglás seems to suggest. What probably happened was that Téglás entered the village in anticipation of finding Magyars, and then tried to project some meaning into the first name he encountered. Paroș was not just a random village like Corbu, but, as Téglás

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was well aware, its inhabitants had been petty nobles whose seventeenth-century ancestors had followed the Calvinist faith. Neither of these circumstances made the origins of the Băcăletes any more Magyar in the context of the Hațeg Basin, and also, incidentally, the name does not figure among the noble families of the village as listed in 1683.19 Magyar authors, however, felt happy to include all former nobles in the fold of ethnic Magyars. The idea that family names were indexical of ethnic origin could underpin the submerged Magyardom myth in all its uses. Ignác Acsády, a pioneer of social history in Hungary, made use of family names to calculate the ethnic make-up of the early eighteenth-century peasantry in a book that carried all the more weight as it came out in the official series of the statistical service.20 Acsády (born Adler) even thought that the correspondence between name and nationality had been more immediate back then as compared to his own time, and he went on to categorize as Magyars even those Saxons who figured under translated Hungarian names in the conscriptions, a usual practice for Saxons in the eighteenth century.21 According to the grim vision in Kálmán Bélteky’s book on the ‘Magyar diaspora’, the business of pinpointing Romanianized Magyar names was itself made difficult by peasants obstinately clinging to their false identities. Bélteky considered as Hungarian even family names with the Romanian -an suffix if derived from place names of Hungarian origin, or indeed from any place name within the contemporary Kingdom of Hungary, and he launched into a tirade to guard these names against their bearers: [T]o complete our knowledge against deceit, we need to consider a peculiar modifying circumstance, to wit, that names get distorted through addition, foreign pronunciation or spelling. Family names are not so much subject to the control of the public, there are no limits to their erosion, they can be bent into an unrecognizable shape, and a few Hungarian names may stand as messengers for many that have fallen. The Wallach makes a parade of trying to efface his origins; any scheme is dear to him that can break the neck of the revealing surname.22

Bélteky was a radical practitioner of this strand of discourse, and most writers did not follow his principle of considering people with Hungarian-influenced names as only a fragment of historical Magyars. Indeed, it would be mistaken to overgeneralize the prevalence of this ethnicizing treatment of Romanian family names. Many well-informed and less wellinformed Magyar authors, born or living in the area, came to grips with the fact that many Romanians had Hungarian names without assuming that such families had originally been Magyar. One did not even need to be moderate in one’s nationalist views to think otherwise; the fanatically chauvinist school inspector of Bihar County, Orbán Sipos, explained the abundance of Hungarian-influenced names among the Romanians of his county by arguing that at seigniorial censuses, agents of the lords had usually doled out family names to those who had

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none.23 The argument that Hungarian names had been given to Romanian peasants by the management of estates or by tax collectors to keep track of them, also noted by Patterson, was widely familiar to the Magyar elite. But then, the availability of other explanations brings the ideological role of the motif into salience; those who peddled this argument usually turned a deaf ear to them. To be sure, some authors did calculate with some of these factors, nevertheless made much of Romanian peasants’ ‘Hungarian’ names. The ethnographer Grigore Moldovan/Moldován Gergely, writing for a Hungarian readership, even undertook to classify Hungarian-influenced Romanian family names along these lines. He distinguished the mountains, where Hungarian loanwords were allegedly rare and therefore bearers of such names were probably assimilated Magyars, from the basins, where for the most part they were ‘genuine’ Romanians.24 In the same multi-volume project on Alsó-Fehér County, István Lázár laid down as a general rule that Hungarian names were proof of Magyar origin only where supported by local history (read: in villages that once had Roman Catholic and/or Calvinist communities). In such villages, however, he put forward as Hungarian even family names of German origin.25 Crucially, the supposed correspondence between the name and ethnic origin could more aptly support integrative-assimilationist than xenophobic-exclusivist argument, since it did not so much relate to a territory as to people. Integral nationalists may later find that the Romanian inhabitants of villages that had been home to Catholics in the Middle Ages and Protestants in the sixteenth century were by now incurably alien and, after all, they could just as well be descendants of new settlers after the erstwhile Catholic or Protestant populations died out or left. Magyars in local history do not make the current dwellers any more Magyar. For the moment, however, the dominant voice of Hungarian nationalism had not yet given up on looking for stray sheep, and the argument always came in handy to justify the founding of a Hungarian cultural institution. The school inspector Lajos Szeremley, for instance, when reporting to the minister on the founding of a state primary school in Buduș/Budesdorf/Kisbudak, mentioned that numerous Romanian families were enthusiastic about the new school and, alluding to the real or assumed Hungarian origin of their family names, he did not fail to add that ‘these are not exactly descendants of Trajan’.26 In his version, the Romanianized Magyars of the village, stirred by an atavistic call, willingly cooperated with the authorities to have their children ‘re-Magyarized’, or at least to have Hungarian ‘retaught’ to them. The loanword-based provenience of family names was not an explanation that contemporary Romanian nationalists favoured. Projecting national oppression back into past centuries and insinuating the national enemy with a deliberate ploy, they would rather retort that the new generation of Magyars, having ascended to power, were trying to reap what their forefathers had sown by consciously renaming their Romanian serfs.27 Certainly, denouncing coercion

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is more gratifying than confronting cultural hegemony, but something else was also at stake here. To Romanian nationalist minds, there could be no point in time when Romanian serfs, said to have descended from Roman colonists with a Latin trinomial system, had no family names. The yawning chasm between Latin and Romanian names gave Romanian authors quite a headache, especially the Latinist generation of the early decades. There were two possibilities: either to claim that the adversities of history had wiped out an original Latin nomenclature and replaced it with the existing mixture of Slavic and Byzantine Greek stems and native suffixes, or to insist against all odds that contemporary Romanian family names could somehow be traced back to Latin.28 As late as 1893, Nicolae Densușianu’s questionnaire inquired about the survival of Roman nomina gentilicia or cognomina among the people, to which the Năsăud border-guard funds attorney Nestor Șimon obligingly matched the family names of his region that derived from Latin-origin words to illustrious Roman families.29 To systematically carry out this operation on the family names of even one village, however, required too big a leap of faith, even if the bounds of the author’s and their sympathetic readership’s imagination were the only limitation to such a feat. In 1891, a series of articles by the aged Latinist philologist Atanasie M. Marienescu, comparing Italian family names with Romanian ones from around his homeplace in the Banat, was discontinued after two instalments, and one is left to wonder how this comparison could be pushed beyond the shared pool of liturgical names and affinity between some suffixes.30 If Romanian intellectuals could not play up the Latinity of Romanian family name stems and could not point to surviving traces of the Roman trinomial system, they could nevertheless set store by the Latin pedigree of certain name endings, especially -escu. More importantly, whatever their linguistic origins, they could create a halo of authenticity over existing Romanian family names, present them as being under threat in national conflicts, and make it every Romanian’s moral obligation to hold on to them and not to let them be ‘Magyarized’ or ‘Germanized’.31 In a roundabout way, the frequency of Hungarian-influenced Romanian surnames and duck-rabbit names was hiding the possibility that Romanians regarded Magyars who bore such names as assimilated Romanians. As a census taker in 1850, the Greek Catholic priest Augustin Papp/Pop from Gyulafehérvár, later an ill-famed conformist, reportedly enforced his view that people of the surname Pap must be counted as Romanians.32 With his own family included, he may have had more Romanian than Magyar Paps among his acquaintances, but the word pap (‘priest’) is Hungarian, and a process probably assisted by the Reformation had made it into a frequent surname among Magyars.33 As a Romanian family name, it was the result of Hungarian influence, mostly extraneous naming.

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From here, it was just one step to the counternarrative of a ‘Valachitas submersa’, the inverse of submerged Magyardom. This would come to a head after the First World War, when families with names of Romanian origin were officially forbidden to enrol their children in schools with a Hungarian or German medium of instruction, and the decision of which family names qualified as such  – a practice that became notorious as ‘name analysis’  – was left to the ­discretion of headmasters in state primary schools.34 Another discursive strategy, based on a similar logic, discredited national adversaries by pointing up their contact-influenced family names. This strategy differed from the previous one on three points. First, its targets were the elite and not the peasantry. Second, it did not lay claim on the people it aimed at. On the contrary, its performative intent was to brand its victim as a wretch who had betrayed his pack and as a consequence did not deserve membership in any nation. Third, the target was often exposed as a traitor of a third group rather than the author’s own; the essential purpose was to show up the gap between the incriminated person’s ‘real’ origins and the group the person identified with. Thus László Réthy sought to unmask the Romanian MP Mircea B. Stănescu as a Serb on account of his native family name, Stanovici.35 Kossuth and Petőfi (née Petrovics), the central figures of the Magyar revolutionary pantheon of 1848, were continually referred to as ‘Magyarized Slovaks’ in the Romanian press, and Romanian writers rarely failed to mention the Swabian, Jewish or Armenian backgrounds of the Magyars they attacked, manifested by their current or former family names. A family name very often provided the only clue that motivated true or false conclusions about a person’s ancestry. At one end of the scale, it is not difficult to grasp the bafflement of Saxon burghers in Brassó after scores of intellectuals with German names settled in their midst who only socialized with the Magyar elite and preferred to speak Hungarian. One of these intellectuals, the gymnasium teacher Jenő Binder, later recalled being reviled as ‘carpet-bagging, renegade scum’ by local Saxons.36 At the other end, hearsays circulated endlessly in elite Romanian circles about the concealed Romanian origins of chauvinist Magyar public figures, often implicating their family names. His predicate losonczi, for example, referring to a town in Upper Hungary (modern Slovakia), could not spare Dezső Bánffy from the following offbeat obituary by the leading Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga: The difference of temperament between him and other Magyars is unmistakable. It requires an explanation, which can be found in his appearance, in his origin, in his name. He did not have in his veins the Asiatic perfidy of the nation that he served. … And his name itself reveals what he was: ‘the son of a ban’, a Wallachian ban from these border regions.37

Of course, such gossips and character assassinations were highly resistant to refutation and were, at any rate, addressed to the writers’ ingroup. For their

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bearers, even genuinely contact-influenced family names caused relatively little trouble in their daily relationships with conationals. It is to this problem, the ingroup perception, self-perception and management of contact-influenced names, that I turn in the next section. Anecdotal evidence from the literature suggests that contemporary Czech nationalists embraced similar strategies to define away a large chunk of Bohemian Germans. Analysing the family names of children enrolled in Prague’s German schools in 1906, a Czech newspaper found that ninety-nine per cent of them were Czech.38 While the methods were likely similar, this result outstripped any idea that Magyar authors built on their historical vision. On the second score, Czech nationalists called into question the Germanness of the mayor of Budweis/ Budějovice, Anton Franz Taschek, partly on the basis of his Czech family name.39

Family Name Romanianization Romanian nationalist intellectuals could not stop believing that their forebears had once borne classical Roman names, which had faded out or had become corrupted due to foreign rule and the intrigues of enemies. The urge to redress this sore state of affairs, to restore themselves and their kinsmen to the image of their putative ancestors, was strongest in the generation of 1848. It was this cohort of young Transylvanian Romanian intellectuals who first adjusted their family names to their national self-image, and this most often took the form of Latinization. They altered their family names to sound more Roman, to forms that they perhaps believed were the original ones: Porcu→Porcius,40 Aldulea→Aldulianu, Oprea→Aprianu, Kásay→Casianu, or translated them: Nădejde→Sperantia (‘hope’), Oltean→Alutanu (‘from the River Olt’).41 By adding new elements to their names, others imitated the Roman trinomial nomenclature; hence Dionisie Pop assumed the cognomen Martianu, Ioan Axente Sever, Constantin Romanu Vivu, Vasile Bob Fabianu (Rom. bob and Lat. faba ‘bean’), Alexandru Papiu Ilarianu (by translating his middle name, Bucur) and August Treboniu (born Trifan) Laurianu.42 By 1866, however, when George Bariț dismissed this form of ‘self-Romanization’ as exaggerated, it had already lost much of its earlier appeal.43 Others from the same generation chose new names with a more vernacular taste. Ilie Fleșer’s family from Reußmarkt/Miercurea/Szerdahely translated their family name, based on a dialectal German loanword, to Măcelariu (‘butcher’).44 Ion and Ilarian Pușcaș took the name Pușcariu; both pușcaș and pușcar used to mean ‘rifleman’, but the former originated from – or at least coincided with – Hungarian puskás, whereas the new derivational suffix tacked onto the same stem sported an apparent Latin pedigree.45 The family-name ending -escu, which arose from the adjectival suffix -esc as a patronymic element, deserves mention. In the Romanian Principalities, it had

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been a hallmark for the boyar class until the emerging middle classes keenly adopted it in the nineteenth century.46 In 1895, the Names Law passed by the Romanian parliament advocated its use,47 and some Transylvanians also attached it to their names after settling in Romania.48 Even the Saxon Josef Carl Hintz, a bookseller’s clerk from Brassó, displayed his family name as Hințescu on the cover of a collection of Romanian folk tales that he brought out in 1877 for the Romanian readership.49 Inside the Carpathians, the suffix was distributed unequally in traditional anthroponymy. Absent from most of the area, it formed a staple ingredient of family names in some parts of the Banat. It was there that, in September 1848, a village notary got permission from the Ministry of the Interior to change his family name Joanovics to Joáneszkó.50 This was a flash in the pan, an ethnic Romanian petitioning the Hungarian state authorities to get his family name Romanianized. Later on, just as other means of family name Romanianization, the adding of -escu went on without state sanction. Romanian intellectuals of the 1850s and 1860s appended it to names of various forms and origins: Maior→Maiorescu, Marian→Marienescu, Taloș→Tălășescu, Balta→Baltescu, Popovici→Popescu, Drăghici→Drăgescu.51 The then sixteen-year-old budding poet from the Bukovina Mihai Eminovici became Eminescu in 1866 upon advice from Iosif Vulcan, editor of the Pest/Pešta/Pesta journal Familia. In the Dualist period, some Magyars came to associate the suffix with subversive nationalist views; when the school teacher Ioan Georgescu arrived at a teachers’ college in the Szeklerland to attend a compulsory Hungarian summer school, the course leader allegedly picked a quarrel with him over his family name and angrily sent him packing to Bucharest.52 Rendering the -escu ending in the more accommodating form -eszko/-eszkó, similar to the way Romanians from Romania would put their names in French, may have helped to prevent malicious comments. The gates of official family name Romanianization did not close with the Compromise. To be sure, there was little chance that the Hungarian Ministry of the Interior would appreciate ideological motives to Romanianize a family name, although it occasionally gave its consent to taking up Romanian names, probably for family reasons or to correct documented misspelling at birth.53 But the Romanian churches continued to keep the registers of births, marriages and deaths for another thirty years, and the operation depended on potentially more pliable Romanian parish priests. An individual could also perform it on their own account  – witness Minister Trefort’s circular from 1885 that drew state school inspectors’ attention to Romanian Greek Catholic teachers who had done so, pointing as evidence to the mismatch between the names as they stood on training school certificates and deeds of appointment.54 Thus, it seems unlikely that the administrative changes linked up with the Compromise could in themselves bring about the decline in name Romanianization in the ranks of the elite. More significant reasons were the demise of Latinism

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in the 1870s  – although its supporters fought a prolonged rearguard action north-west of the Carpathians – and the tolerance of the Junimist linguistic ideology towards linguistic borrowing. The Romanian clergies continued to receive a steady intake of seminarists with family names of Hungarian and Serbian origins who would not change them, and many of whom would also spell them in a Hungarian fashion. The later politician Alexandru Vaida-Voevod and the lawyer Francisc Hosszu Longin now added new elements to their linguistically Hungarian names rather than replacing them. Vaida believed that the semantically equivalent Voevod had been his family’s original name.55 Longin resembles the creations of the forty-eight generation, but the old Hosszu Longin (Hun. hosszú ‘long’, semantically equivalent to Longinus) remembered that it had been stuck on him during Latin classes as a nickname, and had been made semi-official by his supervisor at court during his legal training. Characteristically, Hungarian papers reviled him during the 1894 Memorandum trial for having Romanianized his ‘honest Hungarian name’.56 The possibility of tacking a Romanian translation onto one’s inherited family name and keeping the two alongside each other as a double Hungarian–Romanian family name had already been exploited by the previous generation, as shown by the case of two Uniate high priests, the arch-provost Teodor Kőváry-Chioreanu (from ‘Kővár/Chioar’) and the canon Ioan Fekete Negruțiu (Hun. fekete and Rom. negru ‘black’).57 A different solution, still considered legitimate in the first decades of the era, was keeping two parallel variants in store, one for Romanian and another for Hungarian: Iustin Popfiu/Pappfy Jusztin, Ioniță Scipione Bădescu/Bágyai, Iosif Pop Sălăjanu/Papp-Szilágyi József, Gheorghe Pop de Băsești/illésfalvi Pap György.58 Unlike the last one, many Romanians of noble origin often left Hungarian place names in their predicates when signing in Romanian, the way these probably figured in their patents of nobility.59 The elites thus treated place names in noble titles as fossilized. I will later show how some Magyar nobles protested against the Magyarization of the place names that served them as titles of nobility.

Relief from Shame The Romanian generation of 1848 invested family names with a high ideological stake. From all the linguistic facts about Transylvanian Romanians, their family names, in particular, became the source of deep anxiety for them; a stigma that demanded a Roman pallium to cover it. This opened a brief period of family name Romanianization, most often intended as Latinization; however, it did not affect more than a relatively small segment of the already small Romanian intelligentsia. Thanks to the political milieu and the disinterest of the authorities, this trend could continue into the 1850s and 1860s, but after that, the drive behind it seems to have evaporated, and for the rest of the Dualist Era, Romanian

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intellectuals displayed a rather relaxed attitude to their contact-influenced family names, both in public and in private. This relaxed attitude was in no way unique for Romanians, in spite of the boisterous propaganda for family-name Magyarization. Magyarizing one’s family name became a popular way of exhibiting loyalty in certain circles, but the masses of linguistic and cultural assimilants outstripped many times over the number of name-changers. Noble family names, if of Slavic origin, were also considered too precious to have them Magyarized. The attitude of Saxon intellectuals was not much different either. Magyar politicians vilified the MP Lutz Korodi as the most dangerous pan-German agitator in Hungary, despicable twice over for having betrayed his Magyar roots, but there is no trace that his Saxon colleagues ever questioned his Saxon identity on the basis of his family name, which in fact derived from the Hungarian toponym Kóród with the Hungarian suffix -i. Michael Csaki, the custodian of the Brukenthal Museum, a Saxon cultural stronghold in Hermannstadt, even kept the characteristically Hungarian cs of his family name.60 If there was anything to stand in stark contrast to this indulgence towards the contact-influenced names of ingroup members, it was rather the sensitivity to them in the ranks of the outgroup, equally acute in Romanian, Magyar and Saxon elite discourses. When remembering the period, Romanian memorialists rarely reflect on the Hungarian or Serbian origins of their Romanian contemporaries’ names. As a rare exception, Aurel Cosma notes that ‘Uniates sometimes had the habit of Magyarizing their names’, after the second Romanian figure by the name Kőváry turns up in his narrative.61 Kőváry is not just a Hungarian-influenced name, but it is also worth attention for containing two vowels absent from Romanian. Colloquially, Romanian contemporaries probably substituted such sounds, in the same manner as Romanian peasant speech ‘nostrified’ the Hungarian names of landlords.62 As remarked in a private letter, Véghső, the similarly difficult name of a prominent Greek Catholic family, was pronounced Vișeu by Romanians.63 Slavic names formed with the patronymic suffix -ič/-vič (-ić/-vić) got naturalized in the eyes of the contemporary Magyar public, to such an extent that the Gyurkovics could stand for the archetypical Magyar gentry family in Ferenc Herczeg’s successful ‘The Gyurkovics Girls’ (A Gyurkovics leányok). Similar processes took place in Romanian society, although the foreignness of such names could always be rekindled.64 The complaint that the Serbian church hierarchy had Serbianized Romanians’ names in the Banat was all too usual. The stereotypical ‘Serbo-Romanian’ Orthodox priest from the Banat and his pendant, the ‘Magyaro-Romanian’ Greek Catholic priest from the north-western parts, lent themselves to satirical uses in A.P. Bănuț’s ‘Two “Brothers in Christ”’ (Doi ‘Frați in Cristos’), where an Orthodox pope under the name Dușan Novacoviciu and his Uniate colleague and adversary Antoniu Papiriu de Köváry are insulting each other, calling each other a Serb and a Magyar, partly predicated on the other’s family name.65

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Serbian -ić was rendered -iciu or -ici in Romanian, while Hungarianinfluenced family names were very often, probably in the majority of cases, spelt in a Hungarian way. In practice, the various spellings freely mixed in all types of writings without much consistency, with transcribed and adapted forms showing up randomly, but there was hardly any genre where Hungarian spelling was consciously avoided. In the 1900 almanac of the Nagyvárad Greek Catholic Diocese, the names of thirty-nine Romanian priests carried Hungarian diacritic letters or digraphs.66 People with such names also commonly signed their names in a Hungarian spelling, as did a few Romanians with noble titles. Even if the names – like the Mocsonyi family’s – did not descend from Hungarian, the deeds of nobility contained such Hungarian-spelt forms. From this fact, however, it does not follow that the spelling of Romanian family names was a non-politicized domain, only that status and class hierarchies could undercut national loyalties. Contemporaries may also have seen it as logical or natural to spell unintegrated name elements according to the conventions of the language from which they originated. Mutatis mutandis, many educated Magyars with German names also kept the German spelling. Opening up the spelling of Romanian family names to ideological interventions was above all else the checkered path of Romanian writing – a question so intricate that it will occupy the entire Chapter 8.

Notes   1. A. Konstantinov, Bai Ganyo: Incredible Tales of a Modern Bulgarian, trans. V.A. Friedman et al. (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2010), 36.   2. P. Mateos, Names, Ethnicity and Populations: Tracing Identity in Space (Berlin: Springer, 2014), 119–20.   3. J. Corcuera Atienza, Origenes, ideologia y organización del nacionalismo vasco: 1876–1904 [Origins, ideology and organization of Basque nationalism: 1876–1904] (Madrid: Siglo Ventiuno, 1979), 228–30 and 331.   4. G. Popoviciu, Istoria românilor bănățeni [The history of Romanians in the Banat] (Lugoj: self-published, 1904), 66.   5. L. Réthi, ‘Hunyadvármegyéről’ [On Hunyad County], Vasárnapi Újság 34 (1887), 528.   6. Did he draw on local cultural memory here? In an earlier piece, he had claimed that the Orthodox petty nobles of the Hațeg Basin considered themselves to be of ‘Scythian’ ancestry; L. Réthi, ‘A magyar nemzetiség Hunyadmegyében’ [The Magyar nationality in Hunyad County], Vasárnapi Újság 20 (1873): 586. Cf. L. Tóth, ‘A vallás hatalmas tényező a népek történetében’ [Religion is a mighty factor in the history of peoples], Kolozsvári Közlöny, 9 April 1864.   7. N. Brînzeu, Memoriile unui preot bâtrăn [Memoirs of an old priest] (Timișoara: Marineasa, 2008), 41. On the early history of these villages, see I. Draskóczy, ‘Az erdélyi Szászföld demográfiai helyzete a 16. század elején’ [The demographic situation of the Transylvanian

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Saxon Land at the beginning of the sixteenth century], Erdélyi Múzeum, new series 61 (1999), 1–30.   8. J.J. Tersánszky, Életem regényei [Novels of my life] (Budapest: Magvető, 1968), 42, 57 and 98.   9. From the three surnames mentioned by Tersánszky, two are Slovak, while Kuszkó could originate from anywhere between Bohemia and Belarus. I am indebted to LvT, the author of the blog http://onomastikion.blog.hu/ and the unofficial host of the topic ‘Nevek, családnevek magyarul’ at http://forum.index.hu, for elucidating the origins of these names (last accessed 14 September 2019). 10. ‘Pole’ would probably have been leș in the region. 11. See the sources quoted in my The Politics of Early Language Teaching, 194. 12. A.J. Patterson, The Magyars: Their Country and Institutions (London: Smith, Elder & Co., 1869), Vol. 2, 315. 13. Cf. the following returns to Frigyes Pesty’s survey from 1864: village secretary Sándor Kendy on Țețchea/Cécke and mayor János Ellmes on Sântandrei/Szentandrás, in Pesty Frigyes kéziratos helységnévtárából, 1864: Bihar vármegye [From Frigyes Pesty’s manuscript place name directory, 1864: Bihar County], Vol. 1 (Debrecen: Kossuth Lajos Tudományegyetem Magyar Nyelvtudományi Intézete, 1996), 135, and Vol. 2 (ibid., 1998), 501; mayor Mihai Secui on Almaș, Ádám Szokolay on Gurahonț, BuceavaSoimuș, Mădrigești and Zeldiș (OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 2), anonymous on Ciachi-Gârbou/Csákigorbó (ibid., reel no. 18), village secretary Sándor Enyedi on Copand/Koppánd (ibid., reel no. 20), János Bálint on Băiești, village secretary Elek Barabás on Livadia de Câmp (ibid., reel no. 28), József Mózes on Socolari (ibid., reel no. 35) and village secretary Lajos Darkó on Pogăceaua/Mezőpagocsa (ibid., reel no. 63), council members Todor Fleșer, Tănase Feleudean and Vasilie Pădurean from Hopârta/ Háporton, in Pesty Frigyes helynévgyűjteménye 1864–1865: Székelyföld, Vol. 4, 54, and anonymous on Mihalț/Mihálcfalva, ibid., 74. 14. K. Marosán (ed.), A szatmármegyei Széchenyi Társulat emlékkönyve 25 éves működésének évfordulója alkalmából [Memorial volume of the Szatmár County Széchenyi Association, on the occasion of its twenty-five years of activity] (Szatmár: Széchenyi Társulat, 1907), 14. 15. F. Sólyom-Fekete, ‘Hunyadvármegye hely- és helységneveinek történetéhez’ [On the history of place names in Hunyad County], A Hunyadvármegyei Történelmi és Régészeti Társulat évkönyve 2 (1884), 74. 16. O. Hangay, ‘Kolozsvármegye szelidebb területében’ [In the gentler parts of Kolozs County], Erdély 19 (1910), 12. 17. Z. Földes, A magyarságért! [For Magyardom!] (Ditró: Pannonia-könyvnyomda, 1913), 8. Emphases in the original. 18. G. Téglás, ‘A paroszi barlang Hunyadmegyében: a Retyezát előhegységének egy uj barlangja’ [The Paroș Cave in Hunyad County: a new cave in the foothills of the Retezat Mountains], Földrajzi Közlemények 9 (1881), 98. Emphasis in the original. 19. J. Koncz, ‘Anno 1683: Haczogh vidéki nemesség regestruma’ [Anno 1683: the noble census of the Hațeg/Hátszeg/Hötzing District], A Hunyadmegyei Történelmi és Régészeti Társulat évkönyve 17 (1907), 130. 20. I. Acsády, Magyarország népessége a Pragmatica Sanctio korában 1720–21 [The population of Hungary at the time of the Pragmatica Sanctio, 1720–21] (Budapest: Országos Magyar Kir. Statisztikai Hivatal, 1896).

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21. Ibid., Part 1, 48. Hungarian practitioners of German Volkstumsgeschichte would follow in his wake in the 1930s, with a whole array of like-minded studies. Instructive among these latter is F. Maksay, ‘Magyar-román együttélés az erdélyi részeken’ [Magyar–Romanian coexistence in the Transylvanian parts], Erdélyi Múzeum, new series 47 (1942), 242–52, which traces back Hungarian-influenced surnames among the Romanians of Érendréd/ Andrid, to conclude that the families had been Romanian since the eighteenth century at the latest. Cf. also A. Miskolczy, ‘A 18. századi erdélyi népességszámok értelmezéseinek historiográfiájából’ [From the historiography of interpreting population figures from eighteenth-century Transylvania], Múltunk 58 (1) (2013), 6–35. 22. K. Bélteky, A magyar szórványság: az 1900-ik évi népszámlálás alapján [The Magyar diaspora: on the basis of the 1900 census] (Nagyvárad: Szent László, 1910), 17. 23. O. Sipos, Biharvármegye a népesedési, vallási, nemzetiségi és közoktatási statisztika szempontjából [Bihar County from the aspects of demographical, religious, ethnic and educational statistics] (Nagyvárad: Szent László, 1903), 9–11. 24. Moldován, ‘Alsófehér vármegye román népe’, 761. 25. I. Lázár, ‘Alsófehér vármegye magyar népe’ [The Magyar populace of Alsó-Fehér County], in Alsófehér vármegye monographiája [Monograph of Alsó-Fehér County], Vol. 1/2, 466–7 (Nagy-Enyed: Nagyenyedi, 1899). 26. Lajos Szeremley to Minister Ágoston Trefort, on 19 June 1879; MNL OL VKM K305/2,586. 27. For this type of argument, see e.g. Unirea, 20 April 1901, p. 130. The sober-minded Ladislau Vaida/Vajda László was among the few who cared to seriously disprove the charge of being a ‘Wallachized Magyar’, in a pamphlet written in Hungarian for Magyars. He originated from a noble family of long standing, and he could therefore point to the Orthodox religion and typically Romanian first names of his ancestors, quoting the oldest preserved family documents; L. Vajda, Szerény Észrevételek a Magyar Közmivelődési Egyletekről, a Nemzetiségekről és a Sajtóról [Humble observations about the Hungarian cultural associations, the nationalities and the press] (Kolozsvártt: Róm. kath. lyceum nyomdája, 1885), 26–27. 28. See, for example, Bariț, ‘Despre numele proprie’, 1–3, and Marienescu, ‘Numele de botezu si prolec’a’. 29. N. Densușianu, Cestionariu despre tradițiunile istorice și anticitațile țeriloru locuite de români [Questionnaire about the historical traditions and antiquities of the lands inhabited by Romanians], Vol. 1 (Bucharest: Göbl, 1893), 24–25; and N. Șimon, Dicționar toponimic [Toponymic dictionary] (Cluj-Napoca: Napoca Star, 2007), 227–28. 30. At. M. Marienescu, ‘Numele familiare româneșci’ [Romanian family names], Familia 27 (1891), 8. 31. See, for example, a letter by the Orthodox archpriest of Bereck/Brețcu in the Szeklerland; quoted by A. Grama Brescan, Români sudtransilvani în secolul al XIX-lea: Județul Covasna; contribuții documentare [South Transylvanian Romanians in the nineteenth century: Covasna County; documentary contributions] (Arcuș: Arcuș, 2007), 99. 32. Á. Deák, ‘Az abszolutizmus vas vesszője alatt: Erdély magyar szemmel 1850–51-ben’ [Under the iron cane of absolutism: Transylvania through Magyar eyes in 1850–51], Holmi 8 (1996), 722–23. On Papp/Pop, see N. Josan, Memorandistul moț Rubin Patiția (1841–1918) [The Moț Memorandist Rubin Patiția, 1841–1918] (Alba Iulia: Altip, 2002), 61. 33. Hajdú, 808–9.

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34. L. Fritz, ‘Az erdélyi román kultúrzóna ügye a Népszövetség előtt’ [The question of the Romanian cultural zone of Transylvania before the League of Nations], Magyar Kisebbség 11 (1932), 351; and A. B. Kovács, Szabályos kivétel: a romániai magyar oktatásügy regénye; 1918, 1944–1948, 1996 [Regular exception: the story of Hungarian education in Romania, 1918, 1944–48, 1996] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1997), 26–27. The Primary Education Act 1924 (sect. 1, cap. 1, art. 8) declared that ‘Citizens of Romanian origin who have lost their mother tongue are obliged to educate their children exclusively in public or private schools with Romanian language of instruction’; Monitorul Oficial 1924, no. 161, p. 8,602. 35. L. Réthy, Az oláh nyelv és nemzet megalakulása [Formation of the Wallachian language and nation] (Budapest: Pallas, 1887), 213. 36. J. Binder, Rombauer Emil, 1854–1914 (Budapest: Légrády, 1914), 14. 37. N. Iorga, Oameni cari au fost [The people of yore], Vol. 1 (Bucharest: Fundația pentru literatură și artă ‘Regele Carol II’, 1934), 462. Ban was a dignitary title, first a viceroy in medieval Croatia, and later the administrator of several southern regions subordinated to the King of Hungary, from Dalmatia to Little Wallachia (Oltenia). Cf. G. Schubert, ‘Der Einfluß des Ungarischen in Südosteuropa’, in U. Hinrichs (ed.), Handbuch der Südosteuropa-Linguistik (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 1999), 681–82. The first Bánffy/Bánfi seems to be Dienes, who held the title of Ban of Dalmatia in the fourteenth century. The branch of the family from which Dezső Bánffy descended settled in Transylvania in the fifteenth or sixteenth century, where they intermarried with the indigenous Kemény, Bethlen and Dániel families and received a baronial title in the 1690s. See I. Nagy, Magyarország családai [The families of Hungary], Vol. 1 (Pest: Friebeisz, 1857), 153 and 169–70. Note Moise Nicoară’s inclusion of the Bánffys sixty years earlier into his swollen list of Romanians turned into Hungarian magnates; quoted by S. Mitu, National Identity of Romanians in Transylvania, trans. S. Corneanu (Budapest: CEU Press, 2001), 164. 38. T. Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 20. 39. J. King, Budweisers into Czechs and Germans: A Local History of Bohemian Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 63. 40. The later botanist Florian Porcius was in fact born Șteopan, and derived his new name from his mother’s family name, Porcu. 41. Al. Cristureanu, ‘Latinismul reflectat în domeniul numelor de familie ale românilor’ [Latinism reflected in the field of Romanian family names], Lucrări științifice [Oradea], Filologie 1 (1971), 29–31. 42. Ibid.; and Constantinescu, XLVI. 43. G. Bariț, ‘Cum se se scria connumele neromanesci in limb’a romanésca?’ [How to spell non-Romanian family names in Romanian?], Gazeta Transilvaniei 29 (1866), 97. 44. Braniște, Amintiri din închisoare, 110; and E. Străuțiu, Miercurea Sibiului: pagini de istorie [Miercurea/Reußmarkt/Szerdahely: pages of history], 2nd rev. and exp. edn (Sibiu: Editura Universitătii ‘Lucian Blaga’, 2011), 47–49. 45. Pușcariu, Spița unui neam din Ardeal, 22 and 88. 46. Constantinescu, XXXVI; T. Oancă, ‘Nume de familie derivate cu sufixul -escu: considerații statistice’ [Family names derived with the suffix -escu: statistical considerations], in O. Felecan (ed.), Numele și numirea: actele Conferinței Internaționale de Onomastică [Name and naming: proceedings of the International Conference of Onomastics], Vol. 1, Interferențe multietnice în antroponimie [Multi-ethnic interferences in personal names]

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(Cluj Napoca: Mega, 2011), 185–87; G. Ibrăileanu, ‘Numele proprii în opera comică a lui Caragiale’ [Proper names in Caragiale’s comical works], in Scriitori români [Romanian writers] (Chișinău: Litera, 1997), 185; and Graur, Nume de persoane, 90–91. 47. Firică, 219. 48. V.I. Șuiaga, Juriști hunedoreni: precursori si [sic] luptători pentru libertate si unirea Transilvaniei 1849–1918 [Lawyers from Hunedoara/Hunyad: precursors and fighters for freedom and the union of Transylvania, 1849–1918] (Deva: Emia, 2007), 47; Al. Olăreanu, Contribuții pentru o istorie a teatrului românesc în Banat, Transilvania și Bucovina până la 1906 [Contributions to the history of Romanian theatre in the Banat, Transylvania and the Bukovina until 1906] (Craiova: Liceului Carol I, n.d. [after 1919]), 12; I. Stănișor: Prin Săliștea de altădată [Across the old Săliște] (Sibiu: Salgo, 2009), 58; and Pușcariu, Spița unui neam din Ardeal, 46. 49. V. Florea, ‘I.C. Hintz-Hințescu: autor al celui dintâi catalog al poveștilor populare românești (1878)’ [I.C. Hintz-Hințescu: the author of the first catalogue of Romanian folk tales (1878)], Studii și comunicări de etnologie, new series 11 (1997), 125. 50. Pálmány, 386–87. 51. Mager, 49; G. Neamțu, ‘I.C. Drăgescu, militant pentru republică și dacoromânism (1866–1914)’ [I.C. Drăgescu, republican and Daco-Romanian militant, 1866–1914], Anuarul Institutului de Istorie din Cluj 15 (1972), 264; and Hossu Longin, 192. 52. I. Georgescu, Amintiri din viața unui dascăl: pagini trăite [Remembrances from the life of a teacher: pages lived through] (n.p. [Craiova]: Editura Casei Școalelor, 1928), 45. 53. See, for example, János Vuics→Vuia (1876), Anna Gellerin→Florea (1882) and János Juon→Ruszu (1888); in Z. Szent-Iványi, Századunk névváltoztatásai: helytartósági és miniszteri engedélylyel megváltoztatott nevek gyűjteménye, 1800–1893 [Name changes of our century: the list of names changed with gubernatorial and ministerial authorization, 1800–93] (Budapest: Hornyánszky, 1895). 54. C.M. Lungu (ed.), De la Pronunciament la Memorandum, 1868–1892: mișcarea memorandistă, expresie a luptei naționale a românilor [From the Pronunciament to the Memorandum, 1868–1892: the Memorandum movement, an expression of Romanians’ national struggle] (Bucharest: State Archives of Romania, 1993), 311. A similar concern about citizens’ illicit name changes was documented in imperial Prussia, where German nationalists agonized over the excessive power that the keeping of church registers gave to Polish priests by enabling them to ‘Polonize’ their German parishioners’ names. See R.W. Tims, Germanizing Prussian Poland: The H-K-T Society and the Struggle for the Eastern Marches in the German Empire, 1894–1919 (New York: AMS Press, 1966), 135 and 138. 55. Vaida-Voevod, Memorii, Vol. 1, 13–14. 56. Hossu Longin, 192. 57. According to his biographer, Fekete-Negruțiu’s family earlier bore the name Oltean; V.Gr. Borgovanu, Biografi’a canonicului Joanu Fekete Negrutiu dedusa din acte si scrisori originali [The biography of Canon Ioan Fekete Negruțiu, gleaned from original records and letters] (Gherl’a: Cancelariei Negrutiu, 1889), 5. He ususally signed his private letters as Fekete; Șt. Pascu and I. Pervain (eds), George Bariț și contemporanii săi [George Bariț and his contemporaries], Vol. 3 (Bucharest: Minerva, 1976), 140–65. 58. On Bădescu, see L. Gáldi, ‘A magyarországi román költészet a mult század második felében’ [Romanian poetry in Hungary in the second half of the past century], Magyarságtudomány, new series 1 (1942), 282; and O. Avarvarei et al. (eds), Documente privind mișcarea națională a românilor din Transilvania [Documents concerning the

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Romanian national movement in Transylvania], Vol. 1, 1881–1891 (Bucharest: Viitorul Românesc, 1998), 92. Pop Sălăjanu Romanianized his name from Silaghi, but the title page of his canon law textbook suggests that he preferred the Hungarian version in Latin; I. Radu, Istoria diecezei române-unite a Orăzii-Mari [The history of the Nagyvárad Greek Catholic Diocese] (Oradea: Tipografiei românești, 1930), 146; and J. Papp-Szilágyi, Enchiridion juris ecclesiae orientalis catholicae: pro usu auditorum theologiae et eruditione cleri Graeco-Catholici (M.-Varadini: Tichy, 1862). 59. See the business cards of ‘Ilie Carol Barbul de Sósmező și de Gaura’, quoted by P. Groza, Adio lumii vechi! memorii [Farewell to the old world! recollections] (Bucharest: Compania, 2003), 65; and of ‘Nicolau Rațiu de Nagylak’, quoted in H. Groza, ‘Cărți de vizită din fondul Rațiu în colecția muzeului de istorie Turda’, [Calling cards from the Rațiu fond in the collection of the Turda/Torda history museum], Cultura Medieșană 7 (2018), 62. Place names in Hungarian noble titles did not usually replace the family name, but preceded it. 60. C. Göllner (ed.), Die Siebenbürger Sachsen in den Jahren 1848–1918 (Cologne: Böhlau, 1988), 303. 61. A. Cosma, Jr, Memorii [Memoirs] (Timișoara: Mirton, 2010), 87. 62. On Romanian versions of landlords’ names, see P. Binder, A bodolai (Béldi) uradalom története: Bodola, Keresztvár vagy Nyén, Márkos és Bodzaforduló [The history of the Béldi demesne of Budila/Bodola: Budila, Teliu, Mărcuș and Întorsura Buzăului] (Szecseleváros: D&H Soft, 1994), 5 (Beldea/Béldi and Marchiș/Márkos); I.I. Lapedatu, Memorii și amintiri [Memoirs and remembrances] (Iași: Institutul European, 1998), 122 (Bărceanu/ Barcsay); R. Colta and D. Sinaci, Secusigiu: monografia [Secusigiu/Sekeschut/Székesút: the monograph] (Arad: Tiparnița, 2013), 296 (Țâpari/Szapáry); I. Radu, Istoria vicariatului greco-catolic al Hațegului [The history of the Hațeg Greek Catholic Vicariate] (Lugoj: Gutenberg, 1913), 173 (Brazovanul/Brazovai); and P. Oltean, ‘Schiță monografică a opiduluı˘ Hațegu˘’ [A monographic sketch of the market town of Hațeg/Hátszeg/Hötzing], Transilvania 23 (1892), 229 (Estoras/Eszterházy). 63. Alexandru Roman’s letter to George Bariț on 18 June 1881, in Pascu and Pervain (eds), Vol. 2 (Bucharest: Minerva, 1975), 245. 64. A late nineteenth-century election ditty from Tolna County, however, set the ‘unHungarian’ -ics/-vics against the supposedly more patriotic-sounding -nszky, of Western Slavic origin; T. Farkas, ‘“Nem magyar az, aki ics-vics…”: Egy fejezet a névmagyarosítások történetéből’ [‘An ics-vics is not Hungarian...’: A chapter from the History of the Magyarization of Names’], Létünk 39(2) (2009), 43. 65. Bănuț, 50. 66. Schematismus historicus venerabilis cleri diocesis magno-varadinensis graeci ritus catholicorum pro anno jubilari 1900 (Magno-Varadini: Berger, 1900).

Chapter 5

Dimensions of Family-Name Magyarization

d Who finds fifty kreuzer too much for changing his gross Wallachian name to a nice Hungarian one. —Áfgánistán Vártán ürminy-magyar kalendáriuma1

Although the enforced character of a high number of name changes will take centre stage in this chapter, the initiative lay with the name-changers in the majority of family-name Magyarizations in Dualist Hungary. A massive phenomenon after 1880, it is perhaps appropriate to call family-name Magyarization a social movement, although it was weakly organized and involved no enduring or collective action. It certainly exceeded the intra-Carpathian Romanian elite’s tampering with their names, both in its scale and its timespan, and in pre-war Europe, it probably only fell behind the contemporaneous Fennicization of Swedish family names in Finland.2 The Hungarian movement was not restricted to a small intellectual elite, but neither did it expand to large peasant masses. It mainly comprised urban middle- and working-class men of Jewish, German and Slovak backgrounds who took up Hungarian surnames partly as a token of political and cultural loyalty and partly to facilitate their offspring’s social acceptance as unhyphenated Magyars/Hungarians. The public discourse celebrating the Magyarization of family names shared in a broader ideology of self-Magyarization; a mainly upper-class social movement in favour of voluntary identity change and the cultural realignment this entailed.3 The subject has grown into an established field of research in Hungary in recent decades and has been covered by two comprehensive accounts. Victor Karády and István Kozma approach family name changes in modern Hungary from the perspective of social history, while a slim book by Tamás Farkas (the abridged version of his doctoral thesis) takes a more linguistically oriented view.4

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Since 2004, Farkas has also headed a research group dedicated to the topic at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest.5 Further studies have analysed historical family-name Magyarizations regionally, locally or specifically among Jews, but no research has focused on Transylvania or changes of Romanian family names. The present chapter does not undertake to explore all family name changes in the territory under study. The majority of them were carried out on German names, they offer little in the way of regional features, and their proper assessment would require a cross-region analysis. Many Armenians also Magyarized their Armenian and Turkic surnames, but largely before the Dualist era, and reliable data are hard to come by from that period.6 Here I will only look at the Magyarization of Romanian family names and family-name Magyarizations by Transylvanian Saxons, irrespective of the name-changers’ places of residence; however, around 80 per cent of the material comes from the counties studied. Along with the popular drive towards family-name Magyarization, support from the state also acted as an important catalyst. State involvement began in 1881, when  – upon petition from a certain Central Association for Name Magyarization – the Budapest Chamber of Deputies passed an amendment to the Stamp Act that reduced the stamp duty on name changes from five forints to fifty kreuzer.7 Hence people with newly acquired Hungarian family names were sometimes contemptuously dubbed ‘fifty-kreuzer Magyars’.8 Later, in Germany, the Deutscher Ostmarkenverein seems to have picked up the idea from Hungary and persuaded the Prussian government to make the process of Germanizing one’s family name free of charge under certain circumstances.9 This relief triggered a massive rise in name changes for a few years, and following a slight sag, the decade leading up to the Millennial Celebrations saw their number stabilizing at around seven or eight hundred cases per year.10 Enter Prime Minister Dezső Bánffy, one of just a few high-ranking officials already reacting enthusiastically to the call of the Central Association for Name Magyarization back in 1881 and founding its Dés/Dej chapter.11 As prime minister from 1895, Bánffy launched an unprecedented campaign to Magyarize surnames in that sector of society over which he had direct sway: state employees. The government made arrangements to speed up the official procedure. Ministers, already promoting the cause through circulating announcements by associations, now addressed public servants on their own, calling on them to have their family names Magyarized and to encourage their subordinates to do the same.12 They warned against exerting pressure, but this proviso could not mask the threat of coercion lurking in a string of decrees and ordinances, brought home by the equivocal but ominous title of the brochure enclosed with them: ‘Instructions for Name Magyarization’ (Utasitás a névmagyarositáshoz) – originally a chapter from Simon Telkes’s how-to guide for people wishing to Magyarize their names.13 True, the government could contend that they applied no compulsion. Ministries regularly sent out both implicit and explicit endorsements for publications. This

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information, however, did not usually reach the rank-and-file personnel, only the guidance on family-name Magyarization did. Therefore, sending it down the chain of command all the way to the bottom ranks and calling it ‘instructions’ amounted to little less than a thinly veiled attempt to browbeat public employees, drilled to obey commands. The Hungarian nationalist opposition to Bánffy’s government indirectly owned up to this interpretation on 29 January 1898, when the Transylvanian Saxon MP Oskar Meltzl questioned the minister of commerce in the plenary. Meltzl reported his latest information about enforced Magyarization carried out on railwaymen’s family names in Transylvania: ‘It has occurred, for example in Nagyszeben, Segesvár, Földvár and at other stations of the state railways in the Transylvanian parts, that local station masters or other officials gathered their subordinates and bluntly called upon them to Magyarize their names (Exclamations from the extreme left: They did it right!), trying to persuade them with threats, coaxing and the promise to undertake the necessary formalities’.14 The minister assured the Saxon MP that there existed no decree explicitly ordering railway employees to change their names; nevertheless, the opposition left no doubt that they welcomed the forced Magyarization of family names and attacked Meltzl for objecting to it. This government intervention, the behind-the-scenes details of which are unknown, produced an all-time high of 6,722 family name changes in 1898.15 This is not to suggest that coercion did not already occur before Bánffy’s tenure. In 1884, the Greek Catholic priest of Oláhláposbánya/Băiuț, in Bánffy’s SzolnokDoboka County, reported to his protopope on the district administrator’s threat that he would send packing to Germany and Romania any German or Romanian unwilling to have their names Magyarized.16 This is a rare case where name changes in the public sector can with high probability be connected to pressure, because within two years, fourteen workers of the nearby Treasury mines and smelteries indeed Magyarized their German and Slavic family names.17 Certainly much depended on the zeal of local magistrates and power holders. Simon Telkes, by that time likely the only person behind the Central Association for Name Magyarization, showered praise on officials (like a public prosecutor from Arad, and a district administrator from the Banat) who had ‘initiated’ or ‘carried out’ the name changes of whole families, leaving the reader to speculate about the exact meaning of his words.18 The data attest to a palpable social imbalance: the 1898 lists of family-name Magyarizers teem with humble public employees like railwaymen and gendarmes, but few higher- or middle-ranking officials appear on them, in striking contrast to the by and large middle-class recruitment of the self-Magyarizing movement. Browsing through public sector directories from the following years, one gets the impression that only a small minority of the upper ranks in the civil service Magyarized their surnames. According to an interwar historian’s calculations, the

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share of German names had dropped from 29 to 19 per cent in the apparatus of the Ministry of Finance between 1890 and 1900, but only from 26 to 23 in the Ministry of Commerce, and it stayed on the level of 1900 in the Ministry of the Interior.19 And while not only private gendarmes and NCOs, but even trainee gendarmes, took on Hungarian names by the hundreds in these years, which suggests a heavy pressure from above, the Kolozsvár Gendarmerie District had officers in 1900 by the distinctively non-Hungarian family names Éderer, Proch, Raith, Reschner, Pfeiffer, Krausz, Klatrobecz, Saymann and Spalla.20 All this makes it clear that, at least from a certain salary bracket upwards, by no means every civil servant had to Magyarize their non-Hungarian names. Neither was resistance necessarily futile, although it certainly did not further the official’s career. In his daughter’s telling, a Máramaros Zipser forestry clerk by the name of Schmidt, stationed in Sebeș/Mühlbach/Szászsebes in Transylvania, was able to retain his German family name by virtue of his perseverance, even though his superiors tried to bully him into translating it as Kovács (‘smith’), and they withheld his salary to this end for three months.21 Such excessive concern for the names of others certainly marked a new phase compared to the policy line of reducing the stamp duty in the 1880s, which merely encouraged people to leave behind their foreign roots and look forward to a bright future as equal members of a grand nation. To a possible objection that his name-changing campaign reduced citizens into unwilling public noticeboards advertising the Magyar character of the state, Bánffy, who otherwise thought of himself as a liberal, would probably have retorted that liberal notions of personal dignity and the private sphere were as yet unfit for the special Hungarian conditions. From his and Telkes’s perspective, the state’s heavy-handed incursion worked in perfect concert with the self-Magyarization of the elite, because a ‘Hungarian name … prevents that another nation should claim Hungarians with foreign names as its own’.22 Romanian nationalists were not slow in arguing about the superficial results that any such onomastic operation ought to yield: ‘Doesn’t the ear-locked Telkes know that you can call a spade a digging tool, but it remains a spade? Doesn’t he and those who pay for his foul job of Magyarizing know that a Jew will remain a Jew even if he takes on a name like Hunyadi or Légrády?’23 And the author confidently added that ‘Magyarization does not have much ground among Romanians’. Ten years later, the ‘moderate’ Romanian Emil Babeș came to the same conclusion in a text written in Hungarian for Magyars. He pointed to Romanians’ unwillingness to Magyarize their family names as a sign of their exuberant ‘racial pride’. Not even the governmental/renegade politician Constantin Burdia, he contended, would be ready to cast away his ‘typically Romanian name’.24 In fact, it can be measured how much ground the Magyarization of family names gained among Romanians. Basic data on all authorized name changes

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(old and new family names, occupation, place of residence, year of name change) are available until 1894 in a book entitled ‘Name changes of our century’,25 and thereafter in the half-yearly lists produced by the Ministry of the Interior, which also indicate place of birth and confession.26 For the present analysis, I tried to gather all cases where a Hungarian family name had replaced a Romanian one. As described in Chapter 2, it is safe to assume that a linguistically Romanian name indicates Romanian-speaking ancestors. At the same time, I could not restrict my dataset to names with Romanian etymologies (many Romanian names would then qualify as Slavic), but I also included those that were typically borne by Romanians, either in Hungary in general or in the context of the given namechanger’s place of birth or place of residence.27 When assembling my data, I dealt more cautiously with ambiguous cases where the name-changers did not have a documented connection to Romanian-inhabited areas. It is worth mentioning, finally, that in Romanian-speaking environments, some Hungarian family names that I do not include here (e.g. Baksa, Kolumbán, Simon) could appear Romanian enough to single out their bearers for pressure. I split up my dataset between those who can and those who cannot be identified as public (state or municipal) employees, the former being much more likely to have changed their names under duress. This distinction can be no more than approximate, not only because the lack of occupational data approaches 25 per cent, but even when it is available it is succinct and very often ambiguous.28 Furthermore, it is likely that not all name-changers in the public sector acted out of necessity, whereas some private employers may have pulled rank on their workforce, and some schools on their students. The massive name Magyarization of employees at the private AcsEV railway company in 1886 seems particularly suspect on this score. The number of people involved in the process was doubtless much higher than that of family name changes. Siblings usually filed joint requests, as did fathers and children, producing an average of slightly less than two people mentioned per case.29 Since wives are left unmentioned in the sources, I probably err on the side of caution in putting the actual count of all people affected at somewhere around 2.5 per request, taking into account Karády and Kozma’s observation (based on their sampling of the more detailed archival files of the ministry) that Romanian family-name-changers tended to come from the younger age groups, half of them being in their twenties and 60 per cent of them being below thirty.30 One last methodological comment before turning to my results, concerning the grey zone between family-name Magyarizations and family name changes of a non-Magyarizing character. A small portion of name changes had pragmatic motivations, such as adoption, paternity outside of wedlock or misspelling of one’s name at birth.31 It is not very likely that more than a handful of people happened to change Romanian names to Hungarian ones for any of these reasons. What presents a more delicate problem is those new family names that could

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Figure 5.1  Magyarization of Romanian family names per year. Figure created by the author.

pass as Romanian just as well as Hungarian, belonging to any of the overlapping categories that I described earlier as contact-influenced and duck-rabbit names. Although I included them in my dataset, the fact that my sources spell most names in Hungarian makes it hard to decide whether there was Magyarization intended in these cases. When public employees chose such ambiguous new names, it may also hint at covert resistance. I have counted 1,782 cases where Romanian family names were Magyarized between 1867 and 1913, entailing around 4,500 people altogether. Out of these cases, 875 (49.1%) were performed by people ascertained as public employees. These figures make Romanian family names sharply under-represented compared to an overall count of sixty-seven thousand family name changes in Dualist Hungary, overwhelmingly name Magyarizations.32 As the chart at Figure 5.1 shows, the annual number of cases hovered around one hundred after 1898. This amounted to slightly more than 3 per cent of the aggregate, countrywide yearly average, whereas Romanians made up 17 per cent of Hungary’s population in 1900.33 The divergence between the two curves validates my distinction between confirmed public employees and the rest, notably the feature of the chart that first catches the eye: the dramatic 1898 spike of name Magyarizations in the first group, accompanied by very little growth in the second. The year 1898 was the peak not only for family name changes in general but also for changes of Romanian family names. The stunningly uneven distribution between the two categories and the quick reversion of the trend to its earlier level among

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confirmed public employees throws into relief the state-sponsored campaign under the Bánffy government, and strengthens the impression that it could have been built less on enthusiasm and rather more on manifest or latent coercion. In spite of the outstanding prominence of 1898, the 250 name-changers that year still represented a relatively small fragment of all public employees of Romanian ethnicity or ancestry. Romanians were under-represented in the public sector, and yet almost ten times more people employed in the central, municipal and local government administration and the judiciary would report a Romanian mother tongue in 1910.34 The much lower figures in the following decade and a half confirm what other sources suggest, that individual high officials may have continued to promote Hungarian family names or even imposed them on their subordinates, but the central authorities had put the issue on the back burner and backed out of the campaign. Indeed, the Ministry of the Interior declared the seemingly influential Central Association for Name Magyarization automatically dissolved, forbidding Telkes to pass himself off as its head, after an investigation in 1909 revealed that it had no real leadership, had not convened an assembly since its founding in 1881 and could not produce a record of its members.35 I found few significant differences between the character of the Hungarian names taken by those ascertained as public employees as compared to the rest. Names with the common -i suffix made up almost half of the corpus in both clusters (411 out of 875 and 417 out of 908, respectively), and few of them derived from the birthplaces of name-changers. The translation of the original family name was also rather rare. There was some preference among confirmed public employees for extravagant names with an overdone Magyar character: flamboyant ones of Romantic nationalist inspiration,36 or names of Hungarian national heroes, historical families and even acting politicians (Darányi, Bánfi)37. They also made more frequent use of the patronymic suffix -fi than the rest (42 out of 875 compared to 23 out of 908), which at times led to unlikely results.38 Such public employees or their superiors may have tried to hedge their bets by choosing family names with a guaranteed Hungarian pedigree. Simple, lowprofile names, however, made up the majority in both categories. In what follows, I aim to explore the small cluster of people with Romanian family names who chose to take the symbolic step in assimilation that the change of one’s family name meant, and therefore I will set aside confirmed public employees and will restrict my analysis to family-name-changers with other or undetermined professions. The professional and ethnoconfessional breakdown of this cluster is shown in the table below. Only 61 of the 908 petitioners were women (25 of them minors), although a few additional women changed their names jointly with their brothers. The high participation of minors and the pronounced under-representation of peasants were general features of the movement. Moreover, the number of juvenile

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Table 5.1  Magyarizers of Romanian family names without confirmed public employees – their distribution across occupational and ethnoconfessional categories. Ethnic character of confession Occupation

Total Romanian Magyar German Unknown/other

minor/student 199 artisan/small entrepreneur 64 worker/journeyman 48 peasant 36 domestic servant 19 intellectual 15 agricultural labourer 13 clerk 12 merchant/restaurateur 11 landowner/rentier 8 waiter 5 miner 4 musician 4 other 1 unknown 469 Total 908

121 27 27 19 16 4 6 6 5 2 5 2 1 0 233 474

45 21 13 10 2 2 7 4 1 1 0 2 1 0 103 212

5 0 0 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 11 18

28 16 8 6 0 9 0 2 5 5 0 0 2 1 122 204

Note: I have encoded Orthodox and Greek Catholics as Romanians, Calvinists and Unitarians as Magyars, and Roman Catholics and Lutherans as Magyars or Germans, according to the linguistic groups to which these confessions were typically associated with in the given name-changer’s place of residence and/or place of birth. I have assigned the few Jews with Romanian family names to the category of ‘other’.

name-changers is certainly an underestimate, and does not contain many who were assigned to the various professional categories as apprentices or journeymen.39 Hence it is safe to assume that the majority of name-changing minors who came from peasant families did not expect to remain peasants. Taken as a whole, the social profile of name Magyarizers was decidedly atypical for the Romanian society in Hungary: rather than peasants, teachers and clergymen, they were mostly tradesmen, skilled workers, lower white-collar workers, entrepreneurs and servants. It is also relevant that only two-thirds of those with known religious affiliations belonged to the two Romanian churches, while at least one-third of them should be identified as Magyars of Romanian origin or with Romanianinfluenced names. Conversion and the changing of one’s family name could even accompany each other, and several Uniate or Orthodox men in this cluster had Calvinist children. The mere twenty-nine name-changers recorded with Latinate first names (fourteen of them minors) is also indicative of a Magyarized population, as the social composition of the group would certainly have allowed for a much higher count had the families identified themselves as Romanian.

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Figure 5.2  Residential profile of the category of other and unknown occupations. Figure created by the author.

The two pie charts in Figure 5.2 sort the places of residence of name Magyarizers into major settlement types (cities, towns and villages), and according to the largest local linguistic groups at the censuses closest to their name changes.40 These data indicate that unenforced family-name Magyarization occurred more often in urban or semi-urban and in Magyar-majority settings. From this cluster, no more than 102 people of Romanian confession Magyarized their family names in localities with Romanian majorities, and at least 37 of them were minors. Even their places of residence, however, were typically not outlying villages with purely Romanian populations, but very often bi- or multilingual localities with sizeable Magyar minorities, administrative function, commerce and third sector or commodity production. Map 5.1 shows the spatial distribution of these presumably unenforced family-name Magyarizations, giving further clues on the possible motivations behind them. There is a clear negative correlation between the number of name Magyarizations and the relative share of native Romanian-speakers at the county level (according to the 1880 census), which again highlights the link with linguistic assimilation. Whilst forty-two such changes of Romanian names fell to every ten thousand ethnic Romanians’ share in Udvarhely County, thirty in Békés (not included on the map), twenty-three in Háromszék and sixteen in Csík, the ratio goes below five in densely Romanian-populated counties (Kolozsvár alone is responsible for the high value of Kolozs County), and below one in Fogaras. Moreover, name Magyarizers living in the four Szekler counties came in equal numbers from the Romanian and Magyar confessions. In the case of confirmed public employees, the corresponding map shows an even distribution between counties. Let me return to the over-representation of minors. In general, taking a new name is a simpler choice on the threshold of adulthood, when people are still

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Map 5.1  Spatial distribution of Magyarization of Romanian family names by nonpublic employees and people of unknown occupations. Map created by the author.

building their identities and a new name does not yet interfere with a professional career or an established business. In Dualist Hungary, students were also indisputably more vulnerable to the influence of men of authority, some of whom may have tried to abuse their position to push for name Magyarization. Telkes credited the principal of the nearby forestry school with bringing about what amounted to the biggest collective family-name Magyarization in the territory under study.41 In 1897, 147 entire families Magyarized their German, Czech, Slovak and Romanian names in Görgényüvegcsűr/Glăjărie, a former glass-­workers’ colony. If Telkes’s vague formulation at this point means that the families involved had children studying at the school, it conceivably points to pressure. But the locals were by that time dominant or exclusive Hungarian-speakers and, as such, could have had their own reasons to Magyarize their names. The geographical patterns of name-Magyarizing minors do not differ statistically from other name-Magyarizing non-public employees, although many students who reported a village as their place of residence probably lived in an urban environment. It is their confessional distribution that significantly diverged from most other brackets, with a much higher percentage of them belonging to the Romanian churches. In my Romanian dataset, I have tried to collect all Romanian names rather than just Romanian name-changers, to include people at different stages of the assimilation process. This has not been possible with Transylvanian Saxons because a Magyar person of Transylvania with a German name was not necessarily an assimilated Saxon. I had to narrow down my inquiry to Lutherans

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who Magyarized their German names in Transylvania, to those born in a Transylvanian Saxon locality who Magyarized their names elsewhere, and to those discarding characteristic Transylvanian Saxon names. The number of Saxon name Magyarizers so counted is roughly the same proportionally as that of (Orthodox and Greek Catholic) Romanians, but more of them worked in the public sector. From the 103 Saxon name Magyarizers whom I managed to identify, seventy-three were confirmed public employees and as many as seventysix lived outside of the Saxon Land. Based on these data, ordinary Saxons seem to have been even less inclined to Magyarizing their family names than Romanians. Even paying due consideration to the relatively narrow spatial interface between Saxons and Magyars, the figures remain staggeringly low. This finding squares with the stereotypes about the tight separation of the Saxon part-society and the distance Saxons kept towards all aspects of Magyarization. My single contemporary object of comparison for enforced family names comes from the Kingdom of Romania. In the Moldavia region, Hungarianspeaking Catholics were systematically given Romanian family names through a process that was at once coercive and decentralized. According to a report from 1892 by the vice-consul of the Dual Monarchy in Iași, village secretaries, always Orthodox Romanians, sometimes translated the Hungarian surnames they found and sometimes cast them in Romanian moulds, and the resulting forms became people’s official names. In nineteenth-century Romania, however, village secretaries used similar means to create family names for the Romanian Orthodox, and they may not even have attributed special significance to the symbolic Romanianization involved.42 This circumstance calls attention to the often overlooked fact that family name changes were only possible to the extent that the system of family names had consolidated in the first place, which was unlikely to have happened without external control mechanisms. The minute number of Romanian family names Magyarized by non-public employees in Romanian-majority environments underscores the mainly enforced nature of name Magyarization in the public sector. Confirmed public employees made up around half of all cases. Name-Magyarizing public employees tended to work in lower offices and ancillary positions, and lived scattered throughout the countryside wherever railway lines ran, or gendarmerie stations operated. While public employees in the lower echelons were often defenceless against pressure from above, higher-ranking officials were freer to keep their family names unchanged. The balance of family-name-changers consisted of people living in Hungarian-speaking environments, chiefly in the cities and in the Szeklerland, who often belonged to a Magyar confession, and many of them were minors. Characteristically for the fault line separating the Saxon and Magyar part-­societies, rates of family-name Magyarization were exceedingly low among Saxons, and

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not only were practically all Transylvanian Saxon family-name-changers public employees, but most of them also lived outside Saxon areas. The low overall count points to structural and attitudinal barriers to assimilation. Even if they were unable or insufficiently interested to reproduce a recognizably Romanian nationalist language, a Magyar/Hungarian identity certainly had little attraction for the Romanian masses. Romanian and Saxon nameMagyarizers were outnumbered by seven to one in the area under study by Jewish and Catholic natives and newcomers, public employees and the mostly urban middle class who Magyarized their German or Slavic names.43 The near absence of the upper class and the intelligentsia suggests that either no Romanians assimilated into Magyardom from these social milieus or that such assimilants did not feel the need to Magyarize their family names. However, as very soon becomes apparent to anyone reading the contemporary press or memoirs by contemporaries, a diverse range of prominent public figures populated the no man’s land between the Romanian and the Magyar/Hungarian partsocieties. By 1879 at the very latest, when Gheorghe Pop de Băsești/Ilyefalvi Pap György left the Independentist parliamentary group, dual identities had become untenable in the face of a nationalized Romanian elite; and Romanians who openly cooperated with the Hungarian establishment or took active membership in Magyar/Hungarian political organizations were viewed with abhorrence by the public, and seen as ‘renegades’ in the Romanian press. Of course, this stigma worked in nested circles. The inner circles of those who partly or entirely identified themselves with the Hungarian state nationalist agenda included ministerial officials, judges, MPs, priests, teachers, lawyers, journalists and academics. Most of them hoped to further their careers by repudiation of the Romanian national movement, but otherwise represented diverse equations of multiple allegiances and mimicry. There were genuine assimilants among them, like the Kolozsvár University rector Grigore Moldovan/Moldován Gergely, while others thought to further the interests of their communities, like the police chief, mayor and finally MP of Caransebeș/Karánsebes/Karansebesch, Constantin Burdia, who hijacked the local high-school endowment funds to establish a Hungarian gymnasium, and made millions by acquiring the monopoly of plum brandy distillation over a vast area, while remaining an ardent developer of his hometown.44 None of these people Magyarized their family names, a step that would have underlined their political loyalty without necessarily severing their earlier ties. (This, of course, does not mean that none of them switched between Romanian and Hungarian spellings of their names.) Romanian family names perhaps sounded less unusual to the Magyar public of core-Hungary than the emblematically foreign German names, and did not contain difficult consonant clusters as did Slovak ones. But there was probably another, more specific reason why these people did not Magyarize their family names: namely, their status partly depended on their self-positioning as ‘loyal Romanians’, for which they

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needed to present themselves credibly as Romanians, at least in some contexts and to some audiences and interlocutors. From this perspective, a Romanian family name could mean an advantage rather than a hindrance for their careers. If a former public employee left service and returned to live in his village, his Magyarized family name could easily make him the butt of jokes; but peasant communities were more likely to get over it, as family names generally had limited currency in their world. Even for the very few from the intellectual professions who Magyarized their Romanian family names under duress, the fact that they wore a Hungarian name in official documents did not in itself engender identification with Magyardom. Because there were very few Romanian name-Magyarizers, I do not know about the perception of imposed Hungarian family names in any sphere of Romanian society. One Romanian school teacher called Petru Cotoroiu, who was Nicolae Brînzeu’s schoolmate from the Orăștie Reformed gymnasium, changed his name to Kemény in 1908, but according to Brînzeu, he ‘left a purely Romanian family behind’;45 in other words, he raised his children speaking Romanian while being stuck with a Hungarian name in his documents. In spite of its scarcity in actuality, Romanian elite discourses made much of the subject, either to unmask the shallowness of sociocultural Magyarization (rarely refraining from scornful references to Jews with Magyarized names) or to denounce ‘denationalizing’ government schemes. In fiction, it was sometimes used as a motif to give a negative assessment of characters or their personal development. Iosif Vulcan exploited this device to full effect in his ‘The Wounds of the Nation’ (Ranele națiunii).46 The protagonist of the novel, Ștefan Zimbranu, can only gain his future father-in-law’s assent to his marriage by Magyarizing his name, a juncture in the narrative after which he is referred to as Pista (the corresponding Hungarian hypocoristic). Another figure, a careerist originally called Bumbescu, keeps changing his family name as the political winds blow. He starts out calling himself Knopfler in the 1850s, then reverts to Bumbescu, only to change his name again after 1867, this time to Gombosi (Rom. bumb, Ger. Knopf and Hun. gomb ‘button’). A priestly character, Sofronie Plopescu, appears under the name Nyárfay Szemprő in Hungarian papers while preparing to deliver a sermon in Hungarian (Rom. plop and Hun. nyárfa ‘poplar’).47 The novel expresses the guilt felt by national awakeners for being integrated into the hegemonic culture and alienated from their peasant ethnic stock. The effect Vulcan tries to create, however, is marred by his preference for evocative rather than true-to-life names, an equally common trend in Hungarian Romantic literature. He certainly deserves credit for Szemprő, a happy concoction that captures the contemporary Magyar taste for names, but Plopescu sounds just as laboured as Nyárfay.48 In the later period, the half-yearly official press bulletins on name-Magyarizers kept alive the interest of Romanian newspapers in the subject. They blended the

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old and new family names standing alongside each other with the image of Jews and ethnic Germans trying to hide their real identities, something they hoped would give a thrill to Romanian readers and reassure them about the hollowness of Magyar society. Romanian press reports also regularly took pride in the fact that very few Romanians Magyarized their family names.49 Curiously, this detail was often lost on later Romanian historiography, however uncritically it based its reconstruction of Dualist Hungarian realities on the contemporary Romanian minority press. I may be criticized for paying undue attention to the Magyarization of Romanian names, which involved only four or five thousand people, a number dwarfed by Jewish and Catholic German nameMagyarizers in the same area. The subject matter, however, became a permanent fixture in public memory about what has been presented as the Romanian struggle for national unity. The most bizarre offshoot of the political uses of the topos has arguably been the translation of Simon Telkes’s brochure into major European languages in the 1970s, sponsored by the ultra-nationalist emigrant millionaire Iosif Constantin Drăgan, carrying the title ‘How to Become a Hungarian: The Artificial Reproduction of a People’ in English, and ‘Les Faux hongrois’ (The fake Magyars) in French, and depicting a machine fabricating Magyars on its cover.50 In such a staging, Telkes’s self-help guide for the family-name-Magyarizer was a piece of evidence that the Magyar minority in Romania was an artificial outcome of Magyarization under Hungarian rule, meant to legitimize the then unfolding homogenizing policies of Nicolae Ceaușescu’s national-communist regime. Not only were name Magyarizations blown out of all proportion in Romanian history writing and political propaganda, but the average ethnic Romanian from Transylvania will also have heard of a relative or acquaintance whose forebears had been forced to Magyarize their surnames in Hungarian times. While acknowledging that this kind of Magyarization was more thoroughgoing in the public service of Northern Transylvania between 1940 and 1944, I surmise that a distorted narrative was agreed upon in the interwar period by the Romanian state and nationalist organizations engaged in ‘re-Romanization’ campaigns, on one hand, and by Romania’s new ethnic Romanian subjects on the other, and that this narrative has been passed on ever since as a popular origin story. Widespread Hungarian-influenced names caused unease in the new ruling class – at 15 per cent, these names weighed vastly more than name-Magyarizers – and a consensual interpretation claimed that these names had been foisted upon Romanian families through the centuries. As shown in Chapter 2, a significant minority of them actually were, but under far less dramatic circumstances than Bánffy’s 1898 campaign, let alone the charge of ‘denationalization’. Romanians with ‘Hungarian’ names, whether they kept them or not, embraced this view with pleasure since it allowed them to present what threatened to become a stigma as the mark of sufferings past. As often happens, collective memory envisions earlier centuries on the model of the recent past, and the campaign of name

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Magyarization in the late Dualist period was offered as a prototype for imagining how ‘Hungarian’ names had come about. My hypothesis is informed by American immigration historians’ dismission of stories about Ellis Island immigration officials’ anglicization of immigrants’ family names upon hearing. Such anecdotes have been deeply ingrained into family histories in the United States. An immigrant’s name underwent at least a two-stage procedure: it was first copied onto the passenger list upon boarding at a European port, and from there it was entered into the US records on Ellis Island. This double transcription could certainly give reason for confusion, but researchers suggest that the stories about imposed anglicization should be understood rather as an excuse that the descendants of name-changers told to their ethnic communities.51 Many public employees who Magyarized their German or Slavic surnames under Dualism probably fled to rump-Hungary after 1918, and many of them had anyway been born outside the lands then annexed to Romania. Romanians forced to take Hungarian family names had numerous opportunities to reclaim their former ones.52 Indeed, the interwar Romanian state, in tandem with the nationalist association ASTRA and a new network of ethnic German institutions, waged a relentless campaign to dissimilate Magyarized Romanians and Germans, which makes it unlikely that many of those who adopted Hungarian family names before the war would have kept these out of sheer indolence rather than as the symbol of an identity, consciously chosen or one into which they had been born.

Notes   1. ‘A ki sajnájja az ütven krajczárt, hogy azt a kamisz aláh nevit, egy szíp magyarral felcserijje’; [T. Tőrös], Áfgánistán Vártán ürminy-magyar kalendáriuma: válagatatt trifás iszmazgásakkal [Afganistan Vartan’s Ungarian-Armenian olmenack: wi’ selectid amusin thurrts] (Szamosujvárt: Tőrös, 1882), 41. The passage refers to Patrubány, an Armenian burgher of Szamosújvár, whose name was Romanian in its linguistic origin only (< Rom. patru bani ‘four denars’), but it does not seem that it had ever been borne by ethnic Romanian families. The author himself had Magyarized his name from Marusán.   2. Paikkala, 797–809. For an overview of family-name-changing campaigns, Walkowiak, Personal Name Policy, 229–41 (encouraged) and 243–49 (enforced).   3. As against forcible, administrative Magyarization. This distinction is analogous to the two meanings of ‘Russification’, obruset’ and obrusit’, as explained in E.C. Thaden, ‘Introduction’, in idem (ed.), Russification in the Baltic Provinces and Finland, 1855–1914 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 7.  4. V. Karády and I. Kozma, Név és nemzet: családnév-változtatás, névpolitika és nemzetiségi erőviszonyok Magyarországon a feudalizmustól a kommunizmusig [Name and nation: name change, name politics and ethnic power relations in Hungary from

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feudalism to communism] (Budapest: Osiris, 2002); and T. Farkas, Családnév-változtatás Magyarországon [Family name change in Hungary] (Budapest: Akadémiai, 2009).   5. At the time of writing, their site was available at http://nevvaltoztatas.elte.hu/. The literature of the field is reviewed by T. Farkas, ‘The Research of Official Family Name Changes in Hungary’, Onomastica Uralica 7 (2008), 87–102.  6. Szongott, A magyarhoni örmény családok.   7. S. Telkes, Hogy magyarositsuk a vezetékneveket? [How to Magyarize family names?], 2nd, rev. and enl. edn (Budapest: Pesti Könyvnyomda, 1898), 74.   8. The epithet became ‘one-crown Magyars’ after the 1892 monetary reform, as attested in P. Jumanca, Amintiri: anii tinereții; învățător de școală românească în vremea stăpânirii ungurești [Memoirs: the years of youth; Romanian school teacher under Hungarian rule] (Timișoara: David Press Print, 2011), 300.   9. D. Bering, The Stigma of Names: Antisemitism in German Daily Life, 1812–1933, trans. N. Plaice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 118; and Tims, 138. 10. Telkes, Hogy magyarositsuk, 76–77. 11. Ibid., 71. 12. Karády and Kozma, 65 and 71; and Telkes, Hogy magyarositsuk, 84–86. 13. Cf. Karády and Kozma, 69–70, where the authors suggest that the government resorted to harsher methods after the first volley of calls had met with a poor response from among public employees. 14. This episode is reproduced from the minutes of the House of Commons in G.G. Kemény (ed.), Iratok a nemzetiségi kérdés történetéhez Magyarországon a dualizmus korában [Documents on the history of the nationalities problem in Dualist-era Hungary], Vol. 2 (Budapest: Tankönyvkiadó, 1956), 656, and is also presented and interpreted at length by Karády and Kozma, 71–74. During the year 1898, eight Romanian and six Saxon railwaymen Magyarized their family names in Hermannstadt, four Saxons and three Romanians in Schäßburg, and further railwaymen dropped their German, Slavic or Hungarian (Markó) family names in both places. It is not clear whether by ‘Földvár’, Meltzl referred to Feldioara/Marienburg/Földvár or Feldioara Secuiască/Székelyföldvár. In the former, only two railwaymen Magyarized their Romanian family names that year, while the latter, an important hub of the railway network, mustered six Romanian namechangers. 15. Karády and Kozma, 75. 16. The letter is published in S. Retegan, În umbra clopotnițelor: școlile confesionale grecocatolice din dieceza Gherlei între 1875–1885; mărturii documentare [In the shadow of belfries: Greek Catholic confessional schools in the Gherla/Szamosújvár Diocese between 1875 and 1885; documentary evidence] (Cluj-Napoca: Argonaut, 2008), 442. 17. They can be found in Szent-Iványi as miners and metalworkers from Oláhláposbánya, Horgospataka and Rojahidja. 18. Telkes, 90. Andor Mészáros cites the example of Václav Stehlík, a Czech public official in the Banat, prompted by his superiors to Magyarize his family name into Kis, and living under the name Václav Kýsý after retiring from service; A. Mészáros, A cseh elem a magyar polgárosodásban [The Czech component in the modernization of Hungary] (Budapest: Szent István Társulat; Piliscsaba: PPKE BTK Szlavisztikai Intézet, 2011), 124. 19. E. Lakatos, A magyar politikai vezetőréteg 1848–1918: társadalomtörténeti tanulmány [The Hungarian political elite, 1848–1918: a study in social history] (Budapest: self-published, 1942), 71.

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20. A magyar királyi honvédelmi ministerium, a honvédség és csendőrség névkönyve 1900. évre [Directory of the Hungarian Royal Ministry of Defence, the Honvéd Army and the Gendarmerie for 1900] (Budapest: Pallas, 1899). 21. Recollection of Medi Schmidt, a woman of 59 from Vișeu de Sus/Oberwischau/ Felsővisó/Vyshovo-Vyzhnye in 1968; C. Stephani, Oben im Wassertal: Eine Zipser Chronik (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1970), 70. 22. Telkes, Hogy magyarositsuk, 91. 23. Blondin, ‘Maghiarisarea numelor’ [The Magyarization of names], Tribuna Poporului 2/14 April 1897, p. 298. 24. Argus [pseudonym of E. Babeș], Nemzetiségi politikánk hibái és bűnei [The errors and vices of our nationalities policy] (Budapest: Deutsch, 1908), 56. Cf. Drapelul 13/26 June 1902. 25. Szent-Iványi, Századunk névváltoztatásai. 26. I am indebted to Tamás Farkas for making these lists available for my research. 27. Thus, I counted Popovics/Popovici a Romanian name in Kolozsvár. The spelling of the data copied from church registers was often telling, and at times I also consulted Constantinescu’s dictionary and the online Romanian telephone directory http://www. carte-telefoane.info; last accessed 14 September 2019. 28. Gendarmes, judges, judicial staffers, tax and excise officers, Honvéd officers, state-school teachers, post-office employees, telegraph operators, border guards, registrars, jail wardens and tobacco factory workers were necessarily on the state payroll; policemen received their salaries from the town halls, while district administrators and district bailiffs received theirs from the county budgets. Railwaymen (brakemen, station masters, ticket inspectors, pointsmen, pushers, signallers, engine drivers, stokers, railway porters), platelayers and navvies can also, in all likelihood, be put down as state employees, although several private railway companies were also in operation. Finally, considering the huge over-representation of public employees, I chose to include in this category all scribes, bailiffs (hivatalszolga), temporary junior clerks (díjnok), primary-school teachers, rangers, f­ oresters, hospital workers and military officers (unless specified as serving in the K.u.K. Army), assuming that their majority also worked at Hungarian state or municipal institutions. 29. Cf. Karády and Kozma, 105. When encoding the data, I counted as one case when two applicants from the same year had changed their identical Romanian family name to the same Hungarian one, but as two cases if the name changes had been authorized in different years. 30. Ibid., 103. 31. On these causes, see B. Orosz, ‘A hivatalos családnév-változtatásokat megalapozó tényezők a XIX. század második felében’ [The factors influencing official family name changes in the second half of the nineteenth century], Magyar Nyelvőr 101 (1977), 33–37. 32. Karády and Kozma, 49. 33. Ibid. 34. Magyar Statisztikai Közlemények, new series, Vol. 56, 678–79 and 682–83. 35. Decree 94,618/1909 of the Ministry of the Interior, Belügyi Közlöny 14 (1909), 563. 36. Rónai, Bérczi, Kárpáti, Cserhalmi, Drégelyi, Fegyveresi, Hazai. 37. The latter may have to do with the fact that banfi was in some regions the popular Romanian name for the knave of bells on German playing cards; K. Viski, ‘Magyar szók a mezőségi oláhok nyelvében’ [Hungarian words in the Romanian dialect of the Câmpie/ Mezőség/Heide], Magyar Nyelvőr 37 (1908), 220.

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38. Such as Bétafi. Regulations wanted Magyarized family names to be spelt phonologically, without any aristocratic frills, including the -y ending. 39. Karády and Kozma, 75 and 92. Legal age was twenty-four in Dualist Hungary. 40. Cities: Arad, Berlin, Brassó, Budapest, Debrecen, Hermannstadt, Kolozsvár, Košice/ Kassa/Kaschau, Marosvásárhely/Oșorhei/Neumarkt, Nagyvárad, Paris, Temeswar and Vienna. Aside from places of formal urban status, I also assigned to the category of towns places fulfilling urban functions. 41. Telkes, Hogy magyarositsuk, 90. 42. Stefan Lippert von Granberg to the Habsburg embassy in Bucharest, in 1892; in Gecsényi, 178–79. 43. Karády and Kozma, 49, 52 and 84. 44. On Moldovan/Moldován, see T. Berki, Magyar–román kulturális kapcsolatok a 19. század második felében: értelmiségtörténeti keret [Hungarian–Romanian cultural contacts in the second half of the nineteenth century: a history of intelligentsia framework] (Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület, 2012), 173–212. On Burdia, see B. Gajda, ‘Az intézet alapítása’ [The founding of the institution], in A karánsebesi m. kir. állami főgimnázium első évi értesítője az 1907–1908. tanévről [Yearbook for the first, 1907/8 school year of the Caransebeș Hungarian Royal High Gymnasium] (Karánsebes, 1908), 21–40; N. Magiar and E. Magiar, Monografia localității Bozovici [Monograph of Bozovici] (Reșița: Tim, 2008), 68; O.L. Roșu, Comunitatea de avere a fostului Regiment Grăniceresc RomânoBănățean Nr. 13 din Caransebeș: 1879–1948 [The community of property of the former 13th Caransebeș Banat-Romanian Border Regiment, 1879–1948] (n.p. [Reșița]: Muzeul Banatului Montan, 2010), 65; and Jumanca, 258. 45. Brînzeu, 48. 46. I. Vulcan, Ranele natiunii [The wounds of the nation], 3 vols (Budapest: Kocsi, 1876). 47. Ibid., Vol. 2, 106. 48. Something similar can be said about Punguleanu/Pungulányi in Revoluția din Pîrlești by Slavici. His name is deliberately fanciful, derived from Rom. pungă ‘purse’. 49. E.g. Tribuna Poporului 2/14 April 1897; Tribuna 7/20 October 1907; and Țara Noastră 12/25 April 1909. 50. S. Telkes, How to Become a Hungarian: The Artificial Reproduction of a People (Milan: Europa, 1977). 51. A. Clark, D. Roen Oates and Sh. Rankins-Robertson, ‘Understanding the Life Narratives of Immigrants through Naming Practices’, in S. Medzerian Vanguri (ed.), Rhetorics of Names and Naming (New York: Routledge, 2016), 89–101; and S. Baird, ‘Anglicizing Ethnic Surnames’, Names 54 (2006), 96–97. 52. K. Bochmann, ‘Sprache und Gesetzgebung’, in G. Holtus, M. Metzeltin and Ch. Schmitt (eds), Lexikon der Romanistischen Linguistik, Vol. 3, Die einzelnen romanischen Sprachen und Sprachgebiete von der Renaissance bis zur Gegenwart: Rumänisch, Dalmatisch/ Istroromanisch, Friaulisch, Ladinisch, Bündnerromanisch (Berlin: Niemeyer, 1997), 256; and Karády and Kozma, 263–68.

Chapter 6

Signposts over the Land

d The Politics of Toponymy The common sense that assigned different place name variants to the various languages went uncontested, although it would appear that once the Romanian names were written out in Latin characters in an etymological spelling, that helped to convince Pesty’s respondents that they stood for separate Romanian names, even if pronounced the same. Together with the introduction of new official German names in the 1850s, this also raised the expectation that a locality should have a name in each of the three regional languages, and respondents noted with touching ingenuity if a place ‘as yet’ lacked a separate German or Romanian name.1 In Hungarian texts, locality names borrowed from Romanian were virtually always spelt according to the rules of Hungarian, even those denoting villages at a great distance from Hungarian-speaking areas. But the handful of German locality names in the Banat that lacked parallel Hungarian variants were not transcribed, showing that Hungarian practice gave the better-established German orthography the same preferential treatment as was found in the case of family names.2 Officials and clerks chose their place-name variants according to the language in which they wrote, with the result that their choices reflected the changing fortunes of the corresponding languages. The dominance of German names in official texts gave way to an unprecedented diversity in 1860–61, to be steamrollered by the Hungarian regime after the Compromise on all but the local level, but excluding the former Saxon Land. A few gazetteers – directories listing all localities in alphabetical order, accompanied by basic information – had already come out before 1867 and had been in wide use, but these were private affairs lacking state recognition.3 The first

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gazetteer covering the Kingdom of Hungary enlarged with Transylvania was published by the Budapest statistical service in 1873, but in spite of its semiofficial nature, it too did not have regulatory power. Until 1892, its editions listed the Romanian and German endonyms alongside the Hungarian names. It was not uncommon for a village to have a different Hungarian name on its seal from the one listed in the official gazetteer, while the railway and the Magyar churches might use their own variants for good measure.4 A telling episode occurred in 1887 when the Hermannstadt postal directorate was planning to establish a post office in the Saxon village referred to in the gazetteer under the seemingly unequivocal Hungarian form Petres, and they enquired at BeszterceNaszód County about the name as the county administration used it.5 When the new, nationally minded elites entered a collision course over the symbolic ownership of places by mounting antagonistic claims on their names – usually couched in public statements directed to the ingroup – they relied on the ethnocentric knee-jerk reaction that accepted familiar forms as the true ones, and dismissed alien ones as being contrived or even ridiculous. This reaction was then justified by the circular reasoning that the place name must be of native origin as it harmoniously fit into the phonological patterns of the language; whereas, in reality, this was the expected outcome of the routine adjustment process. Seeking to deride exonyms, educated authors often feigned a local perspective, and harped on how unaware locals were of these forms. Note that the viability of such inward-looking optics was far from unproblematic on the ground. At least Romanian peasants were reminded every now and then that the names they used were not the authoritative ones. Nationalism transplanted this ethnocentric reflex to the field of history. The main battle was now fought over the original names underlying the modern ones, overwhelmingly Entlehnungspaare according to Kranzmayer’s classification, and there was considerable pressure on conationals to assert the historical primacy of mother-tongue variants. The names of others were dismissed as either ‘distortions’ or ‘fabrications’, the products of an adverse past and unscrupulous enemies. This new way of thinking had already reared its head in the responses to Pesty. At least twenty-six respondents maintained that the variants of their ethnic or preferred languages were the original, and the others merely ‘distorted’ or translated. Here, village secretaries seem to have expressed their own rather than local peasants’ opinions. One of them suggested that the Swabians of Baumgarten, also known as Neudorf, called their village by these two names only because they did not know its single correct name, the Hungarian Fakert (both this and Ger. Baumgarten mean ‘grove’, but the former sounds rather laboured).6 Partisans of the Hungarian names usually offered etymologies or at least hinted at the transparency of the Hungarian as against the opacity of other forms, but only two respondents who contended for the priority of the Romanian names presented clues about what meanings they suggested.7 Remarkably, in trying

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to dispel any doubt that the Hungarian name was the original one, the Agrij/ Felegregy district administrator resorted to an argument rarely voiced in the period, although often readily available: that the name had homonyms in distant lands where no Romanian was spoken.8 In the rest of cases, respondents simply stated the priority of one or the other ethnic name variant on the grounds that it perfectly matched the phonetics of their preferred language. Building on the fetish of writing, Magyar respondents could also play out the incomparably longer tradition behind the Hungarian written forms as compared to the Latinate Romanian ones, and present Romanian names themselves as recent products. At least twice at the turn of the century, Independentist MPs tried to whip up moral panic in the Budapest parliament around the fact that Romanians and Saxons used their own place-name variants, which were often derived from the Hungarian ones.9 Characteristically, MP Károly Eötvös presented the Romanian name of Hațeg, the seat of one of medieval Hungary’s Romanian districts, as a recent invention.10 Romanian forms that were little more than approximations of Hungarian names in a Romanian guise did not warrant more consideration – quite the contrary. In 1909, Nicolae Mazere from Iași published the results of his alternative nationality census for Hungary (the aggregate figures of which, incidentally, barely differed from the official data) and called his conationals to task for mindlessly parroting the Hungarian place names. By his admission, he devoted much effort to finding out the true and only Romanian name of each settlement.11 His names from the Szeklerland, in particular, came in for ridicule in a review in Hungarian, whose author wrongly assumed that such Romanian renderings as Gheorghio-Sîn-Micloș for Gyergyószentmiklós must of necessity be improvised forms.12 In time, this exclusivist rhetoric became routinized on all sides, and Iorga accidentally deployed it against a Romanian form that he mistook for a ‘phony’ Hungarian one.13 In the last resort, however, Romanian political philologists commanded an alternative story, which allowed them to move the goalposts and to admit that Romanian peasants in the Transylvanian Basin often used adjusted Hungarian names. It was a story about medieval kings of Hungary who Magyarized the Romanian toponymy. Place-name etymological speculations, intended to shore up national visions of history, were quickly set in motion after the civil war of 1848–49 had dramatically shown the mobilizing force of nationalist slogans and the irreducible gap between the rival national agendas with overlapping territorial claims. Besides, these were also the years when Vienna rolled back the public use of Hungarian and introduced new German place names for the villages that had none, for the benefit of its bureaucracy. Initially, both Hungarian and Romanian nationalist place-name etymologies were purely inward-looking and oblivious to the diachronic nature of language, to the long-standing multilingualism of the area and indeed to history in general, except for a remote and half-mythical national golden age. For a generation or so,

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Hungarian etymologies were either conceived out of the belief that Hungarian was somehow related to the ancient languages of the Near Orient, or were inspired by the idea of synaesthetic, monosyllabic roots, whereas Romanian dilettantes inscribed theirs in the time-honoured tradition of humanist etymology, and pulled out all the stops to prove the impeccable Latin pedigree of the modern Romanian place names. Later, in part as a sulky reaction against the comparative-historical standards, which busted their cherished Latin etymologies, several Romanian intellectuals of the Latinist generation lapsed into the decidedly modern, if pseudo-scientific, trend of etymological ‘Celtomania’, the quest for underlying Celtic etymons, on the flawed assumption that Dacians, imagined as either sufficiently ‘neutral’ or as the ancestors of modern Romanians, had spoken Celtic. Place-name etymologies were strikingly whimsical in this early stage, which opened the gates for the wider nationalist vanguards not only to muse on them but also to partake in their creation. By the 1870s, several parallel developments had conspired to rework the ways place-name etymology was pursued, and to redefine the space that place names were to occupy in the two nationalized readings of history. First and foremost, scholars in Germany and other Western countries had hitched onomastic research to the bandwagon of comparative-historical linguistics, and elevated it to the status of a respectable auxiliary discipline. Researchers traced back the initial forms in documents or reconstructed them relying on the regular sound changes in the past. They classified them into time layers and regional types, sometimes attributing these layers and types to specific ethnic groups. By the 1870s, this line of inquiry had made great headway in the fields of Germanic, Romance and Slavic, providing a recipe for similar classifications of Hungarian and Romanian place names. Historical source collections, compiled out of enthusiasm for the national past, were by that time also there to help to trace back the histories of individual names. Serving as an immediate catalyst for the production of modern, scientific place-name etymologies for the region was the Austrian historian Robert Rösler’s influential theory about the Balkanic origins of Romanians, supported by, among other things, the lack of continuity between the attested settlement toponymy of ancient Dacia and the current Romanian settlement-name cover, which in its early layers largely went back to Slavic and Hungarian. On both the Magyar and Romanian sides, there emerged a handful of young and accomplished or at least reasonably well-informed comparatists who tried to affirm or to refute Rösler’s theory in general, and his arguments based on toponymy in particular. These young men, with the Romanian Xenopol and the Magyar Pál Hunfalvy being the most prominent, were ready to throw out the inherited Romantic ballast, but they were also eager to hone their nationalist credentials in the philological battlefield, called into question because of their critical, irreverent attitude to received wisdom. Both sides engaged with Slavic philology, and Magyar

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scholars  – unavoidably in a debate about Romanian ethnogenesis  – tackled Romanian place naming at some length. Romanian contributors to the debate, on the other hand, tended to brush aside transparent Hungarian etymologies as irrelevant, together with the written historical record. Tacitly, they interpreted place names of Hungarian origin as the result of a large-scale renaming campaign that they imagined had occurred right after the lands where early Romanians had supposedly lived had been incorporated into the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. There is much to suggest that participants and observers understood the debate as one at least partly about certain collective privileges that historical priority in the land was thought to guarantee. Should it be proven that Romanians’ direct-line ancestors had inhabited the intra-Carpathian space prior to the arrival of Magyars, that would have lent them an uncontested autochthonous status, and a firm footing from which to challenge the constitutional status quo and demand some form of political autonomy. Conversely, if the place-name cover was initially Hungarian and early Romanians had only adopted it, that was understood as substantiating the doctrine that as an immigrant minority group historically, Romanians must at least learn the language of their hosts. These conclusions were made explicit or were flagged countless times during the period. Nevertheless, it would be a mistake to overemphasize the role of prehistoric speculations in underpinning contemporary Hungarian and Romanian nationalist discourses. Whilst the former traditionally invoked the right of conquest and made frequent references to Magyars’ putative genius of statecraft, Romanian nationalists would also appeal to the numerical ascendancy of Romanian-speakers, albeit rarely without a historicized framing. Besides, Hungarian and Romanian authors equally went out of their ways to emphasize their ethnic constituents’ inherent cultural superiority over the other. It may present interest in this respect that the Transylvanian Saxon elite was, in fact, able to mount robust and at times successful resistance in the face of Dualist Hungary’s homogenizing policies without laying a strong claim on their precedence in their land. The idea of Saxon historical precedence was by no means absent in their minds, as the Sebeș highschool teacher Johann Wolff’s toponomastic studies demonstrate. Pan-German propaganda, however, did not claim them to be autochthonous, but rather hardy colonists bearing evidence of German industriousness and stamina. Toponyms were invested with great importance in this debate, although perhaps more so on the side advocating Magyar priority. The latter interpretations put a premium on medieval attestations, which the opposite camp usually snubbed, insinuating that the original forms could at best be reconstructed based on the modern names as they lived on the lips of the Romanian folk. The new scientific framework weaned Romanian philologists away from their earlier Latin sources and made them discover the Slavic roots of a large segment of the Romanian toponymy, which they urgently reinterpreted as ‘Romano-Slavic’. They also shifted the emphasis from settlement names to the names of rivers

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and peaks, the latter less prominent in medieval records. They conveniently understood these as relics of hoary antiquity and presented the resemblance between the ancient and Romanian names of the major rivers as a solid proof of Romance continuity. The opposite camp denied that the present-day Romanian forms could go back to the documented pre-Latin ones without a Slavic and/or Hungarian intermediary, and Pál Hunfalvy pointed out that the major hydronyms had usually survived the Migration Period in the whole expanse of the later Kingdom of Hungary. There can be no doubt that the discourse on the origins of place names informed the waves of toponymic engineering that ensued, first under Hungarian rule and later under Romanian. The experts on the Communal Registry Board who assisted the selection of new Hungarian locality names were up to date on the toponymic arguments in favour of Magyars’ first occupancy. Further on, I will also describe how the quest for the original Hungarian forms kindled the imagination of a nationalist public. But if scholarly debates, and especially the one regarding Romanian ethnogenesis, brought the origins of place names into the limelight, one should not overstate the immediate influence that they could exert on renaming. Renaming campaigns redressed felt historical injustices, but also committed symbolic violence by imposing a dominant vision upon non-dominant groups. The new nomenclatures educated (misinformed) the national public, but they could not be seriously considered as arguments for either ­historical vision. Indeed, they tended to compromise them. As mentioned earlier, Pesty’s survey was partly driven by his hope that the microtoponymy would lay bare a wider spread of Hungarian in the distant past. Romanian nationalists had their own Holy Grail when turning their attention to microtoponymy; they were eager to demonstrate that the Romanian peasantry had preserved remembrances of their imputed Roman past and two thousand years of continuity in the land. Romanian philologists working in the Latinist paradigm were in general liable to credit peasant communities with the most extravagant oral traditions. The anonymous author mentioned by Alecu Russo in 1855 probably took the biscuit by creatively mishearing Fântâna lui Martin (‘Martin’s spring’) as Fântâna Lamartină and then depicting the Romanian shepherds of the Ceahlău Mountains as devout admirers of the French poet Lamartine.14 Most of these academic pioneers, however, were not as naive as to believe that peasants consciously nurtured memories of a Roman past. Consistent with the Romantic premises of their discipline, they rather looked for odd pieces that survived from early history thanks to peasant conservatism, even if the original meanings had been long forgotten. Thus they were trying to validate a new, secular cultural memory by linking it to the authentic source that folklore was thought to represent. The question has several ramifications, most of them having to do with the presumptive toponymic legacy of Trajan. Contemporaries made the most of

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Trajan in the alleged Romanian names denoting vestiges of Roman roads and prehistoric defence systems.15 Xenopol effectively advanced the Romanian names as they appeared in the literature not only as veritable folk traditions, but as preserving a genuine bond spanning two thousand years between these places and the Roman emperor, and as standing proof of Romance-speakers’ continuous settlement on the soil of ancient Dacia.16 Nestor Șimon advised Nicolae Densușianu in 1895 not to let any rural respondent fool him into believing that peasants actually told stories about Emperor Trajan or the Romans. I cannot share Șimon’s scepticism. Trajan, a central figure in the early nationalist canon of Romanian history, may have easily penetrated Romanian peasant minds by that time through the clergy and schools, and I showed that the first name Traian enjoyed a modest but noticeable popularity among Romanian peasant families.17 More unsettlingly, however, claims about the historical memory of Romanian peasants went back to early-modern humanist literati, and by the nineteenth century were inextricably woven into a scholarly discourse removed from actual peasant informants. From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, the Roman heritage was the main attraction for travellers to ancient Dacia, and they scrambled to present local traditions about it, all the more fascinating if attributed to the people who were believed to descend from Trajan’s legions. These references later became prized evidence of Roman ancestry in the hands of Romanian writers. Easiest to account for is a German traveller’s statement from 1840, whose oarsmen in the Iron Gates of the Danube allegedly presented to him the road carved into the riverside cliffs, indeed a tour de force of Roman engineering, as the work of Trajan, an ‘Imperator Romanescu’.18 First, a Roman memorial plaque surviving in an easily accessible spot extolled Trajan as the builder, and second, an unbroken chain of maps and reference works had identified the nearby pillars of Trajan’s bridge over the Danube.19 Another road, called Kalea trajanului (‘Trajan’s way’) by local Romanians according to Franz Joseph Sulzer’s information from 1781, had been built by the Habsburg military a few decades earlier, and the military engineers working on it discovered traces of an earlier, possibly Roman road.20 Significantly, wherever references to ‘Trajan’s roads’ can be checked against research evidence, the actual forms turn out to be Troian or Calea troianului.21 Troian is attested in Slavic geographical names throughout the Balkans. It was also used as a geographical term in older Romanian, meaning a vast meadow or even an old levee,22 and several places so called have been found to hide archaeological finds from various periods.23 By the time a seventeenth-century chronicler linked the succession of Moldavian ditches by the name of Troian to Trajan’s fortifying activity, he could already appeal to the consenting opinions of earlier scholars.24 Subsequently, the savant-prince Dimitrie Cantemir lumped the Moldavian and Wallachian systems together with the pre-Roman line of ramparts and ditches running through the Hungarian Grand Plain, passing the

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judgement that all these were ‘fossa Trajani imperatoris’.25 Since the fortification line between the Prut and the Danube failed to turn up any Roman antiquity, however, and because Slavs also called similar structures by the same name in areas where Trajan had never set foot, Nicolae Iorga called into question whether these troians could perpetuate the memory of the great emperor.26 It is also questionable how widespread the use of the name Troian actually was. The Romanians of Alioș, living close to the ditch in the Banat and thus supposed to know this name, used the Serbian-origin word iarc in the early twentieth century, and attributed its building to the Turks.27 For his Trajan’s meadow  – Prat de Trajan, as he chose to call it in mock Romanian28  – the German Baroque poet Martin Opitz drew inspiration from a place similarly called Troian, just upstream of Zlatna/Zalatna.29 The Transylvanian Saxon Johannes Tröster then transferred the humanist tradition some hundred kilometres to the north-east, to the small plain wedged between the Aranyos/Arieș and Maros Rivers and the Apuseni Mountains, chiefly inhabited by Magyars (Szeklers).30 The Calvinist pastor József Benkő, hardly an enemy of deriving place names from antiquity, was alone in warning his readers that this name, slowly becoming established in the scholarly community, was unknown to the Romanians of the area.31 Failing to react to Benkő’s remark, which remained in manuscript, later historians piously corrected the forms by Opitz and Tröster, adjusting them to actual spoken Romanian. On balance, the Magyar Béla Lukács’s 1866 reference to ‘Trajan’s coffin’ as the popular name of a hill in the Ampoi/Ompoly Valley remains the most likely candidate for a genuine vernacular place name commemorating Emperor Trajan. Lukács gave the following explanation for it: ‘The folk is unwavering in its belief that the world-conquering Trajan rests underneath this colossal mass of rock’.32 Perhaps because the actual Trajan was known to have died in Cilicia, this name escaped the eyes of upper-class Romanians. In Chapter 3, I concluded that stories about the Roman Empire caught the imagination of peasants who lived in the vicinity of visible ancient ruins. The Ampoi Valley was one such place, and the tradition may have gone back to the ethnic violence in 1848, in which the locals took part side by side with a few full-fledged nationalists. Educated people on all sides took it for granted that peasants showed interest in history writ large, venerated a heroic national past and often labelled their environment after historical figures. The place names purportedly connected to Emperor Trajan were unique only in that they were embroiled in the debate about the actual ethnic past of the peasants. Nobody called into question the popular transmittance of similar legends drawing on Hungarian dynastic history among Magyar peasants, however fabulous or historically inaccurate they were. An aetiological story about a scenic canyon north-west of Torda/Turda, attributed by countless authors to the Magyar peasants of the area and later included in the core of Hungarian historical legendary, had it created by the

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eleventh-century knightly Hungarian king, Saint Ladislaus. The story cannot be traced back earlier than 1670 when the Transylvanian Saxon author of a historical chronicle recounted that the formations had been shown to him on the site as the horseshoe prints of Saint Ladislaus.33 Similarly to Trajan’s roads, it is possible that the story about the horse cleaving the earth asunder was hatched and sustained by the intelligentsia as an invented tradition, to be embraced only much later by the local folk. At any rate, the pathways of folklorization were broader among the more literate Magyar peasantry, as there had been a stronger layer of brokers between popular and high cultures who could invent and validate such legends. Incidentally, the Alexander Romance, the unrivalled favourite of the Romanian folk, did indeed produce a toponymic outpouring in Romanian, and contemporary Romanian peasants thought the same canyon had originated from the horse Bucephalus.34 Considering the energy that contemporaries invested in making place names support their versions of ethnic prehistory, it is remarkable how little they cared to align their practices with their beliefs. Until the law on locality names turned the clinging to Romanian place names into a token of political resistance, Romanian intellectuals made insouciant use of Hungarian place-name variants and spellings in Romanian writing, both in private and in public.35 The journalist Ioan Russu-Șirianu lamented in 1904 that it was sometimes hard to find out the Romanian place names from afar.36 But places familiar to the writers also routinely turned up under Hungarian names in Romanian texts: ‘I was born in the town of Nagy-Károly’, began the memoirs of the Greek Catholic canon Ioan Boroș, only to shift to the Romanian name of his hometown on following pages.37 Even such a highly exposed setting as the political press featured Hungarian forms. As the editor of the militantly nationalist Tribuna, Slavici tailored the language of contributions to his linguistic ideal and translated the inserts to Romanian, he nevertheless left part of the names of train station stops in Hungarian in the railway timetable.38 The first Romanian-language encyclopedia, published in Hermannstadt between 1898 and 1904, also displayed a few places located in Romanian-majority areas under their Hungarian names.39 Romanian authors’ frequent slipping into the use of Hungarian variants reveals the intensity of the cultural hegemony at work in literate, middleclass and urban milieus. It not only clashed with nationalist ideas about place names but would have also been unthinkable in the interwar Romanian media, partly because of vindictive Romanian state nationalism and partly because the interlude when the public use of Romanian place names fell under restrictions politicized the matter to a great degree. Falling back on Hungarian forms might sometimes carry the awareness of a given name’s Hungarian origin. But the last examples make it clear that such slip-ups were not limited to spontaneous communication, where they could be attributed to slovenliness, but rather that nationalist stances did not yet congeal into a habitus. To be sure, the codes of

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nationally appropriate behaviour were nowhere clear-cut, and it was negotiable whether singing Hungarian songs in public, dancing Hungarian dances or giving a Hungarian speech at a Romanian banquet compromised one’s integrity as a Romanian nationalist, but none of these violations of boundary maintenance went against such elaborate discursive constructs as existed around place names. In the end, the law on locality names did not fail to deepen the Romanian nationalist vanguard’s sensitivity over Hungarian forms.

Backpackers and Other Godparents Write the streets full / and rephrase the map, / abandon all restraint / in overdoing excess. —Tamás Pajor/Neurotic, Brék [Break dance]40

In the second half of the nineteenth century, more and more affluent townsfolk walked alpine trails, equipped with knapsacks and alpenstocks, towards windy mountain tops, narrow gorges, cascading waterfalls and glinting tarns. They had no practical reason to undertake the fatigue of climbing; by their own admission, they sought refreshment from the bustle of urban life and were attracted by the beauty of the wilderness.41 For the apostles of the movement, mountain walking united recreation with sportsmanship and self-education. In addition, tourist writers time and again projected national meanings onto the landscape; they extolled it for having witnessed the nation’s past and having shaped its character.42 The claim was also advanced that organized groups of backpackers were carrying out a national mission – by blazing and maintaining trails, operating mountain huts and publishing guidebooks, they helped people to recognize the worth of their natural treasures. These activities gained heightened significance in borderlands and contested regions, where they were also seen to be conquering the space for the national body.43 In 1893, the Slovene Mountaineering Society was founded with the motto ‘preserve the Slovenian face of Slovenian mountains’, and it immediately engaged in a battle with its German competitors for the symbolic possession of the Triglav, using inscriptions, mountain huts and postcards as weapons.44 Naming a place to symbolically appropriate it for the community was part and parcel of this endeavour. The onomastic output of Hungarian alpine clubs deserves interest, despite its rather modest scale compared to the interwar era. In the last section we saw educated people interpreting existing place names against the backdrop of their nationalist beliefs, and alpine groups were the first to create a platform for them to put their ideas into practice. Unlike Magyarized settlement names, their creations reveal broader sources of inspiration than just national history and myths. At the same time, they also acted as a pressure group,

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pushing state authorities to get involved in the Magyarizing of place names. Finally, the tourist literature is a rewarding source on the Magyar elite’s attitudes towards the ambiguities of spaces between homely and alien, even though in the majority of cases they did not rename them. Saxons were the pioneers of mountaineering in the area.45 Although they restricted their activity to the mountains close to Saxon urban centres, mostly to the southern chain of the Carpathians ranging along the border from their south-eastern curve to the Retezat in the West, even Magyars taking hikes to these parts usually relied on the Saxon Siebenbürgischer Karpatenverein’s infrastructure. On the other hand, Romanian climbers were too few in number to organize separate clubs. The first pieces of Romanian mountaineering literature from Transylvania – written by the chief clerk of Fogaras County, Ioan Turcu, and Teodor Romul Popescu from Hermannstadt – do not present interest from an ideological standpoint.46 With the likely exception of a cave near the Vulcan Pass that Kőváry quoted under the name Bellona (a Roman war goddess), I have found no evidence that the Romanian middle class renamed natural landmarks to fit their nationalist agenda.47 Magyar alpine clubs began to proliferate in the 1890s.48 Hungary witnessed an associational boom in that period, as the Magyar elite was busy creating a civil sphere that mainly differed from its Austrian and German models in the little space it had for gymnastic societies or sharpshooters’ associations. Their founding memberships overlapped considerably with those of Magyarizing cultural associations; indeed, the busiest of them, the EKE (Erdélyi Kárpát-egyesület, Carpathian Society of Transylvania), was midwifed into life by the nationalist EMKE.49 Before long, however, many alpine clubs fell into inactivity, even in such populous cities as Nagyvárad.50 When appointed to Fogaras in 1908 as a high-school teacher, the poet Mihály Babits found a place where only Saxons were given to excursions, and where joining a Saxon party venturing into the nearby mountains was seen as slightly eccentric by local Magyars, although a local branch of the EKE had operated in the 1890s.51 Based on the magazines that I perused,52 mountain walking as a hobby flourished among the elites in the cities of Kolozsvár, Temeswar/Temesvár/Timișoara/ Temišvar and Arad, and the summer clienteles of high-altitude resorts. There was nothing unique in the markedly upper-class and dominantly male composition of Magyar walking parties; the same was also typical for German and Austrian alpine clubs.53 The pillars of the movement were geologists, botanists and entomologists, who also wandered around in nature for professional reasons. What kinds of place names did Magyar excursionists find in the mountains? While on the whole their destinations of choice typically lay in Romanianspeaking areas, an analysis of vernacular geographical names as they could perceive them will differentiate between four contexts. Hungarian vernacular names were unproblematic in the Szeklerland at large. They were also present in some

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parts of the Apuseni Mountains straddling Hungary and Transylvania, where the preference for the Romanian variants on the military map, the only largeresolution map on the market, antagonized Magyar friends of nature. In the rest of the Apuseni, and usually where Hungarian names were not readily available, Magyar visitors may have felt inclined to look for Hungarian ‘originals’, especially behind opaque Romanian forms. Finally, in some mountain ranges on the border, like in the Făgăraș or the Retezat Mountains, they might in practice have accepted the Romanian place-name cover as authentic. Ironically, they came to regard the space as a quasi-colonial blank slate for creative naming to the extent that they did so. Turning now to the question of what potential models existed for the handling of an alien vernacular toponymy, accounts by colonial exploring parties gave obvious inspiration. It may seem trivial to note, but my emphasis on naming and renaming can easily conceal the fact that European explorers of uncharted lands adopted indigenous names in the vast majority of cases, and Magyar tourist writers and geographers proceeded likewise.54 Commemorative names made up the most common type of wilful interventions to colonial toponymies in the nineteenth century, celebrating royalties, politicians, colonial officials, and explorers and their families.55 The Magyar middle class could read about the many geographical features named to honour Queen Victoria around the globe,56 and they certainly knew about the Transylvanian aristocrat Sámuel Teleki, who led an expedition to the interior of British East Africa (Kenya) in 1888 and named two lakes there after the Habsburg heir apparent Rudolf and his consort Stéphanie.57 Then there were also names meant to document the explorer’s journey, a different kind of commemorative naming.58 Here belong many of Captain Cook’s coinages, like Cape Tribulation, so baptized after his ship had run onto a shoal there.59 Descriptive naming grew less popular over time, but countless modern names, from straightforward ones like Lagos (Port. ‘lakes’) to metaphoric ones like Venezuela (Sp. ‘little Venice’), attested to its former productivity. It is less evident how much Magyar nature lovers knew about names assigned by their peers in Europe. Willy-nilly, mountain enthusiasts everywhere had to fill the void left by the locals, for whom altitudes above the treeline represented summer pastures, and who had thus failed to baptize all touristically significant objects. This intervention need not be obtrusive. Tourists could, for example, adapt existing vernacular names for adjacent features. The famous turn-of-thecentury mountaineer Lord Conway used this strategy to give German names to nameless peaks around the Matterhorn in Switzerland, which were then accepted by the locals and later found their way onto cartographic surveys.60 Mountaineers found a similarly incomplete vernacular nomenclature in the Carpathians. Pioneers availed themselves with the military map, but its markings were often arbitrary and flawed, as mountain climbers soon found out upon hearing the

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existing names from local guides. Some features that tourists found attractive or used as orienting points did not have established names. Shepherds had their names for valleys, which commanded importance for them, but not necessarily for peaks, which the military then named by extending the names of valleys.61 Locals’ priority for valleys and slopes also explains the phenomenon noted earlier that different villages would call the same mountain by different names.62 Critically, the Saxon Siebenbürgischer Karpatenverein took a conservative line about naming. They did not rename any natural surface feature that already had some name among the people.63 They only commemorated members of merit by assigning names to a few less significant, nameless prominences, subpeaks and corries.64 For the rest, especially in the Făgăraș Mountains, where separate German names did not exist, they relied on the Romanian folk nomenclature in German spelling. Reports that described destinations for the first time always indicated the vernacular names, even in the rare cases where the ‘explorers’ immediately replaced them. There is no point in looking for consistency in the rendering of minor Romanian place names, but two trends catch the eye. First, while settlement names always appeared in Hungarian spellings in Hungarian texts, a sizeable part of such writings had names of peaks, brooks, cliffs and such like spelt in a Romanian orthography, although rarely in a consistent manner. Unlike settlement names, these did not have established Hungarian-spelt versions. The second trend was that authors sometimes improvised translations, apparently qua Hungarian names. Only the ethnolinguistic make-up of the immediate surroundings, and the presence of the Romanian originals in the text, signal to the reader that these were extemporized forms not reflecting anybody’s usage. Their inventors may have intended to promote some of these, but it is important to note that contemporary Magyar tourist writers would similarly translate meaningful names from faraway lands – the basalt columns of Ulster once appeared in the journal of the EKE as ‘Óriástöltés (Giants’ causeway)’65 – and conversely, they were also not shy to translate similar Hungarian names to German. A book that should command particular interest in this respect is the German edition of Vilmos Hankó’s guide to Transylvania’s spas, published by the EKE. This publication had a translator or editor who drew a fine distinction between the ways settlement and minor place names were allowed to stand in a German text; while, grotesquely, Saxon towns and villages are referred to by their Hungarian names, evocative Hungarian names of mineral springs and caves are translated.66 As already noted, Magyar tourists left the major part of the existing vernacular names unchanged. They renamed different categories of natural objects with varying frequency: caves received new, artificial names in most cases, waterfalls and prominent cliffs often, while peaks, lakes and brooks rarely. New names could be accorded on the site by alpine club members if they could entrust somebody present to describe the excursion for print and thereby also to advertise

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the new names. Such acts of naming became regular highlights of organized outings, together with picnics and singalongs. Published accounts sometimes also recorded who had invented the names, like an 1890 excursion report of the Carpathian Society of Bihar: ‘On the proposition of the junior doctor Géza Schlauch, the company named this beautiful, romantic place József Szabó Ravine, after the outstanding geologist’.67 Solitary excursionists, who typically described natural features for scientific purposes, would baptize them in the act of writing, but to a similar effect. Later descriptions could not afford to leave these names unmentioned, even if not opting for them. What strategies or patterns do emerge from the naming and renaming by tourists? For things unnamed, the most obvious choice was to borrow a name from a nearby landmark. In this manner, for instance, a group of trekkers adopted the name of Lake Zănoaga to baptize a waterfall below.68 This method was often used by Saxons and Magyars alike in the Retezat and Făgăraș Mountains in the South – popular destinations on account of their high altitudes and glacial landforms. Caves usually received the names of geologists and other scientists, landlords and their wives, and the explorers themselves. I counted forty caves that had received commemorative names in the era, fifteen of which were the babies of Gábor Téglás in Hunyad County.69 It became something of a habit to name a cave at its exploration or first description, perhaps because exploring a cave was appreciated as a real feat and a form of conquest. Cave-naming was, moreover, also a form of cultivating social relationships. That said, the speleological literature saw a change in taste towards vernacular names in the pre-war years, wherever such names existed. The merry company on the cover photo is posing for the camera before ceremonially naming a pit cave south-east of Nagyvárad after a member of the municipal council. The windlass at the top of the picture has helped the fearless explorers to descend into the shaft, which the science high school (főreáliskola) teacher who described the expedition mistook for the tube of a spent geyser. Standing in the middle is the ‘godmother’, Mrs István Darvas, who is soon going to baptize the cave by throwing into it the bottle of champagne that she is holding in her hand. Surrounding her are notabilities of Nagyvárad: the namesake Ödön Lukács, the commander of the municipal fire brigade, the ironmaster who offered the windlass, the town architect, teachers of the local law college and various other local schools, including a captain from the military school, plus an official and a journalist. Romanian peasants from nearby Betfia are seen in the background.70 Judging by the chronicler’s remark, they must be astonished to see that the young men had returned safe from the cavity, which they knew to be the devil’s den. This may well be. But are they also wondering why the party is celebrating Lukács of all people, who has not been down to the cave? The interior of caves set free the imagination of early potholers as if they were indulging in a competition to project more uncommon associations onto

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concretions. Granted, they could name undisturbed by vernacular names here, although it seems that in some rare cases, like the Scărișoara Ice Cave, locals did have names for underground features.71 Name-givers’ sources of inspiration ranged from the orientalist to the patriotic to the grotesque to the sublime, but with little connection made between adjacent objects, let alone an overarching concept. In the Meziad Cave (and possibly also in the Zichy Cave), which Magyar activists of tourism developed into a show cave, sights would receive Hungarian inscriptions indicating their names.72 Other surface features also received commemorative names, as a rule honouring contemporaries. New names harking back to Hungarian history and prehistory, as was customary in street naming, can be counted on the fingers of two hands: a cliff named after King Saint Stephen in the Crăpătura Gorge of the Piatra Craiului/Königstein/Királykő, the Nádor-szikla (‘palatine cliff ’, Rom. Pattina) in the Făgăraș Mountains, the Ménmaróth Pair of Cliffs in Bihar (although strictly speaking, Menumorout was a fictitious adversary of the conquering Magyars), Attila’s Cave in the Bihor Mountains, the Árpád Peak (Rom. Vârful Peana) near Kolozsvár, so named by the EKE on the occasion of the Millennial Celebrations, a valley rebaptized Petőfi-völgy off Nagybánya, the Széchenyi Spring near the EKE’s Radnaborberek/Valea Vinului resort, plus a couple of unaccepted proposals and a few names of cave formations.73 It is easy to see why commemorative names were disfavoured when the goal was to Magyarize the names of salient features: such a choice could be regarded as tantamount to a failure to find an ‘old Hungarian’ name. The single biggest toponymic accomplishment of the Magyar mountaineering movement in the area, Gyula Czárán’s elaborate microtoponymy for the karstic parts of the Bihor Mountains, which he made accessible by constructing trails, was conceived in a spirit similar to cave interiors.74 He clad the landscape along his routes in an intended poetic veil replete with biblical and high cultural references, where the Gate of Babylon, for instance, stood in striking distance of Moloch’s Gorge, the Medusa, the Palace of Balthazar, the Piano Spring, the Sugarloaf, the Split Tower, the Fortuna Grove and the Tower of Semiramis.75 These poetic names had not much in common, but they all played on the idea of a landscape conceived as an artefact, not in the more familiar sense of a cultural landscape, but as a ruined city left behind from an early stage of history. They were interspersed with the not too numerous popular Romanian monikers that Czárán had collected, like Galbina and Aragyásza, which could be trusted to take on an exotic flair for the wider Hungarianspeaking high society that Czárán enticed to visit his world. Czárán’s names shared with the toponymy of cave interiors and with György Papp’s fairy-tale mix of name proposals for the Făgăraș Mountains the ambition to present natural scenery through the gaze of the name-giver and according to predefined schemes.

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The school inspector Orbán Sipos also worked towards establishing a Hungarian place-name cover in the Bihor Mountains, but with different goals and a different strategy. He operated on a larger scale than Czárán, only renaming settlements and landmarks that already bore Romanian names, and his ambition was precisely to offer an alternative, Hungarian nomenclature for the tourist. Departing from the Romanian names, he fabricated Hungarian variants through intended translation or semantic remotivation that could be mistaken for vernacular formations; Ples became Kopasz (Rom. pleș and Hun. kopasz ‘bald’), Jád – Setét (Rom. iad ‘hell’, Hun. setét ‘dark’) and Kristyor – Köröstur (a pseudo-etymology). He peddled his creations in writing, sometimes unattended by their vernacular equivalents.76 That they ultimately did not prevail in Magyar tourist literature may have to do with the untimely end of the Carpathian Society of Bihar, of which Sipos was vice-chairman, with Czárán’s apparent lack of sympathy for them and perhaps with Sipos’s frequent translation blunders.77 Occasionally, tourist activists uncovered genuine vernacular and historical Hungarian names and brought them back into circulation. They salvaged, for example, the local name Keresztény-havas for the massif that Kőváry had still called Iskolahegye in 1853, the translation of German Schuler.78 But apart from Sipos’s creations, I have found no more than three or four cases where tourist activists re-etymologized popular Romanian names into meaningful Hungarian ones, and it seems that this strategy only gained traction after the First World War. That is surprising, because they so often suspected Hungarian originals behind modern-day Romanian toponyms. The limestone escarpments of the Belioara already figured as Bélavára in Kőváry’s 1853 book, and this Hungarian form has remained in use ever since.79 The name means ‘Béla’s castle’, but a castle had neither existed nor could it have any strategic significance on that spot. The Țarcu, a mountain close to the border between the Banat and Oltenia, variously appeared as Czárku, Szárku, Szárko or Szárkó in the scholarly and touristic literature of the era, and no less authoritative a publication than an 1890 atlas of Hungary’s counties first converted its name into the transparent Hungarian Szárkő (‘stalk stone’). This may have been just a typo, but then one with long-term consequences, as interwar Hungarian geographers gleefully adopted it.80 The peak and massif called Vlegyásza in modern Hungarian (< Rom. Vlădeasa < Vlad personal name + -easa) had still borne the name Kalota-havas in the early modern period, which later fell into oblivion. Kőváry tried to distil a transparent Hungarian name from the existing one, and came up, in all seriousness, with Balamér-ijásza (‘Balamér’s archer’), honouring the legendary Hunnic prince Balamber or Balamir.81 This pseudo-etymology proved far too eccentric to take over. More successful, in the long run, was Czárán, who recast the name in 1901 as Vigyázó (Hun. ‘sentinel’) after he had still written Vlegyásza the previous year.82 Finally, the entomologist Ernő Csiki relates that members of the EKE’s Kolozsvár chapter had already dubbed the Ordincuș Gorge Ördöngős-völgy (Hun.

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‘diabolic valley’) before 1916, a name that would also turn up more often in the interwar period.83 Even though some of the new names did not catch on in the intended audience, and sometimes even their creators reverted to earlier ones, they were all meant for eternity. One crude method of giving expression to this wish was to write the names on the designated objects.84 This probably took the form of placing a plaque in most cases, but references to such inscriptions include an instance where the geologist Ferenc Pávai-Vajna’s friend, bored by Pávai’s long absence in the hitherto unexplored internal galleries of a cave, killed time by engraving the words Pávai-barlang (‘Pávai cave’) on the rockface next to the entrance (or this was Pávai’s story to account for the naming of the cave after himself) and the name Bucșoiu painted in red on a cliff, the only such Romanian inscription mentioned in the sources.85 Among the practices discussed so far, only these literal engravings interfered with the lives of local people. The linguistic character of the place-name cover that Magyar backpackers could expect to encounter depended on the location, but as most of their usual trekking destinations lay in Romanian-majority zones, it would typically feature a few recent Hungarian names for major sights, against a backdrop of mostly Romanian vernacular names. Some tourists rejoiced at the former, others simply took their presence for granted. Regarding the latter, some came to grips more easily with them, others grumbled and brooded over what their earlier, Hungarian forms could have been. Activists for the movement did not acknowledge the fact, but at the end of the day, the pragmatic orienting function of vernacular names set limits as to how far they could go in replacing them. The features least often renamed were prominent peaks and brooks, as they were the handiest references when asking for directions. Romanian peasants were passive bystanders to the tourist movement, but as holders of local knowledge they may have nevertheless unknowingly thwarted excessive renaming. Soon after its founding in 1891, however, the leadership of the EKE still came out with far more radical demands, and they heavily lobbied for a wholesale revision of place names on the maps of the military survey. This intertwining of touristic and toponymic activism will reveal that the Magyar gentlemanly class were more deeply haunted by historical fantasies on outings to the mountains than my narrative has suggested so far. The relevant sheets of the 1:75,000-scale, so-called Third Military Survey were the most detailed maps available on the region, and in general the only maps detailed enough for use by mountain walkers. The survey was carried out, and the resulting series of maps was published by the Vienna Institute of Military Geography; its choice of place names was dictated entirely by the practical necessities of usability in military exercises or in the event of war. Its guidelines stated that it should primarily display the locally known names, and in linguistically

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mixed zones the names used by the local majority placed first, with the minority names in parentheses and in half-sized letters.86 But how were surveyors capable of putting these principles into practice amidst a mosaic of Romanian-, Hungarian- and German-speakers? They surveyed Transylvania between 1869 and 1873, already under Dualism, and the publication of the first edition of map sheets, also available commercially, lasted until 1889. I have checked five first-edition sheets, two each from the North and the South East, and one from the West.87 On these, settlement names figure in the local and the Hungarian versions, the latter usually first, but in overwhelmingly minority–majority regions, the endonyms often appear as the main forms. Names of landforms are written in either language; the mountains belonging to the Magyar–Romanian Hétfalu variously in Romanian and Hungarian, the peaks of the Schulergebirge/Postăvarul/Keresztény-havas in German and Romanian, and the lands of Saxon–Romanian localities in the Burzenland/Bârsa/Barcaság in German only. The ethnographer János Jankó, who collected the place names of the area, quoted a slew of names from sheet 18/XXVIII as unknown for local people, among them the hybrid form Vêrfu Riszeg – a Hungarian main element coupled with a Romanian generic term (vârf ‘peak’)  – designating a peak on the boundary between Hungarian-speaking Körösfő/Crișeu and Zsobok/Jebucu. Dwellers of these two villages called the place Riszeg-hegy, but the surveyor had probably approached it from the side of Romanian Nadășu/Oláhnádas.88 While the guidelines made perfect sense and were even equitable, it appears that the agents entrusted with collecting the toponymy relied on few informants, with a preference for German-speakers and perhaps shepherds, who tended to be Romanian even in Magyar-majority villages. EKE activists disagreed with both the principles and their implementation. In his outburst over the place names on sheet 18/XXVIII, Jankó denounced the practice of military surveyors as an attempt at ‘Wallachianization’, but in fact the majority of the Romanian forms that he found fault with came from an area heavily intermixed with Romanian-speaking villages, and thus they were likely to have been genuinely popular names, even if they had originated from Hungarian words and conflicted with Jankó’s data collected from local Magyars.89 Gyula Merza, the club’s record-keeper, reacted similarly to a Ciurgo near the King’s Pass, in an entirely Romanian-speaking area. Since csurgó (‘spring’) is a Hungarian word, common sense dictated to him that this should be an old Hungarian name, and the reader was only left in doubt about whether it was the residents or the cartographers who were more to blame: ‘In the course of mapping, this good old Hungarian name was probably distorted into Ciurgo according to Wallachian pronunciation and in Wallachian orthography’.90 What could be blamed, if anything, was Romanian ciurgău, a very widespread loanword with the same meaning as in Hungarian, which served as the basis for the place name.

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The order of settlement-name variants in the captions similarly rankled Magyar tourist activists. Consider, for example, Lajos Szádeczky, professor of history at Kolozsvár University and the chairman of the club’s Kolozs County branch: Above Árpás, Ucsa and Vist, the valleys by the same names are bordered by peaks with the epithet ‘Grand’; on the military map, of course, written in Wallachian: Ucia mare (2431 m), Vistea mare (2520). Although a Wallachian name has some practical justification here, the same Wallachianization is also widespread on the map where we still have the old historical Hungarian names with a long past behind them. Our brave soldiers, e.g., also display Sebesvár, Nagy-Sebes and Kis-Sebes in the Kolozsvár area in Romanian first and in Hungarian only in small letters, between parentheses.91

After the EKE published the map sheets representing Transylvania as an annexe to its first guide in 1891, tourist writers launched a salvo of attacks on the nomenclature employed on them. In the case of faculty at Transylvania’s new higher schools who had moved in from other parts of the country, this reflected their shock over the Romanian ethnic and linguistic majority of the land, and the fact that its most romantic parts were short of truly Hungarian names. The first reaction of many, amplified in the superpatriotic echo chamber of the millennium years, was a call to efface the inconvenient marks from the map. One poignant example of such intransigent reaction came from the EKE board member Oktáv Hangay, born in Western Hungary and a professor at the Kolozsvár Academy of Commerce: Why Valézsinuluj? In general, why is the Ünőkő – Ineu? Why Negoj, why Szurul, why Henyul? Why do our entire Carpathians have Wallachian and Slovak nomenclature? … We do have forestry directorates – why do they not officially Magyarize the names of lots, peaks, brooks, land divisions on the territory that they administer? … On me, each Wallachian name makes the impression as if it marked a place for a hostile lever to topple our country by its four corners.92

Hiking accounts and guides in Hungarian, including the EKE’s own Transylvania guide, continued to make disparaging, sarcastic or self-distancing comments on the military map in the following decades.93 These were sometimes centred on a dichotomy between truth and falsehood, tacitly implying that a misty, imagined Hungarian place-name cover from the past rather than local usage should serve as the measure of correctness. Some articles also tried to show that the map did not even register Romanian names the way they were used by the people, rhetorically dissociating Romanian peasants, whom they could treat with some condescending sympathy, from the Viennese cartographers whom they regarded as exploiting these names to undermine Hungarian sovereignty.94 Such criticisms, it seems, did not disappear after the publication of revised map sheets.

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As part of the routine process that required the periodic updating of the survey, the Banat was reambulated in 1881–82 and south-eastern Transylvania in 1888–89.95 In 1891, the EMKE (Hungarian Cultural Society of Transylvania) petitioned two Hungarian ministries to make sure that the Vienna Institute of Military Geography would only adopt the settlement names contained in the latest gazetteer of Hungary  – which still more or less systematically listed non-Hungarian forms  – and would appoint perambulating officers who knew Hungarian.96 A few months later, participants at a meeting of the Hungarian Geographical Society that was scheduled to codify the spelling of place names abroad, had the non-Hungarian place names of Hungary placed on the agenda. Raising the question was a geologist born in a Romanian-inhabited part of the Banat, who drew a parallel between colonial place names and the spelling of Romanian: ‘Wallachian names also require Hungarian orthography because Wallachian does not have an established one’.97 On the motion of Sándor Márki, later vice-chairman of the EKE’s Kolozs County branch, the society set up a toponymy committee, with the mandate to revise the gazetteer, the military map and the cadastral surveys.98 Later the same year, the requests of the two Hungarian organizations were transmitted to the Viennese Institute of Military Geography.99 It soon became apparent, however, that the desires of EKE leaders were irreconcilable with the basic principles applied in Habsburg military cartography. The former wished to see a map based on historical research, one that would revive the toponymy of boundary perambulations from the medieval and early modern periods. To this end, they invited the Transylvanian counties to collect data, and founded their own toponymy committee to coordinate the work. Only Fogaras County declined to assist them in a letter drafted by Ioan Turcu, mentioned above as a Romanian hillwalking writer, but seven counties signalled their readiness to cooperate and appointed special commissions.100 Udvarhely County even responded to the call by giving its commission the mandate to Magyarize the field names of the few Romanian villages annexed to the county in 1876.101 The EKE’s toponymy committee left little doubt that they would not accept as legitimate any Romanian or German form in which they recognized vestiges of Hungarian words.102 They also urged future writers of the club’s anticipated county guides to choose new place names that were more easily memorizable for Hungarian-speakers.103 In Austria-Hungary, the Common Army was under the monarch’s personal command and emphatically placed above nationalist bickering between the empire’s peoples. It was quite out of the question therefore that the military cartographic service would give up on its priorities and surrender to the passéist fantasies of any nationalist vanguard. They consented to indicate the settlement names according to the official gazetteer as long as it included endonymic variants. They also agreed to pay more consideration to Hungarian minor place

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names in so far as local people used them. They could not accept, however, the obsolete variants advocated by the EKE, which had no independent existence outside archival files and the organization’s plans to galvanize them back to life. János Jankó, who acted as a go-between between the two toponymy committees, illustrated this with the following fictitious example: In a now purely Wallachian place, there is a field that during the Magyar period of the village, in the thirteenth century, used to be called Árpaszer and that is now called Arpasului; you want to use Árpaszer, but this is at odds with the soldiers’ 2nd principle as the village is purely Wallachian and there is nobody who could show where Árpaszer is, but they can very well show where Arpasului is.

He concluded, ‘I cannot imagine joint action, to such a degree does Magyarization clash with correction’.104 After the Hungarian Geographical Society resigned to the military institute’s principles, the EKE gradually also had to backtrack from its position. As the northern parts of Transylvania were reambulated in 1893–95, the proofs were sent for correction to the Budapest society, and the cartographers followed by doing the rounds of the lands that had been reambulated earlier.105 The resulting changes were numerous enough to warrant a redrawing of the map sheets, but they did not upset the mostly Romanian nomenclature of the highlands. The revised sheets, recognizable by the captions Nachträge (‘additions’) and teilweise berichtigt (‘partially revised’), continued to display the names of landforms in only one version, which was now more often a Hungarian one in mixed areas and Magyar ethnic enclaves.106 Vêrfu Riszeg became simply Riszeg, and several places with disputed names were diplomatically left unmarked. While it was questionable, to begin with, whether the quest for Hungarian forms in the archives could produce many noteworthy findings concerning the mountains, this revision was a far cry from what the EKE had expected. Only for want of anything better suited for its members did the club continue to give guarded support to the military map. Its action was not without consequences, however. The lobbying in Vienna ruffled the feathers of Saxon and Romanian politicians and journalists, and the repercussions of its call to the counties morphed directly into the crafting of the law on locality names.107 To the extent that contemporary reflections on essential Magyar qualities pinpointed a Magyar ‘ethnoscape’, an archetypical landscape representing a collective self-image, it was the puszta, the steppe covering much of the Hungarian Grand Plain, rather than the wooded or snow-capped Carpathians.108 Yet, the local bourgeoisie of Central Hungarian towns did not organize hiking clubs to roam the open flat country, just as little as the Romanian elite of Hungary cultivated mountain walking, in spite of the pivotal place of the mountains in Romanian self-narratives. Mountain walking was established after Western models by a group of mainly academic intellectuals. It was advertised with similar

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arguments as in the German lands; mountain landscapes were depicted with the same eye trained on romantic and realist landscape painting and, as far as one can judge, they stirred similar metaphysical awe and nostalgia in Magyar day trippers as in nature lovers across Europe. The pursuit was imported complete with its frame of reference, its imagology and its points of connection to nationalist imaginaries. Ironically, when Magyar tourists set off into the mountains, many of them regarded the Romanian place names there with suspicion, although Hunfalvy and Moldovan/Moldován, the principal Hungarian authorities on Romanian ethnic history, singled out the same mountains as early Romanian population zones. But in general, one should not overestimate obsession with the past as a force behind the Magyarizing of mountain toponymy; indeed, the majority of creations cannot be interpreted as attempts at restoring old names. The nation was seen as old, but also as rejuvenated in its civilized and civilizing gentlemanly class. Tourists’ immediate goal with the new Hungarian names was to place natural sights in a familiar cultural setting, and they appealed with similar frequency to the sovereignty principle, which would require Hungarian place names in Hungary, as to any supposed former name cover. At the end of the day, the toponymic engineering of Magyar alpine clubs remained at a relatively low intensity before the First World War. The main reason for that was the movement’s lack of a mass following and an extensive infrastructure, which constrained them to use such names as local people could recognize. The two main junctions of the Dualist Magyar elite’s time map, 1848 and the elusive golden age that was said to have preceded the intrusion of foreign elements, in principle remote, but often collapsed into the recent past, were each connected to an Other that frustrated the nation’s fulfilment: Austria (‘the Germans’) and the national minorities. Austria was sometimes also cast as the originator and sponsor of Hungary’s minority national movements (Saxons appeared in a double role here). Viennese military cartographers, for instance, came down to the charge of conspiring with dark, subversive forces for displaying the Romanian vernacular nomenclature on their large-scale maps of Hungary. Austria was certainly deemed to be the more worthy enemy, and especially opposition demagoguery to Liberal governments liked to project it behind all the nation’s perceived woes. In the last resort, Independentists found it credible to present the Magyarization of settlement names as sidelining the German or other place names that the Habsburg administration had forcibly imposed. On the rhetorical level at least, political actors often re-enacted history and fought battles in one of these two past worlds, sliding the logic of political action between various frames along the time axis. The Magyar intelligentsia and some officials projected historical myths onto contemporaneous geographical space. These gripped their minds on inspection trips or hiking expeditions, spurred them to redress more recent history or simply

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gave them an excuse to badger village folk. Ghosts from the golden age appeared to them in the guise of peasants with family names deriving from Hungarian, who were then routinely presented in their writings as Romanianized Magyars, fitting into a discourse about degeneration and rejuvenation. The erstwhile medieval or early modern residents were imagined as better copies of contemporary Magyar peasants, perhaps clad in flamboyantly embroidered costumes and living in neat and tidy homes flanked by dovecoted, richly carved gates. Their putative descent from this blessed state into wretched, crouching and bigoted Romanians was rhetorically attributed to moral and intellectual backslide or even contagion, as well as to neglect by the Hungarian state. In this way, names, both geographical and personal, became constituent elements in two of Dualist Hungary’s central foundational myths – the vision of a once Hungarian-speaking Hungary and that of a submerged Magyardom.

Notes 1. Pesty, Pesty Frigyes helynévgyűjteménye 1864–1865: Székelyföld, Vol. 1, 174, and Vol. 2, 37, 105, 167, 228 and 229. 2. Buchberg, Charlottenburg, Ebendorf, Eibenthal, Eisenstein, Frauenwiese, Kohldorf, Liebling, Mariaschnee, Neuhof, Rebenberg, Schnellersruhe, Schönthal, Steierdorf, Traunau, Weidenthal, Weitzenried and Wolfsberg. The three exceptions from the first rule were a village from the Banat estates of the Austrian Railway Company, which habitually appeared as Padina-Matei (instead of Padina-Matej) until the Communal Registry Board changed its Hungarian name to Mátévölgye, Szuplái or Szubplái (instead of Szupláj, later Ciblesfalva) in the former 2nd Wallachian Border Guard Regiment, where Hungarian administration was introduced in earnest after 1883, and Spatta (instead of Szpatta). 3. I. Lenk von Treuenfeld, Siebenbürgens geographisch-, topographisch-, statistisch, hydrographisch- und orographisches Lexikon, 4 vols (Vienna: Strauß, 1839); E. Fényes, Magyarország geographiai szótára [Geographical dictionary of Hungary], 4 vols (Pesten: Kozma, 1851); and Zs. Gámán, Helység-névtár: a Királyhágón inneni rész (Erdély) minden községének betürendes névtára [Alphabetical gazetteer of all communes on this side of the King’s Pass] (Kolozsvártt: Demjén, 1861). 4. For the question of place names at the railways, see Zs. Bartos-Elekes, Nyelvhasználat a térképeken, Erdély, 19. és 20. század [Language use on maps: Transylvania, 19th and 20th centuries] (Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2013), 56. 5. ANR Bistrița, Fond Prefectura județului Năsăud 79/1887, 155. 6. OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 37, Erdőalja; mayor Georgie Sagou and village secretary Sagou from Idicel, 1864; ibid., reel no. 63, Idetspatak; village secretary Nicolae V… and the illiterate mayor Nicolae Popa from Făget, 1864; ibid., reel no. 37, Oláhbükkös and ibid., reel no. 2, Fakert. 7. Pesty, Pesty Frigyes kéziratos helységnévtárából, 1864: Bihar, Vol. 2, 437; and OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel 18, at Keménytelke. 8. OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel 18.

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9. Speech by MP Ubul Kállay on 30 May 1911; Képviselőházi napló 1910, Vol. 8, 99, and speech by MP Károly Eötvös on 6 December 1897; Képviselőházi napló 1896, Vol. 20, 229. 10. Cf. E. Lukinich and L. Gáldi, Documenta historiam Valachorum in Hungaria illustrantia usque ad annum 1400 p. Christum [Documents illustrating the history of Wallachians in Hungary until the year ad 1400] (Budapest: Sumptibus Instituti Historici Europae Centro-orientalis in Universitate Scientiarum Budapestinensis, 1941), 50–52. 11. N. Mazere, Supliment la harta etnografica a Transilvaniei [Supplement to the ethnographic map of Transylvania] (Iași: Goldner, 1909), 3–6. The quotation is from p. 3. 12. S. Beluleszko, ‘Nicolae Mazere: Harta etnografica a Transilvaniei’, Földrajzi Közlemények 38 (1910), 141. The form was in use among the Greek Catholic clergy. 13. N. Iorga, Neamul romănesc în Ardeal și în Țara Ungurească [The Romanian people in Transylvania and Hungary], Vol. 2 (Bucharest: Minerva, 1906), 578–79. 14. Al. Russo, ‘Cugetări’ [Reflections], in Scrieri [Writings] (Bucharest: Minerva, 1910), 118. 15. Cf. Fl. Fodorean, ‘Contribuții la reconstituirea rețelei rutiere din Dacia romană: rolul și importanța toponimiei în cercetarea drumurilor antice’ [Contributions to the reconstruction of the road network of Roman Dacia: the role and importance of toponymy in the research of ancient roads], Revista Bistriței 17 (2003), 324. 16. Xenopol, Une Enigme historique, 143. 17. Șimon, Dicționar toponimic, 185–86 and 235. 18. J.G. Kohl, Reise in Ungarn, Part 1, Pesth un die mittlere Donau (Dresden: Arnold, 1842), Vol. 1, 560. 19. G. Zombory, ‘Traján táblája: az aldunai szoroson Ogredina mellett’ [Trajan’s plaque: in the gorge of the Lower Danube, near Ogradena], Vasárnapi Újság 6 (1859), 616; per I. Sambucum, Ungariae loca praecipva recens emendata, atque edita [The most important places of Hungary, recently revised and edited] (n.p. [Vienna], 1579); A. Ortelius, Theatre, oft Toonneel des aerdt-bodems [Theatre or scene of the globe] (n.p. [Antwerpen]: Coppens van Diest, n.d. [1571–84]), fol. 42, National Library of the Netherlands (Map Collection) KW 1046 B 17; F. Marsigli, Danubius Pannonico-Mysicus: Observationibus geographicis, astronomicis, hydrographicis, historicis, physicis perlustratus [The PannonioMoesian Danube: surveyed from geographical, astronomical, hydrographical, historical and medical aspects] (The Hague: Gosse, Alberts and de Hondt and Amsterdam: Uytwerf & Changuion, 1726),vol. 2, 17–22 and 25–34; F. Griselini, Tabula Bannatus Temesiensis [Map of the Banat of Temes] (Vienna, 1776); and J. de Lipszky, Mappa generalis regni Hungariae… (Pesthini, 1806), on the CD-ROM enclosed to K. Plihál, The Finest Illustrated Maps of Hungary 1528–1895, trans. J. Zinner (Budapest: Kossuth, 2009). 20. F.J. Sulzer, Geschichte des transalpinischen Daciens, das ist der Walachey, Moldau und Bessarabiens: im Zusammenhange mit der Geschichte des übringen Daciens als ein Versuch einer allgemeinen Dacischen Geschichte mit kritischer Freyheit entworfen, Vol. 1 (Vienna: Gräffer, 1781), 215; J.F. Neugebaur, Dacien: Aus den Ueberresten des klassischen Alterthums, mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Siebenbürgen (Kronstadt: Gött, 1851), 119; and C.J. Jireček, Die Heerstrasse von Belgrad nach Constantinopel und die Balkanpässe (Prague: Tempsky, 1877), 159. 21. ‘Calea traianului instead of Calea troianului is a recent, deliberate alteration’, reckoned Al. Philippide in Originea romînilor [The origin of Romanians], Vol. 1, Ce spun izvoarele istorice [What the historical sources tell] (Iași: Viața Romînească, 1925), 726.

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22. Lexicon Valachico-Latino-Hungarico-Germanicum quod a pluribus auctoribus decursu triginta et amplius annorum elaboratum est [Wallachian–Latin–Hungarian–German dictionary, composed by various authors in the course of thirty and more years] (Buda: Typographiae Regiae Universitatis Hungaricae, 1825), 724; and Philippide, Vol. 1, 725–26. Today the word means ‘snowdrift’. 23. S.A. Luca, Descoperiri arheologice din Banatul Românesc: repertoriu [Archaeological finds in the Romanian Banat: a repertory] (Alba Iulia: Altip, 2006), 141; idem, Repertoriul arheologic al județului Hunedoara [Archaeological repertory of Hunedoara County] (Alba Iulia: Altip, 2005), 69 and 141; V. Moga and H. Ciugudean (eds), Repertoriul arheologic al județului Alba [The archaeological repertory of Alba County] (Alba Iulia: Muzeul Național al Unirii, 1995), 122; and C. Kacsó, Repertoriul arheologic al județului Maramureș [Archaeological repertory of Maramureș County] (Baia Mare: Eurotip, 2011), Vol. 1, 480 and 514. 24. M. Costin, Letopișețele Țării Moldovii [The chronicles of the land of Moldavia], Vol. 1 (Iașii: Foiei Sătești and Institutul Albinei Românești, 1852), 22. 25. N. Plopșor, ‘Troianul’, Arhivele Olteniei 6 (1927), 71. 26. N. Iorga, Istoria Românilor [The History of Romanians], Vol. 1/2, Sigiliul Romei [The Seal of Rome] (Bucharest: Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică, 1988), 130–31. 27. Suciu, 11. 28. It is hardly a genitive construction in Romanian, contemporary or modern. In addition, the vernacular use of the word prat (< Lat. pratum) is also dubious. Although modern dictionaries regularly list it (together with lintea-pratului, quoted as regionalism for the plant Lathyrus pratensis), it does not appear in the Lexiconul de la Buda, the first comprehensive dictionary of the language from 1825 and the foremost one-stop resource on Romanian vocabulary from before the Latinate reform (see above). As far as I can reconstruct it, it was first mentioned in the innovative and prescriptivist Romanian material of George Bariț and Gabriel Munteanu’s German–Romanian dictionary from 1854. 29. ‘Zlatna, oder Von Ruhe des Gemüthes’, in M. Opitti, Opera Geist- und Weltlicher Gedichte: Nebst beygefügten vielen andern Tractaten so wohl Deutsch als Lateinisch, Mit Fleiß zusammen gebracht, und von vielen Druckfehlern befreyet (Breslau: Fellgiebel, 1690), 128 and 144. Cf. ‘Trojaner Wirtshaus’ (Kriegs Charte des Grosz Fürstenthum Siebenbürgen; Österreichisches Staatsarchiv, Kriegsarchiv, B IX 715; sheet 152); Tr. Pătrășcanu, ‘Toponimia comunelor Zlatna și Ciugud din Raionul Alba’ [The toponymy of Zlatna/Zalatna and Ciugud communes in Alba Raion], Apulum 6 (1967), 689; and Moga and Ciugudean, 212. 30. J. Tröster, Das Alt- und Neu-Teutsche Dacia: Das ist: Neue Beschreibung des Landes Siebenbürgen, Darinnen dessen Alter, und jetziger Einwohner, wahres Herkomen, Religion, Sprachen, Schrifften, Kleider, Gesetz und Sitten nach Historischer Warheit von zweytausend Jahren her erörtert: Die berühmteste Städt in Kupfer eigentlich abgebildet: dabey viel Gothische und Römische Antiquitäten und Anmahnungen entdecket werden (Nuremberg: Kramer, 1666), 350. 31. J. Benkő, Transsilvania specialis, trans. Gy. Szabó (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1999), Vol. 1, 298. 32. B. Lukács, ‘Az Ompoly völgye: Erdélyben’ [The Ampoi Valley: in Transylvania], Vasárnapi Újság 13 (1866), 608. 33. M. Miles, Siebenbürgischer Würg-Engel oder chronicalischer Anh. d. 15 sec. nach Christi Geburth aller theils in Siebenbürgen theils Ungern und sonst Siebenbürgen angräntzenden

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Ländern fürgelauffener Geschichten Worausz nicht nur allein d. grewligst bluttige Anschläge, Kriege und Zeittungen d. Ober-Regenten Sachsischer Nation (Hermanstadt: Fleischer, 1670), 206. 34. N. Cartojan, Cărțile populare în literatura românească [The folk book in Romanian literature], Vol. 1, Epoca influenței sud-slave [The era of South Slavic influence] (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică Română, 1974), 287–88. 35. Private letters: e.g. Pascu and Pervain, Vol. 2, 173; K. Hitchins and L. Maior, Corespondența lui Ioan Rațiu cu George Barițiu (1861–1892) [Ioan Rațiu’s correspondence with George Bariț, 1861–1892] (Cluj: Dacia, 1970), 239 and 242; T. Pavel, Partidul Național Român și acțiunea memorandistă: corespondență politică (1887–1901) [The Romanian National Party and the Memorandist movement: political correspondence, 1887–1910] (Cluj-Napoca: Daco-Press, 1994), 133; and G. Neamțu and V. Faur, Iosif Roman (1829–1908), o personalitate bihoreană mai puțin cunoscută [Iosif Roman (1829–1908), a lesser-known personage from Bihar] (Oradea: Editura Universității din Oradea, 2004), 49, 59 and 60. Minutes of voters’ caucuses: e.g. I. Popovici et al. (eds), Bihor: permanențe ale luptei naționale românești [Bihor/Bihar: constants of Romanian national struggle], Vol. 1, 1892–1900; documente [1892–1900; documents] (Bucharest: Direcția Generală a Arhivelor Statului din Republica Socialistă România, 1988), 82; and Vl. Popovici (ed.), Acte și documente privind elita politică românească din Transilvania (1869–1896) [Records and documents regarding the Romanian political elite of Transylvania, 1869–1896] (Cluj-Napoca: Mega, 2010), 101. Internal church correspondence: e.g. Retegan, În umbra clopotnițelor, 1, 8 and 190–91. 36. Russu Șirianu, 146–47. 37. I. Boroș, Memorialistica (Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2012), 99. 38. Fugyi-Vásárhely, Mező-Telegd, Rév, Agostonfalva, Gyorok, Németh-Ságh, Orczifalva, Merczifalva, Kerelő-Sz.-Pál, etc. (Tribuna 1884). Cf. I. Slavici, ‘Tribuna’ și tribuniștii [The Tribuna and the Tribunists] (Orăștie: Minerva, 1896), 43. 39. Gyarmata, Nagybánya, Nagy-Cserged, Nagy-Ernye, Nagy-Sikárló, Pecsétszeg, Szász-Bonyha, Szék and Székelyhíd; Diaconovich. 40. ‘Írd tele az utcákat / és fogalmazd át a térképet, / a mérhetetlen túlzásokban / ne tarts semmi mértéket!’ 41. On the cultural meanings of nineteenth-century mountaineering, see J. Frykman and O. Löfgren, Culture Builders: A Historical Anthropology of Middle-Class Life, trans. A. Crozier (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987), 50–58. 42. O. Zimmer, ‘In Search of a Natural Identity: Alpine Landscape and the Reconstruction of the Swiss Nation’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 40 (1998), 643–46. 43. P.M. Judson, Guardians of the Nation: Activists on the Language Frontiers of Imperial Austria (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), 141–76, esp. 151–52; and R.J.B. Bosworth, ‘The Touring Club Italiano and the Nationalization of the Italian Bourgeoisie’, European History Quarterly 27 (1997), 384. 44. P. Mikša and M. Zorn, ‘National “Marking” of Slovenian Mountains before World War I’, Igra Ustvarjalnosti/The Creativity Game 6 (2018), 22–29. 45. N. Baticu and R. Țițeica, Pe crestele Carpaților [On the crests of the Carpathians] (Bucharest: Sport-Turism, 1984), 83–95. 46. I. Turcu, Escursiuni pe munții țerei Bârsei și ai Făgărașului din punctul »la Om« de pe »Guceciu« până dincolo de »Negoiul« [Excursions in the mountains of the Burzenland and

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of the Land of Făgăraș, from the Om on the Buceci to beyond the Negoi] (Brașov: n.p., 1896); and T.R. Popescu, ‘Excursiuni în Munții Cibinului, Făgărașului și Brașovului’ [Excursions in the Cibin, Făgăraș Mountains and the mountains of Brassó], Luceafărul 10 (1911), 421–29 and 475–86. 47. L. Kőváry, Erdély földe ritkaságai [Curiosities from the land of Transylvania] (Kolozsvár: Tilsch, 1853), 102. 48. G. Polgárdy (ed.), Magyar Turista Lexikon [Hungarian Touristic Dictionary] (Budapest: Eggenberger, 1941), 204–13. 49. On contemporary mountaineering in Hungary and its nationalist affinities, see A. Vari, ‘From Friends of Nature to Tourist-Soldiers: Nation Building and Tourism in Hungary, 1873–1914’, in A. Gorsuch and D. Koenker (eds), Turizm: The Russian and Eastern European Tourist under Capitalism and Socialism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 64–81. 50. R. Nemes, ‘Obstacles to Nationalization on the Hungarian–Romanian Language Frontier’, Austrian History Yearbook 43 (2012), 35. 51. M. Babits, Keresztülkasul az életemen [Back and forth in my life] (Budapest: Nyugat, n.d. [1939]), 38. 52. Erdély (organ of the EKE), Turisták Lapja, A magyarországi Kárpátegyesület évkönyve/ Jahrbuch des Ungarischen Karpathen-Vereines, Természettudományi Füzetek, Földrajzi Közlemények, Természettudományi Közlöny and Földtani Közlöny. 53. D. Günther, Alpine Quergänge: Kulturgeschichte des bürgerlichen Alpinismus (1870–1930) (Frankfurt: Campus, 1998), 35–46; and A. Gidl, Alpenverein: Die Städter entdecken die Alpen (Vienna: Böhlau, 2007), 32–35. 54. H. Blais, ‘Comment trouver le “meilleur nom géographique”?: Les voyageurs français et la question de la dénomination des îles océaniennes au XIXe siècle’, L’Espace géographique 30 (2001), 350 and 356; and Th. Stolz and I.H. Warnke, ‘Aspekte der kolonialen und postkolonialen Toponymie unter besonderer Berücksichtigung des deutschen Kolonialismus’, in Th. Stolz, I.H. Warnke and D. Schmidt-Brücken (eds), Sprache und Kolonialismus: Eine interdisziplinäre Einführung zu Sprache und Kommunikation in kolonialen Kontexten (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2016), 132. 55. Ibid., 144–46. 56. To quote two examples dating from the period, the Great Victoria Desert in Australia (1875) and Victoria Peak in then-British Honduras, now Belize (1888); E. Giles, Australia Twice Traversed: The Romance of Exploration (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1889), Vol. 2, 202; and C.H. Godden, Trespassers Forgiven: Memoirs of Imperial Service in an Age of Independence (London: The Radcliffe Press, 2009), 278. 57. L. von Höhnel, Discovery of Lakes Rudolf and Stefanie: A Narrative of Count Samuel Teleki’s Exploring & Hunting Expedition in Eastern Equatorial Africa in 1887 & 1888, trans. N. Bell (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1894), vol. 2, 95 and 187. 58. K.H. Basso explicitly calls so the similar place names of the Western Apache in Wisdom Sits in Places: Landscape and Language among the Western Apache (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). 59. P. Carter, The Road to Botany Bay: An Exploration of Landscape and History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 7–33; and B. Douglas, ‘Naming Places: Voyagers, Toponyms and Local Presence in the Fifth Part of the World, 1500–1700’, Journal of Historical Society 45 (2014), 9.

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60. Woodman, 16. 61. Martonne, 86–87; I. Conea, ‘Toponimia’ [Toponymy], in idem (ed.), Clopotiva: un sat din Hațeg [Clopotiva: a village in the Land of Hațeg] (Bucharest: Institutul de Științe Sociale al României, 1940), Vol. 1, 125–32; B. Szalay, ‘Hegyeink királya’ [The king of our mountains], Erdély 16 (1908), 66; and I. Fratu, Poteci și cabane în Munții Făgărașului [Trails and huts in the Făgăraș Mountains] (Bucharest: Sport-Turism, 1986), quoted in Bácskai and Wild, 42–43. 62. Pre-Columbian American peoples also seldom named mountain peaks; G.R. Stewart, Names on the Land: A Historical Account of Place-Naming in the United States (New York: New York Review of Books, [1945] 2008), 8. 63. H. Heltmann and H. Roth (eds), Der Siebenbürgische Karpatenverein 1880–1945: Gedenkband (Thaur bei Innsbruck: Wort und Welt, 1990), 27–28. 64. Bácskai and Wild, 46–47. 65. Figyelő, ‘A Detonáta’ [The Detunata], Erdély 17 (1908), 86. 66. W. Hankó, Die Bäder und Mineralwässer der Erdélyer (siebenbürgischen) Landestheile Ungarn’s (Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Kárpát-egyesület, 1900). 67. L.S. Nékám, ‘Biharországból’ [From the Bihor], Turisták Lapja 2 (1890), 380. 68. B. Ruzitska, ‘Vándorlás a Retyezáttól Nagyszebenig’ [Wandering from the Retezat to Hermannstadt], Erdély 16 (1907), 137. 69. See the journals listed in footnote 52, as well as Értesítő az Erdélyi Múzeum-Egylet Orvos-Természettudományi Szakosztályából II. Természettudományi Szak, Mathematikai és Természettudományi Közlemények and Barlangkutatás/Höhlenforschung; G. Téglás, Hunyadvármegyei kalauz [Guide to Hunyad County] (Kolozsvár: Erdélyi KárpátEgyesület, 1902); and V. Mátyás, Bihar-hegység: turistakalauz [The Bihor Mountains: a tourist’s guide] (Budapest: Sport, 1988). 70. F. Ardos, Lukács Ödön-barlang és geysir-csatorna: Szent László-Püspök-fürdő és Félix-fürdő közelében [The Ödön Lukács Cave and geyser tube: in the vicinity of Püspökfürdő/ Băile Episcopiei and Félixfürdő/Băile Felix] (Nagyvárad: Szent László-nyomda, n.d. [1914]). Cf. Géza Szegedy’s and Tivadar Kormos’s scathing reviews of this brochure in Barlangkutatás 2 (1914), 141–43. 71. L. Eötvös, ‘A scarisorai jégbarlang’ [The Scărișoara Ice Cave], Vasárnapi Újság 16 (1869), 675; and S. Moldovan, Zarandul și Munții-Apuseni ai Transilvaniei [Zarand and the Apuseni Mountains] (Sibiiu: self-published, 1898), 125. 72. Gy. Czárán, Kalauz biharfüredi kirándulásokra [Trekking guide Stâna de Vale] (Belényes: Süssmann, n.d. [1903]), 125–39. 73. L. Szádeczky, ‘A Nagy-Királykőn’ [On the Piatra Craiului Mare], Erdély 6 (1897), 127; Gy. Papp, ‘Az erdélyrészi Déli-Kárpátokról’ [The Transylvanian Southern Carpathians], Erdély 3 (1894), 67–77; anonymous, ‘A révi új cseppkőbarlangnál’ [At the new dripstone cave of Vad/Rév], Erdély 13 (1904), 126; E. Csiki, ‘Adatok Magyarország bogárfaunájához’ [Contributions to the beetle fauna of Hungary], Rovartani Lapok 21 (1914), 18; anonymous, ‘Az E.K.E. f. évi kirándulásai’ [The excursions of the EKE in the current year], Erdély 15 (1906), 90; anonymous, ‘Fürdőügy’ [Spa affairs], Erdély 4 (1895), 176; anonymous, ‘Egyesületi élet’ [Associational life], Erdély 16 (1907), 63; and J. Bencsik, ‘1400 turista a Petőfi tanyán’ [1400 tourists in Petőfi tanya], Nagybánya és Vidéke, 10 August 1902. 74. On Czárán, see Mátyás. His family name is of Romanian origin, but he was the scion of an ennobled Armenian family.

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75. Gy. Czárán, ‘A Szamosbazár’ [The Someș/Szamos Bazaar], Turisták Lapja 16 (1904), 97–120. 76. O. Sipos, in M. Hegyesi (ed.), Belényes és vidéke [Belényes and its environs] (Nagyvárad: Hűgel, 1889), 29–63. 77. On Sipos’s place-name activism, Nemes, 34–35. 78. Kőváry, 40. 79. Ibid., 123. Cf. I. Györffy, ‘Képek Erdély hegyvilágából’ [Images from the Transylvanian mountains], Turistaság és Alpinizmus 9 (1918–19), 62. 80. Bartos-Elekes, Nyelvhasználat a térképeken, 126. Szár-kő could be a flawless Hungarian mountain name, but the name of the peak is much more likely to have derived from the definite form of Rom. țarc ‘corral’. Surprisingly, the form Szárkő did not appear in a touristic journal until the Caransebeș high-school teacher and future geographer Ferenc Fodor’s article for Turisták Lapja in 1915, but he also reverted to Szárkó in the same journal the following year. 81. Kőváry, 89. 82. Gy. Czárán, ‘Úti vázlatok Móczopotámiából’ [Travel sketches from Moțopotamia], Erdély 10 (1901), 92. 83. E. Csiki, ‘Kirándulás az Aranyos-völgybe’ [Trekking to the Aranyos Valley], Rovartani Lapok 23 (1916), 155. 84. E.g. M. Pálfy, ‘Képek a gyalui havasokból’ [Images from the Gilăului Mountains], Erdély 6 (1897), 61; I. Veress, ‘Barlang-felavató beszéd: a “Zichy Ödön” cseppkőbarlang felavatása alkalmából’ [Cave inauguration speech: on the occasion of the inauguration of the Ödön Zichy Dripstone Cave], Erdély 14 (1905), 117; and Csiki, ‘Kirándulás az Aranyos-völgybe’, 151. 85. F. Pávai-Vajna, ‘Néhány újabb barlang ismertetése’ [Description of a few new caves], Földtani Közlöny 41 (1911), 780; and L. Méhely, Brassovármegye turista-kalauza [A tourist’s guide to Brassó County] (Kolozsvár: E.K.E., 1895), 51. 86. ANR Cluj-Napoca, Fond Societatea Carpatină Ardeleană 126/1898, 142. 87. Zones 15 col. XXXI, Felső-Vissó (1879), 15 col. XXX, Kapnik-bánya (1880), 18 col. XXVI, Bucsa und Rossia (1886), 23 col. XXXIV, Bodzafalu (1880) and 23 col. XXXIII, Kronstadt (1880); OSZK Map Collection ST, 66. 88. Jankó, Kalotaszeg magyar népe, 39; and A.T. Szabó, Kalotaszeg helynevei [The place names of Kalotaszeg], Vol. 1, Adatok [Data] (Kolozsvár: Gróf Teleki Pál Tudományos Intézet, 1942), 66. 89. Ibid. 90. Gy. Merza, ‘Adalékok Erdély helyneveihez’ [Contributions to the place names of Transylvania], Erdély 3 (1894), 246. 91. L. Szádeczky, ‘A fogarasi havasok májusban’ [The Făgăraș Mountains in May], Turisták Lapja 4 (1893), 31. 92. O. Hangay, Harcz a magyarságért! az Alldeutsch Szövetség (All-deutscher Verband) [Struggle for Magyardom! the Alldeutscher Verband] (Kolozsvár: Gámán, 1903), 221–22. 93. D. Radnóti (ed.), Erdélyi kalauz: útmutató Magyarország erdélyi részében [Transylvania handbook: a guide to the Transylvanian part of Hungary] (Kolozsvár: Erdélyi KárpátEgyesület, 1901). 94. E.g. L. Petrik, ‘Kilenc nap a Retyezát-hegységben’ [Nine days in the Retezat Mountains], Turisták Lapja 8 (1896), 63 and 106; and O. Hangay, ‘A Meleg-Szamos forrásai’ [The springs of the Someșul Cald], Erdély 7 (1898), 6.

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95. A. Jankó, Magyarország katonai felmérései 1763–1950 [Military surveys of Hungary, 1763–1950] (Budapest: Argumentum, 2007), 91–93. 96. J. Sándor, Az EMKE 1890–91. évi jelentése [Report of the EMKE on 1890–91] (Kolozsvárt: n.p., n.d. [1891]), XLIV; ‘A magyar térkép megmagyarosítása’ [The Magyarization of the Hungarian map], Erdély 1 (1892), 47–48 and Erdély 3 (1894), 99. 97. Földrajzi Közlemények 19 (1891), 378. 98. Ibid., 376–79. 99. S. Márki, ‘Erdély helynevei’ [The place names of Transylvania], Erdély 3 (1894), 217; and anonymous, ‘Magyarisirung der Ortsnamen in Siebenbürgen’, Romänische Revue 8 (1892), 59–62. 100. ANR Cluj-Napoca, Fond Societatea Carpatină Ardeleană 126/1898, 35. 101. Ibid., 31. 102. Erdély 3 (1894), 95. 103. Márki, ‘Erdély helynevei’, 220. 104. János Jankó to the EKE’s toponymy committee, on 28 October 1893; ANR ClujNapoca, Fond Societatea Carpatină Ardeleană 126/1898, 148–49. 105. B. Erődi, ‘Visszapillantás a Magyar Földrajzi Társaság huszonötéves életére’ [Looking back on twenty-five years of the Hungarian Geographical Society], Földrajzi Közlemények 24 (1896), 280; ANR Cluj-Napoca, Fond Societatea Carpatină Ardeleană 126/1898, 146; and Jankó, Magyarország katonai felmérései, 91–93. 106. Ibid. 107. On the connection between the toponymic action of tourists and the law on locality names, see J. Szulovszky, ‘A helynevek politikumához’ [On the politics of place names], in I. Hoffmann, D. Juhász and J. Péntek (eds), Hungarológia és dimenzionális nyelvszemlélet: előadások a V. Nemzetközi Hungarológiai Kongresszuson, Jyväskylä, 2001. augusztus 6–10. [Hungarology and dimensional approach to language: lectures of the Fifth International Congress of Hungarology, Jyväskylä, 6–10 August 2001] (Debrecen: Debreceni Egyetem Magyar Nyelvtudományi Tanszék, 2002), 118. 108. Alternatively, one can argue with Levente Szabó T. that the rising popularity of mountain hiking outshone the significance of the puszta in national imagery. See L.T. Szabó, ‘“Erdély népei”: A tér ideológiái és Erdély képei az intézményesült erdélyi turisztikai mozgalomban’ [‘The peoples of Transylvania’: Ideologies of space and images of Transylvania in institutionalized Transylvanian touristic life], in A tér képei: tér, irodalom, társadalom; Tanulmányok [Images of space: space, literature, society: studies] (Kolozsvár: KOMP-PRESS and Korunk, 2008), 141–59. On the notion of ethnoscape, see Smith, 50. On early reflections upon the puszta as a national symbol, see R. Albert, ‘La Grande Plaine hongroise, symbole national: Genèse d’un imaginaire XVIIIe–XXe siècles’, in R.-M. Lagrave (ed.), Villes et campagnes en Hongrie XVIe–XXe siècles (Budapest: Atelier Franco-Hongrois en Sciences Sociales, 1999), 11–35.

Part III

The State

d

Chapter 7

Floreas into Virágs State Regulation of First Names

d At long last, Wallachian litigants will learn what they are called in Hungarian from the writs, summonses and sentences. —Egyetértés, 24 July 19021

The codification of a Hungarian first-name regime has hardly received any serious attention in the historical literature, something that by and large has also been true for the codification of first-name regimes in general.2 To be sure, the subject became truly relevant only with the emergence of the nation-state, whereas earlier interventions in parents’ choices about naming their babies were rare and often followed a different logic. Until the modern era, name-giving fell under the authority of the Church, through the institution of baptism. However, the slow replacement of Germanic with Christian names in Western Europe during the high and late medieval period did not result from a consistent Church policy, and only after the Council of Trent did the Catholic Church restrict the pool of baptismal names to the names of canonized saints.3 By that time, Calvin and his fellow pastors in reformed Geneva had forbidden and even tried to uproot names that they associated with the papal faith, either because they were unbiblical or because they were linked to popular local saints.4 Similar regulations, forbidding pagan or foreign names, were also introduced in the German-speaking Protestant lands during the early modern period.5 Absolutist rulers sometimes curtailed the right of certain groups to name their babies. Joseph II of Austria, for example, planned to introduce a ban on specifically Jewish names to promote the enforced integration of Jews, while the Prussian king Frederick William III tried to achieve the exact opposite, perpetuating Jews’ social exclusion by limiting their choice to specifically Jewish

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names.6 Finally, the first modern baby-naming trend of secular, although still non-nationalist, inspiration, the French revolutionary taste for Ancient Roman and Greek names, found a formal recognition in Napoleon’s law dated 11 Germinal year XI (1 April 1803), which opened up the list of eligible names to names of ancient historical figures.7 Once the state took over population registers from the churches, a move that in most Roman Catholic areas also inaugurated the use of the national standard language instead of Latin, the state apparatus started to make implicit or explicit decisions about the official usage of specific name forms.8 This was a novelty compared to the examples cited in the preceding paragraphs, where the selection took place between different names and not among variants of the same names. The general trend reduced variety and favoured standard, accepted forms of first names at the expense of sundry regional and local variants, which, at least among the peasantry, remained very much alive during the nineteenth century. The work of registrars was helped here by the universalization of literacy and the growing number of required personal documents. The ideal was a national inventory of names with few alternative forms and a size that could be memorized, something that materialized in the ubiquitous calendars and in baby-naming books, a genre that rose to popularity in the second half of the nineteenth century.9 Such first-name inventories re-enforced the symbolic boundaries of the nation, the community of those who wear one of ‘our’ names. Interchangeability disappeared between cognate names in the same system, and in the last resort, the possibility of conversion between equivalents across languages was also greatly diminished. Wherever the borders of states and nations did not overlap and the statenation project was contested by successful rival national movements, that added a further dimension to this state of affairs, one of wilful discrimination against the forms used by linguistic minorities. The repressive Polish policies in the Prussian provinces of Posen and West Prussia, often quoted approvingly by hawkish Magyar commentators on contemporary Hungary’s ‘nationalities question’, established provisions similar to those the Hungarian government would impose. A Prussian ministerial decree connected to the 1875 imperial law on the civil registry ordered that children of Polish-speaking parents must be registered with the German equivalents of their first names.10 In contrast to the Hungarian regulation, however, the Prussian practice made a sharp distinction between people born before and after the introduction of the civil registry in 1875. For the older generations, forms found in the parish registers were treated as official, which led to the mildly anachronistic effect that many Polish-speaking Catholics officially bore Latin first names.11 In the German-speaking parts of Alsace-Lorraine/Elsaß-Lothringen, a regional policy specifically targeted the ‘nationally alienated’, especially the urban elites of the new German province, who treasured French cultural models and developed a fashion for French name variants. Imperial German officials enforced

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an informal ban on these variants in the civil registry. French names were not considered a threat elsewhere in Germany, where children could be freely registered with names like Louis and Marie, but only Ludwig and Maria were thought admissible in Alsace-Lorraine. My source here, the pioneering sociolinguist Paul Lévy, was himself entered into the registry as Paulus, from the registrar’s fear that a higher authority might find Paul too French.12 The cause of names lent itself to political use in turn-of-the-century Ireland after Irish nationalists had enthusiastically embraced Gaelic, and where British officials had, among other things, consistently replaced the popular Irish versions of Christian names with their English equivalents in the civil registry.13 The Gaelic League’s call to use Irish name forms triggered a sharp response from the British authorities, peaking in the cause célèbre of the nationalist activist Pádraic Mac Piarais/Patrick Pearse, who lost a case before the appellate court after being fined for his confrontational act of painting his Irish name on his cart.14

The Practice before Regulation Before 1894, non-Magyar citizens’ names appeared in a variety of ways in documents produced by the state and county authorities, the local governments and the judiciary. As most personal documents were not based on birth certificates, it could happen that the same person bearing a first name with several corresponding Hungarian variants had it recorded differently in their trade licence, tax booklet and passport, and on the electoral roll. There was no uniformity or consistency either between the practice of various authorities or within the same authority longitudinally, sometimes not even in the same document. An order by a district judge in Ilia/Marosillye, dated 5 July 1906, refers to the same person first as Mártin and then as Márton.15 In Hungarian official usage, first names were either left in their native forms (nearly always if no obvious equivalent was available in Hungarian) or translated, but the name order regularly followed the Hungarian custom: family name first, given name second. A rough estimation about how widespread these alternative methods were can be made based on the registry books of the Ministry of the Interior. The hundreds of Romanian names contained in these registry books for each year are written in diverse forms, which likely reflects the diversity of the authorities that forwarded the files to the ministry. At least in the years immediately preceding the regulation, it was clearly the ‘family name + native given name’ pattern that appeared most often, with both elements transcribed according to Hungarian spelling. While non-Magyar town and county officials were more likely to write native forms, zealous champions of Magyarization might try to stamp them out from bureaucratic practice in their own jurisdictions, and would react with indignant

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comments to the accommodating approach of their colleagues.16 In 1882, as the prefect of Szolnok-Doboka County, the later prime minister (1895–99) Dezső Bánffy ordered non-Hungarian first names to be translated in all official documents.17 Some district administrators put pressure on local governments to use the Hungarian variants in their records, claiming that they ‘would not understand them’ otherwise.18 As early as 1894, the Lugoj-based lawyer Nicolae Proșteanu protested against those authorities that had Magyarized first names in cadastral map transcripts, and had done so in an arbitrary fashion, such that the Romanian Achim had been replaced with the unrelated Hungarian name Ákos.19

The Stages of Regulation With Act XXXIII of 1894, however, the state took over responsibility from the churches for the keeping of registers of births, marriages and deaths. This measure was hotly debated in the Hungarian press and was widely interpreted as challenging the secular power of churches. The law also included measures that served as nationalist sugar coating for the anticlerical pill. The governing Liberal Party tried to deploy the full Magyarizing potential inherent in the new institution of a state civil registry. Although the law enacting the new system did not explicitly prescribe how the first names of newborn children, newly-wed couples and the deceased should be introduced there, section twenty declared Hungarian to be the language of registers, and from this passage in the law, decrees by the minister of the interior presumed an obligation to display all names in their ‘Hungarian-sounding’ (magyaros) forms. ‘Foreign’ (i.e. the native) names could only appear upon request and between parentheses.20 Registrars were also called upon to make sure that the names parents reported for their babies were the same ones they had been given in church baptisms.21 Preparations for the law started as early as the late 1880s. In order to establish the proper Hungarian equivalents for non-Hungarian names, the Ministry of the Interior asked prefects to draw up lists of all first names current in their counties. Prefects would in turn forward this request to village or circle secretaries (községi jegyzők and közjegyzők), the only professional bureaucrats in rural local governments. Nominated by the county administration and elected for life, those serving in these places were increasingly Magyars, even in non-Magyar villages, and were often acting as local representatives of Hungarian state nationalism. In most places after 1894, they would also be invested with the new duties of registrar. Only seven prefects returned lists of names, collected by village secretaries subordinated to them. Suggestively, three of these came from counties with Romanian majorities, another three from counties with substantial Romanian minority populations and only one from Slovak-speaking parts of Upper Hungary.22 The ministry then entrusted the Hungarian Academy with compiling

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an equivalence list for the names thus collected. The resulting printed brochure, the work of a team of four, listed the first names (sometimes more than one) in use among the minorities, alongside with their Hungarian counterparts. German first names were rendered in their German spellings, whereas Romanian first names were reported in an (attempted) phonetic Hungarian transcription. To help state registrars who were often at a loss in linking diminutive forms to their roots, the brochure contained a variety of hypocoristics. Still, this catalogue of Romanian first names was less than exhaustive. It was sent out to all registrars and to other official organs, first in 1893 and later in two amended and extended versions.23 As was usual with measures that reduced the scope for minority languages, the Hungarian government also offered an alternative reading of its intent from that of Magyarization, adducing practical grounds for the introduction of an official first-name regime. As was also usual, government officials appealed to the alleged demands of a modern, efficient bureaucracy. They argued that it added an excessive burden on officials, unfamiliar with the language and names of the people they administered, who had to find their way through a thicket of strange diminutives in order to establish the identity of a person. In some cases, even a person’s gender was hard to ascertain. In a ‘decision of theoretical importance’ from 1905, the minister of the interior also put forward the slightly spurious reasoning that the use of Hungarian first names in Hungarian documents was just a routine part of translation, and that it ensued from the status of Hungarian as the official state language: ‘Since the lists of parliamentary voters need to be redacted in the official language of the state, it necessarily follows that the first names of voters, as far as possible, also have to be entered on the lists in the official state language or according to Hungarian spelling’.24 In fact, the part of the regulation that affected non-Magyar first names takes on its full significance when it is seen as a component of the Bánffy government’s line of action that outstripped all previous Hungarian governments in gratifying an increasingly jingoistic civil society by implementing designs that imposed a uniform Magyar/Hungarian vision on multilingual Hungary. On the horizon optimistically painted by the Magyarizing discourse of the era, Hungarian first names would help Hungarian culture to assert itself by developing an affectionate bond between the names’ reluctant bearers and the state language, thus making them better disposed towards learning Hungarian. Or, short of that, they would at least make them bow to Magyar cultural sovereignty. Soon after the new state registrars stepped into office, they started to besiege the ministry with complaints about the many names that parents were choosing for their children that were not listed in the official publication. Acting upon a circular from the Ministry of the Interior in 1896, registrars working in minority areas sent up new lists of names to the academy. The academician authors,

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however, refused to consider these new names in earnest, pointing out that they were either hypocoristic forms or untranslatable into Hungarian. The words they used to dismiss these new lists are worth quoting, as they relate to expectations that were apparently widespread among public servants: (some registrars) ‘misinterpret the goal of the list, presuming that the government or the Academy, or both, want to extirpate … the names … that the minorities have freely used so far and want to replace them with Hungarian-sounding names yet to be created’.25 On the basis of this expert opinion, the minister now made an exception for first names without ascertainable Hungarian equivalents, which could subsequently stand in their native forms in the registers. However, state registrars were not to let themselves be fooled by parents and accept a name that was really just a hypocoristic variant, and it fell upon them to determine whether the requested forms belonged to a name with an established Hungarian equivalent.26 The law included the following ominous, equivocal passage (§ 44): ‘No one can bear a family or first name different from the ones entered on his birth certificate’. This clause was neither meant nor interpreted as a general ban on the non-Hungarian forms of first names, but referred to cases where people assumed a false identity or would inadvertently mislead the authorities by taking on an altogether different name. The regulations left untouched the private sphere, not to mention the written practice of the non-Hungarian press and of non-Magyar institutions (with the exception of schools, as we shall see below). One truly paradoxical aspect of the law was that it regulated only the official first names of those born or married after it came into effect, but contained no provision regarding the rest of the population. This was likely just an oversight, however, as it clearly transpires that the Budapest government aimed at replacing native names in the short run, across the age pyramid and in the entire official realm. Indicative in this regard is the letter that the Ministry of the Interior sent out to state organs in preparation of the law: it has come to the minister’s attention, the letter reads, that in certain regions, documents issued by the administration contain ‘foreign-sounding’ first names or names that ‘correspond to the local idiom’, instead of to the appropriate Hungarian forms. One version of the letter explicitly lamented that too many Romanian first names turned up in official texts.27 The minister stressed that ‘this widespread improper practice has no justification whatsoever’.28 His judgement fits oddly with the ministry’s similarly incongruous handling of non-Hungarian first names in its registry books, to which I referred above. Beyond such indirect commands, the circulation of the brochure to all state and county offices was itself meant to drive it home to civil servants that the government wished to expand the use of Hungarian names to the entire citizenry. Later on, several decrees were issued that circumscribed the sphere in which non-Hungarian name forms could appear officially, irrespective of whether their bearers were born after or before 1894. Hungarian first names became officially binding in lists of conscripts for the Honvéd Army after 1896

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and in the land registers after 1910, whose keeping also pertained to the duties of village secretaries.29 In 1902, the chair of the Kolozsvár high court of appeal ordered all subordinate courts to use the Hungarian versions of first names in all their registers, and when addressing the parties, witnesses and forensic experts in the courtroom.30 Measures were also taken to inculcate the official, Hungarian names in the minds of new generations. The 1908 curriculum for non-Hungarian primary schools (the majority of Romanian and Transylvanian Saxon pupils attended mother-tongue schools) instructed teachers to acquaint children of six to seven years of age with their Hungarian names in and outside Hungarian classes, and starting with the 1908/09 school year, pupils’ names had to be put in the class registers using the Hungarian equivalents and the Hungarian family name + given name order.31 A manual of methodology advised non-Magyar trainee teachers to start familiarizing children with their Hungarian names even on the day of enrolment, when their mum or dad first brought them to school: The German writes his name like this: Stefan Laub. While noting it down, we pronounce it in a slow and drawling voice: Laub István. We accompany this with a gentle smile, as if we were truly happy that Stefan Laub is Laub István. Then we keep on repeating in the child’s mother tongue, e.g. in German: So, so! Du heißt István, István, István, Laub István, Laub István. Ist es so, guter Nachbar? Ja, ja, er heißt Stefi, hier Laub István. István ist auch schön gesagt.32

Later, children were to be made to practise their names for a few half-hour sessions during Hungarian classes, and teachers were encouraged to call them by their Hungarian names well into the first year, whenever they addressed them.33 In practice, however, all this was likely to have been no more than the desires of Magyar educationalists. Non-Magyar teachers might have agreed that it was useful for children to know their official first names, but it is rather unlikely that many would have followed their textbook instructions so excessively. At the same time, the use of Hungarian names went without saying in schools with a Hungarian medium of instruction. As a consequence, awareness of them was probably higher among new generations of Banat Swabians,34 whose primary schools had by and large been Magyarized by the turn of the century, although a local historian of Werschetz/Vršac/Versec/Vârșeț made the following remark about Swabian children’s last day in Hungarian school: ‘From that day onwards, the pupils were not called János or Károly anymore, but Hans and Karl’.35 But how deeply did the principle of translating given names in fact permeate the official sphere before the outbreak of the First World War, when the first generation entered into the civil registry at birth had not yet turned twenty? In some cases under the Coalition Government of 1906–10, citizens were pestered for writing the native forms of their given names in official documents. A request to the Kolozsvár tribunal by a Transylvanian Saxon peasant was apparently

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dismissed unconsidered on that score, and it is known from official sources that at least three Romanian credit cooperatives were not chartered until their executives and liquidators had provided Hungarian signatures.36 The registry books of the Ministry of the Interior are no longer accessible for the respective period to gauge the extent of change in the practice of the executive branch. The weekly county bulletins, a new type of publication that in most counties had not existed before the turn of the century, systematically translated citizens’ first names. These bulletins, however, at best reflected the practice of county administrative departments, and not necessarily even that, as the chief clerks were Magyars in all counties by 1914, and they were more likely to guard over the enforcement of the spirit of regulations, at least in the public eye. Moreover, announcements issued by lower-level officials also disrupt the uniform picture presented by county bulletins. Many district administrators, police chiefs and village secretaries, Magyar and non-Magyar alike, did not go the extra mile to look up the Hungarian equivalents, but rather followed the old custom and wrote Danilla, Átyim, Radu, Viorika, Tógyer, Costi, Filip, Barbu, Avram and Toma instead of the Dániel, Joákim, Rudolf, Viola, Tódor, Szilárd, Fülöp, Bárb, Ábrahám and Tamás expected from them.37 Indeed, why would they have done otherwise? The new first-name regime might have simplified state administration, but it unnecessarily encumbered the work of local governments, where officials themselves often knew all residents by name. Even though the binomial mothertongue names were seldom used in everyday village settings, they could nevertheless be relied upon with a fair degree of certainty to identify their b­ earers for co-villagers, whereas one could not expect the local public to decode Hungarian given names. Thus, if a village secretary put a bounty on a stray horse, it saved complications if he indicated the owner as Sztán Bukur rather than Sztán Vidor, even if the person in case was normally referred to as, say, Bucur al lui Ionică al lui Moise Șchiopu. The surviving files of local and county archives provide ample evidence for the continuing official use of vernacular first names. People who lived in localities with Romanian or German as an official language would indeed usually encounter their names in mother-tongue spelling (Bucur Stan or Stan Bucur) in documents issued by the local authorities. Although the percentage of such local governments had fallen since the first decades of Dualism, 20 per cent of village secretaries in the eastern counties still declared Romanian nationality in 1910, and Transylvanian Saxon villages were typically administered by Saxon village secretaries.38 There were also Magyars in these jobs who wrote documents related to strictly municipal tasks, as well as letters to the public, in Romanian or German. Ironically, it was probably within the corps of village secretaries, who usually also acted as state registrars, that the most officials continued to write first names in their vernacular form and mother-tongue spelling, even though they would cautiously enter the Hungarian names in the registers.

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Nonetheless, villagers more often received notices from the state authorities than from the village secretary, who would rather send for them or go to their homes and talk to them in person. State agencies and courts sent out papers only in Hungarian, and they were also more likely to use the Hungarian equivalents of first names. And yet, the old ways were slow to die out even in this sphere, judging by a document no less prominent than the supreme court sentence from 1904 in an infamous case of gendarmes shooting dead over thirty Socialist demonstrators, which contained an untidy mixture of Romanian first names, sometimes translated into Hungarian and sometimes left in their vernacular forms.39 In any case, documents carrying citizens’ names multiplied rapidly as the administration expanded in leaps and bounds. For this reason, non-Magyar subjects of the Hungarian state were confronted, time and again, with the labels by which the state deigned to recognize them, but that felt alien to them. Indeed, many Romanian peasants could hardly get their tongues around what had become their official first names. The assertion of state dominance was unmitigated here by shared national identities, which in other parts of Europe bound subjects of diverse linguistic backgrounds to the state. As Hungarian nationalism left them indifferent at best, it is hard to imagine how Romanian peasants could have experienced the Hungarian names foisted on them as anything other than exotic, no matter how perfectly these matched their ‘real’ names. They reacted with aversion to the very institution of a civil registry, as evidenced by their calling the state registrar ‘the Jewish pope since he can marry unlawfully’.40 (The term ‘Jewish pope’ here also alluded to the increasing proportion of Jews among village secretaries-cum-registrars in Romanian-inhabited regions.)

The Handling of Exclusively Romanian Names This is not, however, the whole story. Through the massive Magyarization of the German-speaking Christian and Jewish urban bourgeoisie, the rules of conversion between German and Hungarian forms of given names had gradually solidified. Indeed, the most popular names of pre-Christian German origin had also taken root in Hungarian.41 But no such linguistic assimilation involving Romanian-speakers took place on a comparable scale, and a large group of Romanian first names remained untranslatable into Hungarian, even in an elite context. To the group of untranslatable Romanian names belonged those saints of the Eastern-rite calendar who were either not venerated in the Western Church or had not become popular patron saints among Magyars. Many of these names were typically borne by monks as monastic names, but some of them enjoyed currency in the populace at large. More critically, here belonged most Latinate first names, which were par excellence carriers of nationalist imaginaries. It was this latter group that would

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rankle Magyar village secretaries-cum-registrars the most. While Neolog Jews, Dualist Hungary’s exemplary assimilationist ethnic group, consciously adjusted their first names to the latest trends among middle-class non-Jewish Magyars, Romanians continuously drifted away from any future shared corpus of names.42 Worse than this, and flying in the face of culturally homogenizing policies and designs, Latinate names were also symbols of a separate national identity. For all the distaste and scorn they provoked from Magyar nationalist ultras, the Hungarian state could not place a ban on Latinate names, if for no other reason that it would have meant an unlawful and undue breach of Church autonomy. But the many Hungarian locality names coined after 1898, especially for Upper Hungary and the Banat, demonstrate that fabricating new Hungarian equivalents for Romanian first names that had none was also a viable option. For instance, they could have matched Romanian Traian with Tarján, the name of a pagan Magyar tribe preserved in Hungarian place names, or Tiberiu with Tibor, one of the archaizing first names coined in the Romantic period, in the same way as learned tradition had already matched Hungarian Jenő with Eugenius, and Gyula with Iulius. Eventually it was not the prestige of Latin in itself but the views of the academicians involved in the process that prevented this scenario, as testified by the correspondence between the academy and the Ministry of the Interior. The Romanian component of the official list of equivalents was largely the work of György/Gheorghe Joannovics, honorary member of the academy and chair of its linguistics committee.43 He was entrusted by the institution with heading the original team of authors, and he took on himself the task of establishing Hungarian equivalents for Romanian names. In the second edition of the list, he was replaced in this role by Sulica Szilárd/Constantin Sulică; this 1909 edition, however, brought few changes to Romanian names, the most important addition being two new Hungarian equivalents (László and Vászoly) for the common Romanian first name Vasile. Born to a landowning Orthodox merchant family in the Banat, of Aromanian descent, German culture and with Hungarian political sympathies, György Joannovics spent four years in prison for his activities during the 1848–49 revolution on the side of the revolutionary Hungarian government, but by 1867 he was serving as secretary of state under Minister of Education József Eötvös.44 No doubts could be cast upon his Hungarian nationalist credentials, but being representative of an older, more tolerant generation, he was not as averse to nonMagyar cultural life in Hungary as many of his younger colleagues. However, his linguistic interests were confined to Hungarian (his main field of research was Hungarian word order), and he never dealt with Romanian-related topics in a scholarly manner. More importantly, he set forth his views on Hungarian language planning in two lectures presented at the academy. In their organicist understanding of linguistic development, which ruled out deliberate intervention from above,

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these lectures bore resemblance to the radical organicist-vernacularist ideology of the early Magyar Nyelvőr, an influential periodical to which he frequently contributed.45 In particular, he found the language reform of the first half of the century guilty of confusing the logic of Hungarian, and he marked out corrupt linguistic coinages for purging. The yardsticks he used were alleged ‘laws’ of word formation, which he boldly extracted from earlier layers of the Hungarian vocabulary. This work of cleansing he certainly considered to be a necessary evil, as he was no friend of linguistic engineering and would have preferred to leave it to the ‘spirit of language’, working unadulterated in the simple folk and bringing about linguistic change spontaneously.46 One cannot help but see a connection between Joannovics’s theoretically grounded resistance to neologisms and his prudence in establishing Hungarian equivalents for minority first names. His purism of the organicist type kept him from satisfying some of the tacit expectations of Hungarian nationalists. In their letter written to the Ministry of the Interior during the first round of the process, he and his colleague, the Slavicist Oszkár Asbóth, made it clear that they had not undertaken to create new Hungarian forms, even though the method of ‘translating’ classical names had been in vogue in Hungarian throughout the nineteenth century and had given birth to names like Angyalka from Angelica, Aranka from Aurelia, Hajnalka from Aurora, Bódog from Felix, Győző from Victor, Szilárd from Constantinus and Vidor from Hilarius. They did not even consider the matching of Latinate Romanian or pre-Christian German first names with similar-sounding pagan Hungarian ones, to be recovered from historical sources or place names. They pointed out that whenever they had not found a proper Hungarian equivalent, they had left the minority first name unchanged.47 Joannovics could only repeat this principle when the ministry approached him again in 1896. Certainly, the bulk of the most common Romanian first names had longestablished Hungarian equivalents and did not need further codification: Catarina ~ Katalin; Elena ~ Ilona; Ioan ~ János; Petru ~ Péter etc. Apart from such cases, however, Joannovics included few new Romanian-Hungarian pairs of cognates (see Appendix A, Table A.3). His new pairs were always motivated by an etymological relationship, even if a less obvious one for the non-philologist: Sava (formerly transcribed into Hungarian as Száva) ~ Sebők, Sânziana ~ Johanna, Vlad ~ László. For a few names without modern Hungarian equivalents, Joannovics restored related forms attested in medieval Hungarian, like Beszárion, Cirjék, Karácson, Pentele and Prokóp. Through this strategy, the Romanian name-bearers were symbolically grafted onto one thousand years of Hungarian cultural and language history, in accordance with the ideology of a triumphant Hungarian state nationalism, rather than allowing their ‘alien-sounding’ first names to enter the authorized inventory. Joannovics implemented this particular method rather sparingly, however.

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A series of rare, mainly monastic names were given truncated Hungarian forms, by removing their distinctly non-Hungarian endings. It is unclear whether Joannovics actually coined any of these or they were already in use in Hungarian Greek Catholic publications, or in reference to Romanian or Serb monks. One Latinate name, Tiberiu, also received a clipped Hungarian equivalent (Tibér), which hints at the possibility of a similar treatment of most Latinate names. Although forms like Horác, Homér and Ovid still sounded natural in Hungarian at the time, Joannovics did not make further use of this strategy. Instead, he more often chose the opposite procedure, and added the Latin -ius ending to names that did not have it in Romanian (Longin→Longinus; Terenție→Terentius). He probably aimed at achieving more prestigious and more universal versions, or he might have had Western monastic names in mind, but maybe he just wanted to live up to his task and alter some more Romanian forms. His procedure is all the stranger as such Latinizing of names only emphasized the Latin character of their Romanian bearers, something the regime likely wished to avoid. Moreover, most names affected were not of Latin origin (Artemie, Crăciun, Gherasim, Macavei, Sofronie) or did not count as Latinate names among Romanians (Anghel, Maxim, Șerban). Indeed, at least two of them (Artemie and Carp) had patron saints only in the Eastern Church.48 Joannovics usually left out from the list those names for which he did not find a Hungarian equivalent. He included a few Romanian names, with just two examples (Sabin and Traian) traditional ones, on which he performed purely orthographic Magyarization. (He may not even have intended this orthographic Magyarization, as he also transcribed the original Romanian names.) According to the ministerial decision, names not included in the brochure could keep their native forms in the civil registry. Thus, while a majority of newborn ethnic Romanians and the great majority of ethnic Germans would be introduced into the civil register with name forms generally accepted as Hungarian, even if not particularly widespread among ethnic Magyars, a significant minority of Romanian names were either declared untranslatable, subjected to a merely cosmetic Magyarization or outright reLatinized. Paradoxically, most Latinate names, which the Romanian intelligentsia had thrown into circulation to become the bearers of a Romanian nationalist vision, were assigned into this group of ‘untranslatable’ names. In that way, their special treatment may even have boosted the acceptance of Latinate names among Romanian peasants, which had been rather low until the turn of the century. Romanian intellectuals referred to their official untranslatability as an argument for Latinate names when making propaganda for them, and various sources can attest that Romanian priests circulated lists of ‘untranslatable’ first names among themselves and promoted them to their faithful.49 It certainly added to the appeal of these ‘pagan’ names that they spared Romanian children from the burden of a separate Hungarian name, a reason that could lead otherwise reluctant parents to

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give them to their children.50 Justyna Walkowiak formulated a similar hypothesis about the Province of Posen/Poznań under German rule, connecting the rise in popularity of first names of Slavic origin to homogenizing civil registry policies.51 An interesting confusion arose around the name Florea. On the basis of its etymology, the first edition matched it with Virág, a Hungarian female name revived in the nineteenth century from medieval sources to replace Flóra. This solution caused quite an uproar among Floreas in Hungary, whose majority knew Virág only as a popular name for buffalo cows, as the editorialist of the Romanian weekly Libertatea flippantly pointed out in 1905.52 The prefect of Arad County besought the academy to reconsider its choice. Joannovics retracted and pleaded a misprint in the brochure, where Flóra and not Virág should have figured.53 Subsequently, Flóra was established as the Hungarian equivalent for the Romanian Florea in a ministerial order from 1899.54 This correction did little to solve the problem, however, since both Virág and Flóra are female names, whereas Florea is male. It was the second edition that ultimately disentangled the difference between two Romanian names, Florica or Floara on one hand, female names corresponding to Flóra, and the male name Florea on the other, which the publication now identified with the Hungarian Flórián. Incidentally, the equivalence of Florea and Flórián had been known earlier, at least to Florea Bozgan, a Romanian Kossuthite lawyer from Caransebeș. He habitually styled himself Bozgán Flóris in Hungarian, Flóris being a variant of the name Flórián.

Conclusion Was there a genuine belief among the Magyar political elite that modernization of the administrative machinery demanded a homogeneous inventory of first names? What makes it difficult to give a straight answer to this problem is that the dominant public discourse in Dualist Hungary projected modernization and Magyarization as two closely intertwined goals and saw social, not to mention official, multilingualism as an obstacle to progress. Without claiming that the modernizing ethos, often stressed in senior officials’ public utterances, was somehow less genuine, the argument that the generalization of Hungarian first names would make the work of (Magyar) civil servants smoother seems related in this logic to the broader bid for unconditional cultural dominance. In hindsight, even if some sort of regulation was necessary, the troubles at which government circles hinted certainly did not warrant the demotion of minority first names to an inferior status, as is borne out by the states that today maintain larger and more complex bureaucratic apparatuses than Dualist Hungary and yet also implement more inclusive name policies (contemporary Hungary and Romania among them).55 By the same token, since the Hungarian state ordered a survey of minority first names, it could just as well have declared the non-Magyar names

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on the list, which all registrars received anyway, to be official. Instead, they exploited the ambiguous perception of translating first names, which they could still claim to be ‘natural’, though they could hardly conceal the political intent behind it. In the end, what did it entail officially to ‘rename’ half of Hungary’s citizens from the viewpoint of the state nationalist agenda? How could it satisfy assimilationist expectations if peasants who usually did not know much Hungarian became increasingly aware that the authorities did not record them under their ‘real’ names? Such renaming could instantly create a semblance of assimilation in the eyes and the imagination of Magyar society, with the proviso that this result was as yet far from obvious in a context where even the first names of famous foreigners were also routinely translated into Hungarian, and ethnic Magyars’ first names appeared under French equivalents in their passports.56 Clearly a Hungarian first name did not necessarily signify cultural Magyarness. Nevertheless, this kind of make-believe assimilation of the surface was intended and welcome. It symbolically displaced non-Magyar citizens to the realm of the state language, which signified the beginning of their merging into a shared national community. In the short run, no equivalence table could bridge the incongruity between the Hungarian and Romanian corpora of first names. Most of the new Hungarian equivalents remained markedly non-Magyar, sometimes because they were new creations in Hungarian, but more often because they were rare or virtually nonexistent among ethnic Magyars. Somebody officially called Athanáz or Vazul would be rightly identified as a Romanian, a Ruthene or a Serb, and a Dömötör or Illés as more likely being a Romanian than a Magyar. These first names, however ‘Hungarian’, carried an undertone of foreignness for most Magyars, not much unlike any Romanian form. The majority of Hungarian nationalists perhaps wished to see Magyar cultural patterns generalized and would expect that the offspring of ethnic Romanians would bear the same names as theirs. Others would gladly incorporate non-national or domesticated elements of ‘minority cultures’ into a future Hungarian culture. The regulation, at any case, left intact the specifically Romanian trends of name-giving. As far as the desired internalization of Hungarian first names was concerned, some rural Banat Swabians might use them under certain settings, but Romanian peasants, apparently the main targets of the regulation, could only perceive them as just another kind of vexation. Hungarian nationalists could perhaps invest their hopes in future generations of peasants who, by learning Hungarian and growing up to be more functionally literate, might take a liking to them. While traditional Romanian names presented little threat for assimilationist designs in this respect, Latinate names were a delicate matter, especially as their popularity was on a steady upswing. Joannovics’s list offered no strategy that promised to neutralize their nationalist content, although Hungarian orthography might go

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some way to taming it. On the contrary, the regulation only underscored their national character by declaring them untranslatable. Short of anything better, Hungarian nationalists could only hope that the connotation invested in these names would slowly wear out. Whether it fulfilled the expectations may be open to doubt, but the conversion of ethnic given names was a relatively easy task in purely administrative terms, and it allowed the Hungarian government to sidestep the resistance of ethnic elites, which has also set limits to an interactionist account of the process in this chapter. The next chapter, by contrast, will unfold as a conflict between the politically dominant and minority high cultures for shaping the cultural habits of the increasingly literate masses. State bureaucrats took aim at an elusive target when they tried to spell Romanian family names in defiance of nationalist norms, and the tumultuous legacy of Romanian writing largely forced them to play on the rival’s turf.

Notes   1. ‘Egy kolozsvári táblai elnök rendelete’ [An order by a Kolozsvár high court of appeal judge], Egyetértés [Budapest], 24 July 1902.   2. A slightly different version of this chapter was published under the same title in Austrian History Yearbook 47 (2016), 107–27. © Center for Austrian Studies, University of Minnesota 2016, published by Cambridge University Press. Reprinted with permission.   3. S. Wilson, The Means of Naming: A Social and Cultural History of Naming in Western Europe (London: UCL Press, 1998), 99–111 and 191.   4. W.G. Naphy, Calvin and the Consolidation of the Genevan Reformation (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, [1994] 2003), 144–49.  5. A. Linsberger, ‘Namenrechtliche Anfänge in Österreich: Frühe Regelungen zu Namenwahl, Namenführung, Namenwechsel und Namenschreibung von Ruf- und Familiennamen’, Onoma 47 (2012), 207.   6. Bering, 35 and 48–65.  7. http://legilux.public.lu/eli/etat/leg/loi/1803/04/01/n1/jo (last accessed 10 September 2019).   8. For the French situation, where the earlier parish registers had already been kept in the national language, see Prénoms pouvant être inscrits sur les registres de l’état civil destinés à constater les naissances: conformément à la loi du 11 germinal an XI (1er avril 1803) (Paris: Dupont, 1858); the revised edition of the same list from 1865; and P. Geslin de Kersolon, Catalogue des noms et prénoms qui, seuls, peuvent être donnés légalement à l’état-civil et au baptême (Paris: Roussel, 1876).   9. According to a survey of Google Books, the genre cropped up in Germany in the 1830s, and together with its more highbrow but in fact scarcely different cousin, the popular etymological dictionary of first names, yielded eight separate German, English and French titles in the 1850s. 10. E. Müser, Führung und Abänderung der Familien- und Vornamen in Preußen (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1913).

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11. H. Glück, Die preußisch-polnische Sprachenpolitik: Eine Studie zur Theorie und Methodologie der Forschung über Sprachenpolitik, Sprachbewußtsein und Sozialgeschichte am Beispiel der preußisch-deutschen Politik gegenüber der polnischen Minderheit vor 1914 (Hamburg: Buske, 1979), 353–54. 12. P. Lévy, Histoire linguistique d’Alsace et de Lorraine, Vol. 2, De la Révolution française à 1918 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1929), 365. 13. A testimony about the changing practice in Ireland is provided in R.E. Matheson, Varieties and Synonymes of Surnames and Christian Names in Ireland: For Guidance of Registration Officers and the Public in Searching the Indexes of Births, Deaths, and Marriages (Dublin: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1890), and its 2nd edn 1901. 14. L. Mac Mathúna, ‘What’s in an Irish Name? A Study of the Personal Naming Systems of Irish and Irish English’, in H.L.C. Tristram (ed.), The Celtic Englishes IV: The Interface between English and the Celtic Languages; Proceedings of the fourth International Colloquium on the ‘Celtic Englishes’ held at the University of Potsdam in Golm (Germany), 22–26 September 2004 (Potsdam: Universitätsverlag Potsdam, 2005), 73–4. 15. ANR Deva, Fond Tribunalul Hunedoara 2/1891. 16. Ö. Végh, ‘A telekkönyvek magyarságáról’ [On the Hungarian character of land registers], Jogtudományi Közlöny 19 (1884), 391; and E. Nagy, ‘A törvénykezési irály kérdéséhez’ [On the question of legislative style], Jogtudományi Közlöny 27 (1892), 56. 17. ANR Bistrița, Fond Prefectura Județului Năsăud 8/1886, 7; and D. Bánffy, Magyar nemzetiségi politika [Hungarian nationalities policy] (Budapest: Légrády, 1903), 151. Cf. M. Eminescu, ‘Mai lesne se torc...’ [It is easier to spin], in Opere [Works], Vol. 13 (Bucharest: Editura Academiei Republicii Socialiste România, 1985), 315–16. 18. Editorial from Dreptatea 16/28 May 1897. 19. P. Oallde, Lupta pentru limbă românească în Banat: apărarea și afirmarea limbii române, la sfîrșitul secolului al XIX-lea și începutul secolului al XX-lea [The struggle for Romanian in the Banat: the defence and the affirmation of the Romanian language at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century] (Timișoara: Facla, 1983), 94. 20. Decrees nos 86,225/1895 and 49,893/1898 of the Ministry of the Interior; Magyarországi rendeletek tára 1895, Vol. 2, 1,397; and Belügyi Közlöny 3 (1898), 261. 21. Decree no. 80,000/1906 of the Ministry of the Interior, § 55, point 7 and § 82, in Magyarországi rendeletek tára 1906, pp. 1,834 and 1,869–70. 22. MTA Manuscript Collection RAL 440/1892. 23. Nem-magyar keresztnevek jegyzéke [List of non-Hungarian first names] (Budapest, 1893, 19092 and 19143). 24. Belügyi Közlöny 10 (1905), 227. 25. György Joannovics and Oszkár Asbóth to the Ministry of the Interior; MTA Manuscript Collection RAL 6/1899. 26. Decree 55,093/1899 of the Ministry of the Interior, in Magyarországi rendeletek tára 1900, Vol. 1, 17. 27. MTA Manuscript Collection RAL 23/1891. 28. Popovici et al., Bihor, Vol. 1, 82–83. 29. Decree 65,788/1896 of the Ministry of Defence and Decree 26,141/1910 of the Minister of Justice; Magyarországi rendeletek tára 1896, p. 543; and Igazságügyi Közlöny 19 (1910), 415. 30. ‘Egy kolozsvári táblai elnök rendelete’ [An order by a Kolozsvár high court of appeal judge], Egyetértés [Budapest], 24 July 1902.

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31. A magyar nyelv tanításának terve a nem-magyar tannyelvű népiskolában és útmutatás ezen tanításterv használatához [Curriculum for the teaching of the Hungarian language in the non Hungarian-medium primary school, and guidance for the use of this curriculum] (Budapest, 1908), 37; and Libertatea 23 August / 5 September 1908. 32. M. Láng, A magyar beszéd tanításának természetszerü módja a nem-magyar ajku népiskolákban: a tanító-, tanítónőképző-intézeti növendékek, tanítók és tanítónők számára [The natural way of teaching Hungarian in non-Hungarian-speaking schools: for training school students and primary teachers] (Budapest: Athenaeum, 1900), 92. 33. Ibid., 109. Cf. P. Szebeni, ‘A magyar nyelv módszeres kezelése románajku népiskolákban’ [The methodical treatment of Hungarian language in Romanian-medium primary schools], Néptanítók Lapja 16(3) (1883), 37; and A magyar nyelv tanításának terve, 37. 34. H. Frisch, Werschetz (Versecz – Vršac): Kommunale Entwicklung und deutsches Leben der Banater Wein- und Schulstadt (Vienna, 1982), 481; and H. Klein, Heimatbuch der Heckegemeinde Josefsdorf im Banat (n.p.: Josefsdorfer Heimatortsgemeinschaft, 1986), 165. 35. Frisch, 369. 36. C. Bodea and H. Seton-Watson (eds), R.W. Seton-Watson and the Romanians 1906–1920 (Bucharest: Editura Științifică și Enciclopedică, 1988), Vol. 1, 165; Közjegyzők Közlönye 11 (1908), 289; Közjegyzők Közlönye 12 (1909), 155; Központi Értesítő 33 (1908), 414, 699 and 1,286; and Központi Értesítő 35 (1910), 1,947. 37. Alsó-Fehér vármegye Hivatalos Lapja (1914), 36 and 456; Brassóvármegye Hivatalos Lapja (1914), 17, 39, 224, 230 and 312; Fogaras vármegye Hivatalos Lapja (1914), 132; and Szebenvármegye Hivatalos Lapja (1914), 202 and 360. 38. Magyar Statisztikai Közlemények, new series, Vol. 56 (Budapest: Kir. Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, 1915), 725. 39. The incident went down into the annals of history as the Élesd/Aleșd volley. Kemény, Vol. 4 (1966), 229–30. 40. N. Iorga, Neamul romănesc în Ardeal și în Țara Ungurească [The Romanian people in Transylvania and Hungary], Vol. 1 (Bucharest: Minerva, 1906), 201. On a demonstration in 1893 where, according to a Magyar observer, a speaker’s attack on the regulation of first names (then still in the making) received general acclaim from his Romanian peasant audience, see Kemény, Vol. 2 (1956), 109. 41. K. Szily, A magyar nyelvujitás szótára a kedveltebb képzők és képzésmódok jegyzékével [Dictionary of the Hungarian language reform with a list of its favourite suffixes and types of word formation] (Budapest: Hornyánszky, 1902), Vol. 1, 172. 42. K. Frojimovics, ‘Jewish Naming Customs in Hungary from the Turn of the Twentieth Century until the Holocaust’. Paper presented at the 23rd International Conference on Jewish Genealogy, 20–25 July 2003, Washington DC; available at http://www.jewish​ gen.org/Hungary/2003nameskinga.html (last accessed 10 September 2019). 43. His family name was sometimes spelt Joanovics, but he never signed it in the Romanian fashion as Ioanovici; D. Braharu, Un colaborator al lui Șaguna: secretarul de stat Gheorghe Ioanovici de Dule˘u și Valea Mare [One of Șaguna’s collaborators: Secretary of State Gheorghe Joannovics] (Cluj: Cartea Românească, 1932), 43. 44. Ibid.; J. Balassa, ‘Joannovics György’, Magyar Nyelvőr 38 (1909), 145–47; and E. Jakabffy, ‘A Banat (Bánság) magyar társadalmának kialakulása a XIX. század folyamán’ [The formation of a Magyar society in the Banat during the nineteenth century], Magyar Kisebbség 19 (1940), 234.

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45. On the vernacularism of the Magyar Nyelvőr, G.B. Németh, ‘A századvégi Nyelvőr-vita: a népies provincializmus kialakulásához’ [The Nyelvőr debate at the fin de siècle: on the emergence of Populist parochialism], in Mű és személyiség: irodalmi tanulmányok [Work and personality: literary studies] (Budapest: Magvető, 1970), 465–520. 46. Gy. Joannovics, Adalékok a magyar szóalkotás kérdéséhez [Contributions to the question of new word coinage] (Pest: Eggenberger, 1870); and idem, Értsük meg egymást: a neologia és orthologia ügyében [Let’s get it right: about neology and orthology] (Budapest: M. Tud. Akadémia, 1881). 47. MTA Manuscript Collection RAL 440/1892. 48. Interestingly, yearbooks of Hungarian high schools made even wider use of this method than Joannovics, which suggests that such forms were actually supported by some consensus of usage. 49. Cristureanu, Aspecte, 22; Oallde, 89–90; and Pașca, 40. 50. Cf. W. Dahmen, ‘Magyarisierungsversuche im Siebenbürgen des 19. Jahrhunderts als Motor für die Sprachnormierung des Rumänischen’, in W. Dahmen and R. Schlösser (eds), Sexaginta: Festschrift für Johannes Kramer (Hamburg: Helmut Buske, 2007), 103. 51. J.B. Walkowiak, ‘A Name Policy and Its Outcome: Programmatic Names in the Nineteenth-Century Province of Posen’, in J. Tort i Donada and M. Montaguti i Montagut (eds), Names in Daily Life: Proceedings of the XXIV ICOS International Congress of Onomastic Sciences (Barcelona: Generalitat de Catalunya Departament de Cultura, 2014), 1,745–56. 52. Libertatea 3/16 September 1905. On Virag as a buffalo name, see Pașca, 370. 53. MTA Manuscript Collection RAL 6/1899. 54. Decree 55,093/1899 of the Ministry of the Interior, in Magyarországi rendeletek tára 1900, Vol. 1, 17. 55. On today’s incongruous regulations and official practices of personal name use, see Walkowiak, Personal Name Policy and F. de Varennes and E. Kuzborska, ‘Human Rights and a Person’s Name: Legal Trends and Challenges’, Human Rights Quarterly 37 (2015), 977–1,023. 56. P. Bencsik, A magyar úti okmányok története 1867–1945 [History of Hungarian travel documents, 1867–1945] (Budapest: Tipico Design Kft., 2003), 152–53.

Chapter 8

The Most Correct Ways to Spell One’s Name

d The principle of writing the family name as in the original, unchanged, and with all its national marks. —Libertatea 23 August / 5 September 19081

The Heritage of Romanian Etymological Spellings Even in linguistic cultures that today use straightforward, phonemic spellings, family names can preserve the marks of spelling conventions long past, so much so that such residual features sometimes end up altering the pronunciation of names. Ironically, Romanian family names acquired a similar veneer almost overnight, owing to the failed Latinist experiment of language planning. Although the etymological norm dominated the writing of Romanian for no more than four decades, it burdened Romanian family names with a disproportionate gap between sounding and written forms.2 This was particularly true in the intra-Carpathian space, where its career started earlier and lasted longer. Romanian family names were certainly subject to external orthographic influences, too. German had a more modest impact in this respect than Hungarian. With some reservation, I concur with Vasile Gr. Borgovan in attributing the v of his family name  – he called it ‘my disfigured German name’  – to German influence. Known as Vasilică Bârgăoanu a Roșului in his village, his new name superseded the old one after entering the Năsăud Normalschule (military school).3 Borgovan’s comment serves as a reminder that the German schools and administration of the Military Frontier passed the written forms of Romanian names through a German filter.

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Romanian etymological orthography, however, brought about more variation and uncertainty, it upset the correspondence between the spelling and the pronunciation of Romanian names in a more radical manner than did extraneous influences. Four features in particular were prone to persist in the writing of family names: the final -u/-iu; the attempt to eliminate the sound /ɨ/; the si spelling of /ʃ/ and the ti spelling of /t͡ s/, both resulting in the insertion of an i; and the c spelling of /t͡ s/. This orthographic legacy affected the illiterate as well, because parish priests adopted the etymological spelling during its heyday for keeping the registers. This could effectively overhaul the family name corpus of entire village communities, provided that later priests continued to cherish the etymological tradition – a more likely scenario in the Uniate than the Orthodox Church. But the intelligentsia needed to tackle this problem more often as it required a firm decision on their part to break the usage hallowed by their fathers in order to readapt the spelling of their names to the pronunciation – a decision, moreover, that they would preferably coordinate with their family members, although Moise Branisce retained the etymological spelling of his name even after his brothers had switched to sign it as Braniște.4 Some Romanian surnames already had a final -u in folk usage; it was the postposed article, left without much grammatical function.5 In Latinist etymological spellings, however, all words ending in a consonant received an -u or -iu (depending on the consonant).6 This again carried no grammatical function, its goal was simply to highlight the Latin pedigree of the language, and family names automatically received it.7 Later ‘phonetic’ spellings, which slowly replaced etymological ones from the 1870s onwards, attempted to mirror language the way it was spoken, with the consequence of dropping the -u/-iu ending. Accordingly, some people also removed it from their names, while others fluctuated between the two alternate written forms. If one was building a career in the public sector, it seemed advisable to get rid of -u/-iu in Hungarian writing, although this may have added to the opprobrium of ‘renegadism’ in Romanian nationalist eyes. Thus, the future writer Liviu Rebreanu used the name Rebreán Olivér when still an officer in the Hungarian (Honvéd) army, while his father Vasile signed himself as Rebréan László under a request.8 But written bilingualism and Magyar expectations only added a further dimension to existing indecision. In 1909, the same author’s name appeared as Crișan under his paper in one Romanian educational magazine and as Crișanu in another.9 Contemporaries often omitted this erudite -u/-iu from the names of people who retained it, which suggests that it was seldom actually pronounced.10 In some cases, like the name of the leading Romanian public intellectual George Bariț/Barițiu, it is still a moot question whether it should be written out. The rest of the etymological features affected fewer names. Latinists attributed the central vowel /ɨ/ (a sound once marked with the special letter ↑ in Romanian Cyrillic script and spelt â today) to Slavic influence, and tried to weed it out by

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substituting it in writing. The replacement letter – e (Velceanu), o (Borgovan) or u (Bursan) – survived the ebb of Latinism in some names and later also prevailed in pronunciation.11 Many families, with two important dynasties of intellectuals – the Muresianus and Densusianus – among them, kept the etymological spelling of /ʃ/ unchanged in their names. The Banat-born General Michael Trapsia would even revert to the etymological spelling of his baptismal certificate at an advanced age (sometime before 1893), which he then combined with the German form of his first name.12 In most such cases, the bearers and their environments later assigned a phonetic value to the unetymological letter i, starting to pronounce [ʃi] or [t͡ si] (in the case of ti) what was originally a double character standing for one sound, and to restore consistency, the name ended up with a stroke under s or t. It seems that the pronunciation of such written forms already hesitated around the turn of the century, but Nicolae Iorga, perhaps through his Transylvanian wife, was for one well aware that Budapest University professor Iosif Siegescu was ‘in fact’ Șeghescu, lawyer and political activist Rubin Patiția Patiță and Orthodox Metropolitan Ioan Mețianu Mețan.13 The c spelling of /t͡ s/ had its origin in a short-lived version of the etymological orthography and transformed few family names. Chief among them was the name of its inventor, Timotei Cipariu, the Transylvanian apostle of Latinism. In 1873, dissecting the muddled state of Romanian orthography, the linguist Hugo Schuchardt rightly inquired about ‘le moyen, par exemple, de savoir que M. Cipariu prononce son nom à l’allemande, non pas à l’italienne’ (‘the way to know, for example, that Mr Cipariu pronounces his name in the German, not in the Italian fashion’).14 At the turn of the century, educated Romanians still knew that he had pronounced his name Țipariu (‘à l’allemande’, that is), and they might also know that it originally sounded Țipar or Țâpăr, from țipar, the Romanian for eel.15 Around the same time, the Circa and Ciura families still pronounced their names with /t͡ s/ instead of /t͡ ʃ/, as one would have expected.16 The shift to a thoroughly new orthography in the 1880s and the long end-tail of the Latinate norm inside the Carpathians mixed up the spelling of a large number of family names for decades to come, and exactly when nationalist reasoning strategically needed to show up a firm tradition against the real or perceived encroachment of administrative practices. Notably, the Hungarian transcription of family names in documents was the single aspect of Dualist Hungary’s official handling of personal names that Romanian nationalists most chafed at in these decades. In a memorandum drafted in 1910, Ioan Mihu included, among Romanian minority politicians’ conditions to enter into negotiations with Prime Minister István Tisza, that ‘the names of Romanian parties will not be distorted in bureaucratic usage, but they will be used and written as pronounced’. Tisza left the following note in the margin: ‘Where does that happen?’17 In fact, throughout the entire state administration, at courts and in

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personal documents, the family names of ethnic Romanians were most often spelt in Hungarian; ‘as pronounced’, yes, but from a Magyar point of view.

Magyars Write Romanian Family Names When you write to me, write my name in Hungarian because the people who are going to pass it to me don’t read Romanian and would give it to somebody else. —The volunteer Ion Jivcovici to his fellow-villager Dumitru Savescu from Babșa/Babsa, Temeswar, 191515

For their fight over the spelling of family names in official documents, Romanian national activists could draw some inspiration from similar debates on the Austrian political scene. German and Italian nationalists repeatedly accused ethnically Slovene and Croatian priests of respelling their parishioners’ names, and the priests of Dalmatia and the Austrian Littoral could feel all the more entitled to do so because parish books had adopted Italian spelling for Slavic family names after the decline of the Glagolitic alphabet. Habsburg bureaucracy sought to defend individual rights and raised the forms found in parish registers to official status in Lower Styria, Carinthia and Carniola, but it threw its power behind the status quo palatable to the Italian party in the Adriatic provinces. This policy involved at least one high official personally leafing through the registers in search of potential tampering in an insular parish of Dalmatia.19 Most Magyar officials had always transcribed Romanian family names, and indeed they had little other conceivable option as long as Romanian was written in the Cyrillic script. The custom became more visible in the Dualist Era thanks to both the extension of state bureaucracy with its largely Magyar personnel and to the rising literacy rates. At the same time, although forms like Sekszpir for Shakespeare still occasionally popped up in the Hungarian press, the rule slowly crystallized that foreign family names should not be transcribed from another language that uses the Roman script.20 Significantly, this rule was not applied to minority family names, although the returns to Frigyes Pesty’s questionnaire from 1864 prove that Magyar village secretaries active in Romanian-majority areas had by that early date already acquainted themselves with the basic rules of Romanian etymological orthography.21 Thus the custom of transcription increasingly carried the message that official Hungary rejected the claims by national minorities to cultivate their literacies and, in general, the demands of non-Magyar intelligentsias to set cultural norms for their co-linguals. These covert meanings found blunt expression in 1904 in the words of Independentist MP for Nagyvárad, Béla Barabás: And then there are the names on inscriptions. You only marvel at the twisted inscriptions on some shop signs. Everyone should write his name the way it is pronounced.

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We have now amended the law on the civil registry, [so] steps should also be taken to this effect, and it should not be tolerated that anyone should spell his name differently from the way it is entered into the registry and as it is pronounced in plain, honest Hungarian.22

The long-standing tradition of transcription, which preceded any stable Roman-based Romanian writing system by centuries, made it common sense in the eyes of Magyar officials and intellectuals, whilst their (often overdone) references to the chaotic state of Romanian spelling served as further justification. This practice was hegemonic to the extent that literate Romanians continued to sign their names in Hungarian spelling out of routine rather than in conscious acquiescence to power. In the early period, Romanians regularly spelt Romanian names in the Hungarian way in Romanian texts, irrespective of their persuasions. One village secretary from Târnava/Küküllő/Kokel County responded to Pesty’s questionnaire in Romanian and revealed an unusual awareness of the political significance of names by claiming that the Hungarian name of his village, Erdőalja, was just a late translation of the Romanian Subpădure (‘bottom of the woods’). He nevertheless put down the names of the mayor and his informant on local microtoponymy in the Hungarian forms ‘Koszte Porfirie’ and ‘Szöts Iftimie’.23 Old habits were slow to die out, even as nationalist intellectuals hastened to challenge them with a more dogmatic stance. The Romanian George Bariț had already in 1866 contended for the principle that family names cannot be transcribed. At the 1866 elections, it stirred a major uproar among Magyar and Saxon burghers of Orăștie that a Romanian town-hall official had written their names on the electoral rolls according to the rules of Romanian etymological spelling.24 Commenting on the affair, Bariț distanced himself from the official’s demeanour but did not refrain from placing the spelling of names in an imagined demographic framework. For centuries, he argued, Magyar public functionaries had been consciously Magyarizing the names of the Romanian masses in the service of their well-thought-out national goals. Therefore, if Romanians follow the Hungarian or German spelling of Hungarian or German names, that will not come as a mere courtesy gesture, but will also make manifest the peaceful nature of their nationalism and their demographic self-sufficiency: ‘We, Romanians, should all the more keep Hungarian and Saxon family names the way they write them with their own spellings, since we have never thought about enlisting Magyars, Saxons or Germans to augment our numbers’.25 He urged his fellow Romanians to stick with one surname and to pass it on in an unaltered form. An article from 1892 in the Temeswar paper Luminătorul likewise called upon artisans and shopkeepers to put the proper Romanian forms of their names on shop signs.26 It suggested that the majority who were unversed in the intricacies of spelling should consult either their apprentices or a teacher for help, and

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instructed them that while given names were translatable, family names were not.27 This was the same phrasing that the Uniate priest Constantin Lucaciu used for rebuking the gendarmerie headquarters of Arad, which had apparently asked him to present the names of his parishioners in more Hungarian forms; his parish was not entitled to perform translations, he countered, and besides, only given names can be translated, family names cannot.28 Alas, those families who took Bariț’s advice in 1866 and insisted on keeping the spelling of their names were likely to have come into conflict with the new, phonemic orthographic norm twenty years later. The diffusion of Romanian spellings was slowed down by the weakness of the Romanian school networks and later by their gradual retreat in the face of Hungarian state and communal schools, which not only did not teach Romanian spelling but, as a rule, even transcribed their Romanian pupils’ names.29 From the 1908/9 school year onwards, Romanian confessional schools were also made to enter pupils’ names in class registers in the ‘family name + given name’ order, and either out of fear or under pressure from local dignitaries, some Romanian schools lapsed into writing the full names in the Hungarian way.30 The standing committee of the archdiocesan Orthodox teachers’ conference declared this latter practice ‘contrary to natural laws and to be fought off by all who are working to promote culture among the people’. They added the (at the time, highly debatable) statement that ‘surnames are in all civilized countries written in the spelling of the people to which the individual belongs’.31 The editors of Libertatea also advised Romanian teachers that the new regulation did not want them to write Lászku János, Cserbicsán Vazul, Boncza Elek, Szabó Győző or Kerpenyesi Sándor, but left them free to write Lascu János, Cerbicean Vazul, Bonța Elek, Săbău Győző and Cărpinișian Sándor, the family names spelt according to standard Romanian phonemic orthography and complete with the Hungarian forms of given names.32 In a letter sent from the Temeswar barracks in February 1917, the volunteer Ion Jivcovici captured in just two words the onslaught that Hungarian spelling had made in Romanian primary schools in the last pre-war years. He asked his fellow-villager to use ‘children’s orthography’ on the envelopes sent to him, by which he referred to Hungarian spelling.33 A new state school probably operated in his village, where the Hungarian state had settled 350 Magyar colonists in the 1900s, but the local Romanian school may also have been Magyarized through the back door, after the 1907 Lex Apponyi. In any case, Jivcovici had still learned to write in Romanian, while younger cohorts in his village were more familiar with Hungarian spelling.34 It is no surprise that many Romanians who had attended school in the last decade of Hungarian rule continued to sign their names in the Hungarian-spelt or translated versions once inculcated in them.35 In the administrative sphere, Romanian citizens stood little chance of having their names consistently spelt in a Romanian fashion outside Saxon counties

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and communes with Romanian village secretaries. With the introduction of the civil registry, the Hungarian spelling of Romanian family names gained further ground. Registrars were advised to enter the names of newly-wed couples according to the transcripts that priests issued from the parish registers, and children were to inherit the spelling of their fathers’ names. It is likely, however, that a good many Magyar registrars automatically transcribed to Hungarian the Romanian names found in parish register transcripts. Here, ideology could conspire with ignorance. In the advice column of the leading civil service journal, the Transylvania-born editor recommended a perplexed registrar to respect a citizen’s will when spelling names. In the given case of an illiterate bride whose family name figured in the parish register as Todea but she ‘pronounced it Togye’, this principle meant that the editor should honour her purported wish and have it spelt in the latter, Hungarian form. However, as the same editor scolded another registrar in a later issue for Magyarizing a family name, perhaps neither he nor the registrar were aware that in fact ‘Togye’ was just the usual Romanian dialect pronunciation (with a soft /d’/ and an open /ɛ/) of what was Todea in Romanian spelling.36 The question of how to spell minority family names in the civil registry first turned up in the bulletin of the Ministry of the Interior in 1905. It is indicative that the registrars seeking the minister’s advice did not address the spelling of non-Hungarian names in general, but more specifically those ‘Hungarian family and place names that had been entered into the parish registers of some churches in the spellings of the respective nationalities, but had often been altered to sound foreign’. Such tendentious framing was meant to cast a desired systematic intervention into the writing of names as demographic self-defence against the intrigues of minority clergies. The response came in the form of a ‘statement of principle’ by the minister, who decided that names that were ‘Hungarian according to common knowledge’ and figured ‘in distorted forms’ in parish registers should be restored to their Hungarian originals. In the case of a ‘more glaring distortion’, the nonHungarian written variants were to be displayed in parentheses for the sake of disambiguation. The minister based his directive on a logic already encountered in the previous chapter. The passage of the law that required the keeping of the civil registry in Hungarian also implied that names should be entered ‘in Hungarian’.37 As a hint for the sort of names that the minister had in mind, the text indicated Romanian family names based on Hungarian loanwords: Sas, Sabo (in fact, Săbău) and Suciu.38 The criterion of ‘common knowledge’, repeated several times, implicitly meant ‘common to the Magyar elite’, which gave the decree a tremendous elasticity, as, in the logic of certain county officials, any name that had ever existed in Hungary in its post-1867 form was necessarily Hungarian. (A similar ordinance was sent out to civil registrars in Alsace-Lorraine in 1899, but behind the similar wording, there lay a more modest purpose: to eradicate

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the fashionable acute accents from the final e-s of German names.)39 Thereupon, registrars in Hungary had one more option regarding the writing of some family names. A name that appeared as Socaciu in the Romanian parish register could be spelt Socaciu or Socaci following a traditional or a phonemic Romanian spelling, transcribed into Hungarian as Szokács or re-etymologized into Szakács (‘cook’).40 In 1903, in opposition to this vaguely worded guideline, the Romanian Greek Catholic archbishop ordered the priests under his jurisdiction to adhere strictly to the spellings found in the parish registers, should they write in any language, also urging them to familiarize state registrars with Romanian orthography. Four years later, the archbishop felt it necessary to repeat his admonition.41 In rebuttal of the archbishop’s second circular, the new minister of the interior, Gyula Andrássy Jr., reaffirmed the validity of his predecessor’s ‘statement of principle’, again setting the goal of ‘restoring the distorted names’.42 No resolution to the conflict was forthcoming. Any young middle-class or upwardly mobile Romanian could expect to be interrogated several times by Magyar teachers or clerks about the pronunciation of his name, and would be faced at least once with the choice of whether to resign to it being respelt or to run into conflict with authority over its spelling. Teachers at Hungarian schools were sometimes encouraged to teach minority children the ‘Hungarian pronunciation’ of their family names, whatever that meant.43 Tempers were likely to flare if a young man’s name as recorded on his baptismal certificate jarred with the spelling that his professors thought proper. Attitudes varied, and the Faculty of Catholic Theology in Budapest introduced the future writer Ion Agârbiceanu’s name in the faultless ‘phonetic’ form Agârbicean into his credit book, whereas a few years earlier it figured as Agarbiceanu in the yearbooks of the Romanian gymnasium of Blaj.44 At the Faculty of Humanities, however, Axente Banciu could only keep the spelling of his name (pronounced [ʹbant͡ʃu]) unchanged by falsely insisting, when cross-examined by Professor Pál Gyulai, that it sounded [ʹbɔnt͡siʲu], as it would in Hungarian.45 After finding their names misspelt on their matura certificates at the Calvinist gymnasium of Orăștie, the later Romanian prime minister and president Petru Groza and the future Greek Catholic cathedral provost Nicolae Brînzeu went to complain to the headmaster. The episode, as related in Groza’s memoirs, highlights the (perhaps feigned) outrage of the high school headmaster after his honour students manifested loyalty to another high culture, one that his own circles tended to diabolize. Incidentally, the spellings quoted by Groza (in particular the circumflex in brînza) do not seem to be Hungarian transcriptions, but rather approximations to meaningful Romanian words, notably the ones mentioned in the text. – Sir, in this certificate my name is spelt with an accent on o: ‘Gróza’. But I am called Groza, without the accent. In our Ciparian orthography, this accent on the letter o

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makes it sound oa, which would also mean that my name is not Groza, but Groaza. Now, that sounds bad to us, and I wouldn’t like to carry that name throughout my lifetime! The old director looked at me astonished through his dazzling glasses, followed by a moment of awkward silence. But seeing that my friend Brînzeu was also holding his certificate in his hand and anticipating another, similar surprise, he snapped at him: – And you? With a physiognomy that betrayed the smile of the later Jesuit, Brînzeu quietly replied: – Sir, in my certificate there is written ‘Brînza’. But my name is Brînzeu. I resent such distortion of my proper Romanian name, the more so as, in Romanian, the word ‘brînza’ means the same that is called ‘túró’ in Hungarian, which I also can’t bear for a lifetime. On hearing this, the old director truly awoke from the bewilderment into which he had fallen, and yelled out to us in rage: – You treacherous snakes! I have cherished and nursed you in my bosom for eight years, and now, you are proving yourselves to be some venomous Vlachs, enemies of the Hungarian nation! And he threw us out of his office so that we were left with those certificates and with those names, made official and later copied into all our documents. For a long time, we remained ‘groază’ [horror] and ‘brînză’ [curd].46

The transcription of citizens’ family names into Hungarian could offer the practical advantage of making their pronunciation clear  – not negligible in a bureaucracy chiefly staffed by Magyars and with Hungarian as its main working language. The Romanian press in Hungary, too, sometimes spelt Hungarian family names in the Romanian way and with the same intent.47 But spelling a Romanian name in Hungarian was no simple business either, especially if the name-bearer was illiterate. A clerk faced with this task had two options. He could transcribe a Romanian written form as found in another document, but he could easily get lost if various sources spelt the same name differently, especially if he was unversed in the intricacies of Romanian spellings; or he could try to transcribe the name by ear, but this could encumber the spelling with dialect features and make his forms hard to match with ones recorded by other clerks. It did not help that there were tendencies rather than rules for the Hungarian spelling of the Romanian vowels missing from Hungarian. The practice was inconsistent until well after the introduction of the civil registry. Some clerks spelt the family name in Hungarian and the given name in Romanian (Zsura Iuon), while others did the inverse (Jura János). Others still produced half-transcribed forms, mixing elements from Romanian and Hungarian spellings, not to mention the frequent German interferences. A name as simple as Dubar was written down in at least three different fashions, all intended as Hungarian, in the court records of a case in Hunyad County.48 To make matters worse, an erratic Romanian hand could also easily produce

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forms that made the reader wonder about the pronunciation of a name, as Hungarian and German spellings had a permanent influence on the already uncertain Romanian orthographic practice. In 1908, an anonymous correspondent to the educational journal Biserica și Școala scolded a Romanian priest who had spelt the same boy’s family name in three different ways in three parish register transcripts (as Macicovescu, Mașcovescu and Macskovesku) and he lamented in general that the forms in which peasants’ names appeared on gables, grave signs, coffins and wayside crosses did not reflect either custom or the parish registers, but only the executing craftsmen’s spellings.49 For example, when a Swabian stonemason painted a Romanian customer’s name on the gable of a new house, as was customary in the Banat, the result would likely reveal German influence.50 For intellectuals, cross-switching between Romanian and Hungarian spellings of one’s family name, still feasible at the outset of the era, increasingly turned problematic and could expose the person to the charge of turncoating from both sides. Dénes Pázmándy, Independentist MP and specialist of the ‘Romanian question’, exploited this rhetorical potential to discredit two convicts of the famous Memorandum trial, Father Vasile Lucaciu and Ioan Rațiu, as defecting Magyars. It gives a touch of irony to his claims that, unsurprisingly for 1897, he appeared under the Frenchified name ‘D. de Pazmandy’ on the cover of his pamphlet. Lukacs→‘Lukaciu’, being born in a half-Hungarian village, was declared by his parents to be the son of Mr Lukacs (Lucas), spelt in Hungarian. Our clergyman was thus called when he was still a professor at the Hungarian high school of Szatmár. The threat of a transfer to another city made him an irredentist, and he immediately added a sonorous u to his Hungarian name … an ab origine Hungarian name. They showed me the old sign on the door of his law firm in Torda – and it read: Racz. Mr Ratiu became a Hungarian-basher and quite naturally appended the vibrating u to his name.51

And vice versa: the fact that the former Greek Catholic confessional school teacher Alexiu Pocoliu/Pokol Elek spelt his name in the Hungarian way after a lucky strike turned him into a millionaire and he rubbed shoulders with the high and mighty, could seem like a full-scale name change to a Magyar observer: ‘The former primary-school teacher was called Pokol by that time after he had relinquished his Romanian-sounding old name, Pokoliu, since it behoved a peace-time gentleman to have a name that sounds Hungarian’.52 By the turn of the century at the latest, the Romanian nationalist camp had widely denounced as renegades those ethnic Romanians who regularly transcribed their family names under Hungarian texts, unless a Hungarian-influenced surname was in question. To underline their supposed betrayal of the national cause, the Romanian press of Hungary tendentiously referred to Grigore Moldovan and

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Gheorghe Alexici in the Hungarian fashion, as ‘Moldován Gergely’ and ‘Alexics György’, amplifying their point by using the Hungarian name order. Tribuna even transcribed Ioan Ciocan’s name into ‘Csokán’ when reporting on the praises that Dezső Bánffy’s paper heaped on the Năsăud professor, although he kept the spelling Ciocan in Hungarian.53 Following the practice of the Romanian press, a Uniate priest from Szatmár County used the same device to pillorize six of his congregation who had voted for a Magyar village secretary, writing their names in the parish record (historia domus) ‘in the language that they hold dear’.54 The village secretary Căldăraru/Kaldarár in Rebreanu’s Ion and Dragonescu/ Dragoneszku, a high official from Temeswar in József Méliusz’s wartime autobiographical novel, advanced their careers by spelling their names in Hungarian, but also drew the contempt of fellow Romanians.55 The spelling of family names had grown into a staple grievance of Romanian political actors. In everyday routine situations, however, their testiness gave way to a great deal of flexibility. In 1903, the editor of the local Libertatea attacked the mayor of Orăștie in the town council, rebuking him for the Germanized spelling Kristea in the passport that the town hall had issued for an engineer named Cristea.56 His outrage seems studied or at least gratuitous, however, as at around the same time, the Romanian notary at the town hall habitually spelt town councillors’ names in the most diverse ways on town assembly invitations, including ethnically ‘transgressive’ diacritics.57 When inveighing against the ubiquitous transcription of Romanian family names into Hungarian, Romanian national activists could only gradually appeal to peasants’ own sense, let alone family tradition, of spelling their names, since the majority of them remained illiterate until the end of the era and therefore made three X marks instead of a signature. For peasants, especially for the illiterate, a name existed as a sounding form, and writing was a ceremonial or, at any rate, a somewhat mysterious practice. Only the elite would sometimes read somebody’s name before hearing it and may have wondered how that written form was pronounced. In his already quoted opinion piece from 1866, that is before the Magyar menace had become acute, Bariț made a sober assessment of the situation, exhorting the elite to pay more attention to their names, and the clergy to oversee those of the rest. Around that time, many parish registers were still kept in Cyrillic or had just shifted to the Roman script, which held out the promise of an onomastic blank slate.58 By 1908, the discourse invoking the allegedly homogeneous tradition of Romanian spelling could not easily conceal the little tradition and no homogeneity. In that year, Libertatea presented as ‘national marks’ the diacritics specific to the Romanian phonemic orthography, and suggested that Romanian confessional school teachers, whenever they felt uncertain of the proper spelling of their pupils’ names, should check them in the parish registers, which the article claimed as being the repository of authentic spelling.59 But the marks thus

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elevated to national significance had been in usage for twenty-five years at best, and the teachers had a fair chance to find etymological or mixed spellings in parish registers, especially in Uniate communities. The consecutive shifts from Cyrillic to Latin scripts and from etymological to phonemic orthographies not only upset, and in the short term made uncertain, the relationship between the pronunciation and the spelling of Romanian, but they also left a long-lasting mark on many a written Romanian family name. In an era when the majority of the population was still illiterate, the confusion around the spelling of family names was all the greater. And yet from early on the question was invested with political stakes, because Magyars tended to transcribe Romanian names, a practice that increasingly conveyed a principled dismissal of a Romanian writing system’s right to existence in Hungary; however, the returns to Pesty’s survey showed that the Magyar village secretaries incumbent in 1864–65 had already acquainted themselves with Romanian etymological spelling. The Romanian nationalist intelligentsia, as experts in matters of spelling, hoped to strengthen their bid for political leadership: first, against the widespread official practice of transcription, and then against the head-on offensive mounted by the state into this domain. But the expertise thus claimed was based on all too tenuous grounds. In face-to-face conflicts with persons of authority, defending one’s way of spelling one’s own name proved a rewarding way to assert both cultural and national difference. But when the same intelligentsia strived to make the peasantry conscious about how important it was to spell their names ‘correctly’, it was only with great difficulties that they could present the diacritics of phonemic orthography as ‘national signs’, and they could not credibly direct peasants to parish registers as the ultimate standard for spelling. While the state control of family names was largely limited to writing, the systemic encroachment into place names, a subject that will occupy the rest of the book, was as extensive and intrusive as was the official first-name regime. Both of these hit home even with the illiterate, as they sought to replace their most intimate verbal references with forms that sounded as well as looked c­ onspicuously alien.

Notes   1. Emphasis in the original.   2. See Berecz, Politics of Early Language Teaching, 103–6.   3. V.Gr. Borgovanu, Amintiri din copilărie: școala primară, românească și nemțească, preparandia și gimnaziul; 1859–1873 [Childhood memories: Romanian and German primary schools, teachers college and high school, 1859–1873] (Brașov: Mureșianu, 1909), 78.   4. Braniște, Amintiri din închisoare, 5.

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  5. On the -u(l)/Ø alternation in old Romanian personal names and the possible alternative origins of the -u ending, see Al. Graur, ‘Les Noms roumains en -u(l)’, Romania 52 (1926), 495–504; and M. Cosniceanu, ‘Nume de familie românești cu și fără articolul -l’ [Romanian family names with and without the -l article], Limba Română [Chișinău] 17(10–12) (2007), 170–71.   6. Graur, Nume de persoane, 97.   7. Cf. D. Tomescu, Gramatica numelor proprii în limba română [The grammar of proper nouns in Romanian] (Bucharest: ALL, 1998), 189–90.   8. N. Gheran, Tînărul Rebreanu [The young Rebreanu] (Bucharest: Albatros, 1986), 80; and C. Sigmirean, Elevi din Transilvania la Academia Militară de Honvezi ‘Ludovika’ din Budapesta [Transylvanian pupils at the ‘Ludovika’ Honvéd Military Academy in Budapest] (Sibiu: Astra Museum, 2013), 98.   9. Reuniunea învățătorilor (1909), nos 11 and 12; and Biserică și școală (1909), no. 29. 10. ‘Oniț’ (= Onițiu), ‘Pușcar’ (= Pușcariu), ‘Barcian’ (= Barcianu) and ‘Cipar’ (= Cipariu); a 1911 letter by Andrei Bârseanu in V. Braniște, Corespondență [Correspondence], Vol. 4, 1911–1918 (Cluj-Napoca: Argonaut, 2001), 51; an 1898 entry in N. Cristea, File de memorialistică: jurnal [Pages of memoir: diary] (Sibiu: Tribuna, 1998), 187; Daniil Popovici Barcianu’s obituary in Libertatea 8/21 February 1903; and Libertatea 8/21 October 1905. 11. I. Velceanu, Autobiografie [Autobiography] (Timișoara: Tipografia Românească, 1937), 15. 12. I. Marin, ‘The Formation and Allegiance of the Romanian Military Elite Originating from the Banat Military Border’, PhD thesis (University College London, School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies, 2009), 219; available at http://discovery.ucl. ac.uk/18562/1/18562.pdf (last accessed 11 September 2019). 13. Iorga, Oameni cari au fost, Vol. 2 (, 1935), 98 and 183; and Iorga, Neamul romănesc, Vol. 1, 46. 14. H. Schuchardt, ‘De l’Orthographe du roumain’, Romania 2 (1873), 78. 15. Gh. Jianu, Potpourri (Oravița: self-published, 1901), 33; and I. Pătruț, Nume de persoane și nume de locuri românești [Romanian personal names and place names] (Bucharest: Ed. Științifică și Enciclopedică, 1984), 104. 16. Lapedatu, 28 and 31; and Tăslăuanu, Spovedanii, 193. 17. Kemény, Vol. 5 (1971), 365. 18. From S. Dănilă, ‘Scrisori din Bătaia Mare’ [Letters from the Big Fight], Patrimonium Banaticum 2 (2003), 171. 19. O. Lobmeyr-Hohenleiten, ‘Steiermark, Kärnten, Krain’, in K.G. Hugelmann (ed.), Das Nationalitätenrecht des altes Österreich (Vienna: Braumüller, 1934), 480–81, 500–1 and 531; A. Manussi Montesole, ‘Die Adrialänder’, in K.G. Hugelmann (ed.), Das Nationalitätenrecht des altes Österreich (Vienna: Braumüller, 1934), 629; and A. Lasciac, Erinnerungen aus meiner Beamtencarrière in Österreich: in den Jahren 1881–1918 (Trieste: Lasciac, 1939), 15–16. 20. In general, the transcription of family names between languages using the same writing system is rare today, except in fossilized forms, but it is still the rule for Latvian and Lithuanian; Walkowiak, Personal Name Policy, 359–66. 21. OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A. 22. Béla Barabás’s speech in the debate of the 1904 bill on primary schools (Lex Berzeviczy) on 10 August 1904; Képviselőházi napló (1901), Vol. 28, 369.

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23. OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel 37. 24. Ghentii (= Gönczi), Siencu (= Schenk), Ghiurfi (= Györffi), Siuleru (= Schuller). 25. Bariț, ‘Cum se se scria connumele neromanesci’. Cf. the gymnasium teacher Vasile Dumbravă’s manual of orthography on the spelling of foreign names: V. Dumbrava, Ortografia română in actuala sa stare de desvoltare [Romanian orthography in the present stage of its evolution] (Beiuș: n.p., 1897), 36. 26. Cf. Iorga, Neamul romănesc, Vol. 1, 336, where Iorga is dismayed to find Romanian shopkeepers’ names spelt in Hungarian in Dobra, Hunyad County. 27. Luminatoriulu (1892), no. 33, quoted in Oallde, 151. 28. V. Ciubotă et al., Lupta românilor din județul Satu Mare pentru făurirea statului național unitar român: documente 1848–1918 [The struggle of Romanians in Satu Mare County for the creation of a unitary Romanian nation-state: documents, 1848–1918] (Bucharest: Direcția Generală a Arhivelor Statului din Republica Socialistă România, 1989), 384. 29. Berecz, Politics of Early Language Teaching, 125–32. 30. Libertatea 23 August / 5 September 1908; and O. Ghibu, Școala românească din Transilvania și Ungaria: desvoltarea ei istorică și situația ei actuală [Romanian school in Transylvania and Hungary: its historical development and present situation] (Bucharest: Göbl, 1915), 44. State school inspectors had earlier sometimes tried to enforce the Hungarian transcription of family names. One such episode is related from the Szilágysomlyó/Șimleu Silvaniei Romanian girls’ endowment school from 1895 in A. Vicaș, XXV ani [sic] din viața Reuniunei Femeilor Române Sělăjene 1881–1906 [25 years from the life of the Sălaj Romanian Women’s Association, 1881–1906] (ȘimleulSilvaniei: Victoria, 1906), 45–46. 31. From the committee’s report dated 8–9 October 1910; O. Ghibu, Cercetări privitoare la situația învățământului nostru primar și la educația populară [Investigations into the state of our primary schooling and popular education] (Sibiiu: Tipografiei archidiecezane, 1911), 6. On the wavering practice in contemporary German, see A. Zastrow, ‘Zur Schreibung fremdsprachiger Namen im 19. Jahrhundert’, in R. Heuser and M. Schmuck (eds), Sonstige Namenarten: Stiefkinder der Onomastik (Boston, MA: De Gruyter, 2018), 433–51. 32. Libertatea 23 August / 5 September 1908. 33. Dănilă, 184. 34. On the settlement in Babșa/Babsa, see J. László, A Bukovinában élő (élt) magyarság és kirajzásainak története 1762-től 1914-ig az első világháború kitöréséig [The history of Bukovina Magyars and their relocations between 1762 and 1914, the outbreak of the First World War] (Kolozsvár: Kriterion, 2005); and N. Săcară and V. Cica, ‘Gospodăria maghiară din Babșa de la Muzeul Banatului’ [Magyar household from Babșa in the Museum of the Banat], Tibiscus: Etnografie 3 (1978), 167–80. 35. I thank Gábor Egry for this information. 36. Magyar Közigazgatás 14(25) (1896), 3. Cf. Magyar Közigazgatás 30(30) (1912), 4. 37. Decree 24,233/1901 of the Ministry of the Interior; Belügyi Közlöny 6 (1901), 76–77. 38. The minister also cites a hypothetical Romanian written form Chitiu, supposedly derived from a Hungarian Kis, which is all too unlikely. 39. Lévy, 434. 40. This is another widespread Romanian family name that probably has a Hungarian loanword as its origin in most instances, as dialectal Romanian socaci also means ‘cook’. The example is taken from the archives of Caransebeș. It seems that in 1907 and 1908, the

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Caransebeș town hall ‘corrected’ the family names of craftsmen who applied for trade licences. Thus, the locksmith who signed his name as George Socaciu (under a request in Hungarian) became Szokács György in the response; ANR Caransebeș, Fond Primăria orașului Caransebeș 47/1907–08, 45 and 109. 41. Răvașul 5 (1907), 25. 42. Brassóvármegye Hivatalos Lapja 5 (1907), 375. 43. Láng, A magyar beszéd tanításának, 101; and Gy. Berecz, ‘A beszéd- és értelemgyakorlatok módszeres kezelése a nem-magyar tannyelvü iskolák I-ső osztályában’ [The methodical treatment of speech and mind exercises in the first year of schools with non-Hungarian medium], Néptanítók Lapja 12 (1879), 208. 44. Zaciu, unpaginated annexe. 45. A. Banciu, Valul amintirilor [Flood of memories] (Cluj-Napoca: Editura Universitară Clujeană, 1998), 215. 46. Groza, Adio lumii vechi!, 37–38. 47. For example, Libertatea spelt the name of a Magyar councillor in the Orăștie town hall as Șüchei in the issue of 5/18 January 1902, but as Sükei in the following number. In 1904, Minister Albert Berzeviczy’s name usually appeared in the Hungarian form, but sometimes as Berzeviți, to indicate the pronunciation. 48. ANR Deva, Fond Tribunalul Hunedoara 1/1905. 49. ‘Scrisoarea’ [The letter], Biserica și Școala, 21 December 1908 / 3 January 1909, pp. 4–5. 50. H. Gehl, Wörterbuch der donauschwäbischen Lebensformen (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2005), 43. 51. D. de Pazmandy, La Vérité sur la situation des Roumains en Hongrie (n.p., n.d. [1897]), 39. Rác is an old Hungarian ethnonym for a Serb (from Rascia/Raška). Lucaciu/Lukács is a duck-rabbit name. The Rațiu/Rácz are an old Transylvanian noble family with the predicate nagylaki, and the first time a member of the family transcribed the name as Ratiu was in 1820; I.-Gh. Rațiu, ‘Familia Rațiu de Noșlac: Dinastie culturală românească; 7 secole de istorie în slujba românilor’ [The Rațiu de Noșlac/Nagylak family: a Romanian cultural dynasty; seven centuries in the service of Romanians], Țara Bârsei, new series 14 (2015), 54–57. 52. Gy. Krúdy, Régi pesti históriák: színes írások [Old stories from Pest: colourful writings] (Budapest: Magvető, 1964), 173. On Pokol, see R.C. Tőkőly, ‘Câteva date cu privire la familia Pokol de Lozna Mare’ [A few data concerning the Pokol de Lozna Mare family], Revista Arhivei Maramureșene 3 (2010), 175–84. 53. O.Em. Judean, ‘Solidarități politico-naționale la românii năsăudeni în timpul alegerilor parlamentare de la începutul secolului XX’ [National-political solidarities among the Romanians of Năsăud at the time of parliamentary elections in the early twentieth century], in C. Bărbulescu et al. (eds), Identitate și alteritate 5: studii de istorie politică și culturală [Identity and alterity 5: studies of political and cultural history] (Cluj-Napoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2011), 38. 54. Ludovic Mărcuș, ‘Istoria parohiei greco-catolice române de Madarasu începând de la Anul Domnului 1887’ [History of the Mădăras/Madratz/Madarász Romanian Greek Catholic parish since the year 1887], in V. Câmpean, V. Ciubotă and M. Sălceanu, Mădăras: Contribuție monografică [Mădăras: contributions to a local monograph] (Fersig: MaestroTip, 2017), 184. 55. L. Rebreanu, Opere [Works], Vol. 4, Ion (Bucharest: Minerva, 1970), 445; and J. Méliusz, Város a ködben: regény [City in the mist: a novel] (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1982), 482.

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Rebreanu’s printed text has Kaldarar, but the form Kaldarár seems more congruous with his intentions. Cf. also Libertatea 23 August / 5 September 1908. 56. Libertatea 18/31 October 1903. 57. ANR Deva, Fond Primăria orașului Orăștie 2/1903. 58. To give examples from the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1866, the parish registers were still being kept in Cyrillic in Vecherd/Vekerd in Bihar County and in Tămășasa in Hunyad County, but they shifted to the Roman script in that very year in Răcășdia (Krassó County), and perhaps a year earlier in the Romanian Orthodox parishes of the southern part of the later Temes County; Gh. Borza, C. Borza and M. Popescu Borza, Tămășasa în documente, amintiri, datini, obiceiuri și tradiții (n.p., 2007), 16; E. Csobai, ‘Comunitatea românească din Vecherd’ [The Romanian community of Vekerd/Vecherd], in E.R. Colta (ed.), Modele de conviețuire în Europa Centrală și de Est [Models of coexistence in Central and Eastern Europe] (Arad: Complexul Muzeal Arad, 2000), 178; Em. Novacoviciu, Monografia comunei Răcășdia jud. Caraș-Severin dela anul 1777–1922 [Monograph of Răcășdia commune in Caraș-Severin County, 1777–1922] (Oravița: Weiss, 1923), 62; and M. Samoilă, Viața numelui: contribuții la relațiile dintre numele de famiile și localități raportat la românii din Voivodina [The life of names: contributions to the relationship between family name and home locality among Romanians of the Voivodina] (Seleuș: Comunitatea cultural-instructivă, 2002), 8. 59. Libertatea 23 August / 5 September 1908.

Chapter 9

The Grand Toponymic Manoeuvre

d Its International Context The publicity value inherent in place names had since early on prompted people, high- and low-born, to try to stamp out those with unpleasant connotations. Thus John II of Portugal wasted no time in ordering that the more auspicious Cape of Good Hope replace Cabo Tormentoso (‘stormy cape’), the name first given by the discoverer Bartholomew Dias; and it took the people of Gyakfalu (‘Bonkham’) in the Ugocsa County of the Kingdom of Hungary two centuries until the elusive Nevetlenfalu (‘no name village’) finally phased out its earlier, salacious name.1 It was only in the nineteenth century, however, that elites began to interpret the place-name cover as representative of collective history and sometimes as a mirror of a proper national linguistic variety, functions previously alien to it. In practice, this could translate into correcting the perceived blemishes of the inherited toponymy or, on the peripheries of Europe, into its massive remodelling according to nationalist preconceptions. Changing people’s actual linguistic habits is a troublesome business, however. In this realm, change could ensue slowly, through those impersonal channels of social communication that greatly multiplied their impact in the nineteenth century, and where state elites could feel in the saddle thanks to their formal policing powers: the print media, the mail service, written administration, road signs and, in a paradigmatic way, the map, now reproduced tens of thousands of times for classroom purposes. In general, expanded schooling and heightened long-distance social communication made more people more conscious of the geography of their ascribed national space. The fragile and jostling new states and national movements of Eastern Europe at large, however, did not solely address their citizenries or kin constituencies

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with the map toponymies they sponsored, but also Western public opinion and especially the high-powered Western diplomat, whose impressions gleaned from map gazing would, it was hoped, factor into his political sympathies. In Europe, where the state played the leading role in renaming places, the standards implemented in the process were steeped in upper-class ideas and visions of history – typically golden age myths – and were external to the perception of even well-disposed locals. Names branded ‘foreign’ in high places were not necessarily seen as such by those who used them on a daily basis. There were even local people habitually reproducing state-nationalist ways of thinking and behaviour who defied the normative use of newly introduced place names. Political and cultural elites applauded new names as the essentially true, authentic ones, eternal in a nebulous, abstract sense, and they bracketed the old ones as inconsequential by-products of history. Acts of renaming were supposed to render old names impractical and warn dominant ethnic minorities off their foreignness, but the elites failed to recognize that in so far as national identification gained ground among the masses, it did so largely as an extension of local ties; and for the potential membership pool, the accustomed names could serve as helpful identity symbols, sites of authenticity. The same also applied to national minorities to the extent that they became nationalized, and thus place renaming further alienated them from the states that pursued it. Like commemorative street naming and modern secular name-giving, toponymic engineering first gained massive proportions in revolutionary France. In 1792, the Jacobins embarked on expunging Christian and feudal references from place names; they even renamed Grenoble Grelibre. Within the space of two years, 3,200 communes had taken up new names like Montagne, Union, Égalité and Marat, and only the Jacobin fall from power stopped them from introducing a more comprehensive list of six thousand.2 Later renaming campaigns also typically took place following revolutions, declarations of independence or major political upheavals. It gives credit to Benedict Anderson’s theory about the creole origins of nationalism that the first wave that was driven by nationalist sentiment unleashed in the independent Mexico of the 1820s, where coinages in Nahuatl and names of revolutionary leaders replaced settlement names that had been transferred from continental Spain.3 A few national place-name committees began their activity in the long nineteenth century, notably in Greece, the United States, Italy and Denmark; they would become more prevalent after the First World War.4 Two such bodies from Greece are reported in the literature. One was brought to life as early as 1843 by King Othon, with the aim of reviving the classical Hellenic toponymy.5 The second one operated between 1909 and 1912, and established new names for a full fifteen hundred localities, but in the end these were not put into practice.6 The American Board on Geographic Names, set up in 1890, is a prime example that large-scale renaming campaigns did not automatically attend nationwide

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codification in the matter. Initially, its main duty was to investigate and settle controversial cases, and it had as one of its principles that bureaucratic practice should follow local usage. Only in 1906 was it given the mandate to baptize previously unnamed places. In an unusual manner, it lacked the authority to enforce its decisions upon anyone but government officials; for more than twenty years, Pittsburghers could go about flouting the board’s ruling to remove the h from the name of their city.7 Some goals and strategies that name-givers pursued in other lands were against the grain of the Magyar remakers of Dualist Hungary’s toponymy. New names were frequently created overseas from the resources of non-dominant or extinct languages, harnessing autochthonous traditions to give expression to distinctly postcolonial identities. Apart from the Nahuatl-based Mexican names mentioned above, artificial Native American or Native American-sounding place names also came into favour among white Americans in the 1840s, while Anglo settlers in California developed a taste for Spanish names, or names intended as Spanish.8 Even more significant was the trend to honour esteemed or powerful people with settlement names, ubiquitous outside Europe and also cropping up in the Romanov Empire and the new Balkan states, where places were named and renamed after members of the ruling dynasties.9 In the Hungarian process, this commemorative method was applied very sparingly. Aside from seven place names from the area studied, newly prefixed with names of (historic) landowning families – a pattern already present in vernacular place naming – three villages were renamed after local boys.10 Although members of the Communal Registry Board and village councils made a dozen such proposals, only one village received the name of a living person: the Romanian–Saxon Hundorf that of the acting subprefect.11 The examples cited so far belong to the domain of codification and were carried out in the single dimension of state languages. Besides altering the body of Hungarian settlement names, however, the Hungarian regulation had another side to it, bearing on what macro-sociolinguists call status planning; it took away recognition from non-Hungarian place-name variants and relegated their use to the private sphere. This second dimension may also appear on its own. Such a purely status-planning measure, without any intervention into the actual names, was a 1911 decision by the Federal Council of Switzerland affirming the principle that each commune should be designated in the language of the local majority in official texts.12 The lands of today’s Austria saw no ideologically motivated change of settlement names in the period.13 In contemporary Europe, the Greek and Prussian projects offer the closest comparison to Hungary’s renaming campaign, although both were more drawn-out processes. In all three cases, nationalizing elites sought to adjust the place-name cover to their visions of a national golden age, and all three made linguistic minorities feel undesirable along the way. But while the

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Greek endeavour was hardly visible from Hungary, the Polish-speaking provinces of Prussia likely served as a model for the Hungarian process. Moreover, it is safe to assume after contrasting the two timelines of state policies that the influence was mutual. The remodelling of modern Greek toponymy was propelled by a robust ideology that wanted the Kingdom of Greece as the rebirth of classical Hellas and, as far as possible, it attempted to conceal the presence of non-Greek speakers on its territory. Immediately after the declaration of independence, the monarchy’s provinces and administrative communes, adjusted to the ancient grid of settlements, were invested with the corresponding names taken from ancient sources. Settlement names of non-Greek origin were found inconvenient and were labelled ‘Barbarian’. Throughout the next century, local bosses, amateur historians and government officials worked in coalition towards eradicating such names, along with those simply deemed ugly, and they created new ones with a classical gloss by translation, classicizing or simply out of thin air. While this was a piecemeal and decentralized process within the 1832 borders, prefects initiated all-out purifications of the map in the lands annexed later.14 A royal decree of 1909 inaugurated a Committee for the Study of the Toponyms of Greece, condemning ‘foreign elements’ of the Greek place-name cover as a collective stigma tainting the nation’s self-image and the face that it turned to the outside world. Such ‘barbaric’ forms stemmed from ‘national disasters and humiliation’, the decree tells us; they had a ‘damaging educational impact’ on the population as they tended to shrink and diminish its spirit, whereas, for the external observer, they raised ‘false suspicion over the ethnic composition of the villages’. Their replacement with what the decree called ‘older Greek names’ was therefore touted as ‘integral to liberation and the suppression of any trace of former national mishaps’.15 The fiction that the new names were the old ones, despite the lack of supporting evidence, was common to all nationstate-sponsored ‘regimes of spatial inscription’,16 but the importance attached to this point, the sincerity with which it was asserted, and the regard actually paid to historical data varied from case to case. In Greece, at least the ideological investment in the historical dimension was somewhere near the higher end of the scale. The tinkering with Slavic place names in the Prussian provinces of Western Prussia and Posen also came wrapped up in references to medieval German populations. These were to play a more modest role, however, whilst the theme of the treacherous Polish inhabitants took centre stage, in direct opposition to small and fragile Greece, where the fact that dwellers of many renamed villages spoke Slavic, Albanian or Aromanian instead of Greek was hushed up in public discourse. From early on, the Germanization of Polish settlement names was accompanied by an argument that affirmed it as a just response to the Polish elite’s anti-German stance.

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In contrast to Greece, where the initiative came from the new state bureaucracy, the Prussian process got underway as a grassroots movement, and the state latched onto it as a late player. When a German landlord first filed a request in 1836 to get the name of his estate, Kopitkowo, changed to Lichtenthal, the Prussian Ministry of the Interior duly rejected his plan. Moreover, once the trend had risen to prominence in the 1860s among the ethnic German provincial bourgeoisie, several district administrators and the minister himself issued warnings, reminding local governments that the changing of settlement names was dependent on the ministry’s prior approval, and that whilst a cosmetic Germanization of place-name formants (e.g. from Papowo to Pappau) was still acceptable, a substantially new German name could only pass if petitioners could sustain its historical authenticity with documentary evidence. The Prussian state only warmed to the idea of massive toponymic Germanization during the Kulturkampf of the 1870s, but then to such an extent that many new proposals concerning Posen came from state officials, whereas the renaming of Germanspeaking localities was as a rule initiated by local councillors. Although the ministry took note of local opinion, only very seldom were Polish residents able to thwart the name change of their homeplace. Hundreds of new German names were introduced in 1878 alone, and by 1912, the majority of the four thousand German place names in Posen were recent creations.17 An 1899 decree by the Prussian minister of the interior suggests the influence of the Hungarian law on locality names from the previous year. It mandated the use of German settlement names in all official documents wherever such names existed, reiterating the formula of the Hungarian law that each locality should bear one name only and, citing the same rationale, that these should meet the requirements for efficient transport and communications. And while it made no mention of the second principle put forth in the Hungarian law, that each name had to be borne by a single locality, in practice, the Prussian ministry tried to avoid that new names led to homonymy within Prussia.18 Prior to the First World War, apart from the very early and different French revolutionary experiment, no other place renaming campaign was as methodical, well coordinated or thoroughgoing in its scope as the Hungarian one, and even among similar state-sponsored projects of the twentieth century, only the renaming of the map in Israel, in Turkey and of Poland’s post-1918 and post1945 acquisitions exceeded its ambitions.19 Not without its antecedents, it did not grow out of a popular movement on a par with the one in Prussia as its first practitioners were mostly state employees, teachers and county officials, befitting the system of patronage politics that characterized the non-Magyar peripheries of Dualist Hungary especially. It was made possible by the concurrence of a despotic premier intent on appeasing a hostile public opinion with sabre-rattling and inexpensive nationalist measures, and by an interest in the issue in county leadership and Magyar associations. The Bánffy government gave a two-sided

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rationale for the process, bringing into relief the symbolic re-Magyarization it was expected to perform and the modernity inherent in rationalizing the placename cover. Both framings addressed the public well disposed to Hungarian state nationalism in the first place, and the national minorities were mainly present lurking in the subtext as fodder for assimilation, but also as aliens who had supposedly distorted the original forms. Far from being the privilege of aspiring nation-states culturally appropriating their territories, the practice of ideological place renaming was embraced with similar enthusiasm by up-and-coming national movements and irredentas, without the means of bringing their new or resurrected names fully into effect. Slovene place names openly flaunting their German origins got replaced by Slavic creations (Marbrk→Maribor, Možbrk→Blatograd, Karenburk→Krnski Grad), early twentieth-century Basque nationalists dug up and promoted archaic names like Arrasate for Mondragón and Gastez for Vitoria, the irredentist activist Ettore Tolomei invented a whole new Italian toponymy and microtoponymy for Central Tyrol, the Gaelic League published in two editions the list of the original place names ‘anglicized’ during the Ordnance Survey, while thanks to the purist leanings behind Greek irredentism, the Greeks of Sozopolis on the Bulgarian coast discovered that they lived in Apollonia and Greek children from Smyrna and Cappadocia were taught by their teachers to call their playing sites by obscure names dating from the Hellenistic age instead of the Turkish-origin ones that the entire community used.20 When it came to the treatment of Romanian place names, Latinists differed sharply from later Romanian generations. They often modified vernacular names to fit the etymologies that they saw in them, or whimsically substituted them with ancient Roman names taken from Dacia and Italy. The second edition of Treboniu Laurian’s History of the Romanians and Spiridon Fetti’s map of Transylvania, both from 1862, featured arbitrary Latinizations, like Rupea (< Hun. Kőhalom ‘cairn’ × Lat. rupes ‘rock’), Sedișióra (vernacular Sighișoara × Lat. sedes ‘seat’), Urbea-mare instead of Oradea and Carelli instead of Carei; borrowings from ancient geography, like Sargețiulu instead of Strei, Bisterția instead of Bistrița, Aufena21 or Aufidena22 instead of Ofenbaia; and semantic adaptations from Hungarian and Slavic, like Tîrgulu Mureșului (‘market by the Mureș’, < Hun. Marosvásárhely idem) instead of Oșorhei, Pretoriulu Secoiloru (‘seat of the Szeklers’, < Hun. Székelyudvarhely idem) instead of Odorhei, Auraria instead of Zlatna (< Slavic zlato ‘gold’), along with a series of ad hoc creations for the Szeklerland.23 Little survived from this trend to the next generation of Romanian nationalists, who espoused a more unrefined taste in language. Alba Iulia, a medieval Latin form consciously chosen instead of Roman Apulum, had replaced Bălgrad as the Romanian name of the seat of Alsó-Fehér County in learned writing and speech,24 the neologisms superior/superioară and inferior/inferioară lingered on in

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place names, and a handful of other innovations of lesser importance were also preserved, such as the substitution of luncă, a word of Slavic origin (‘meadow’), by vale ‘valley’ in Lunca Vinului.25 In addition, Romanian publications made intermittent use of Rupea, Târgu Mureșului, the pseudo-etymological Satu Mare (‘big village’, instead of vernacular Sătmar) and the Latinizing Silvania for Sălaj and Marmația for Maramureș. Most of these names were elevated to official status after 1918, together with a host of freshly invented ones; on the eve of the First World War, however, this much toponymic self-fashioning can be considered as moderate, especially when confronted with the prevalence of placename Magyarization as a theme in Romanian intellectual debates and political propaganda.

Renaming before 1898 What likely amounts to the first place renaming guided by a secular ideology in the territory studied is, appropriately enough, itself veiled in mystification. Carefully nurtured legend has it that the Emperor Joseph II greeted the Romanian border guards of the recently militarized Năsăud region with the Latin words ‘Salve, parva nepos Romuli!’ (Hail, Romulus’s little granddaughter!).26 Deeply moved by the imperial attention, his hosts would then rename four nearby villages, one after each word of this salute. The anecdote raises suspicion, as one of the villages had already borne the Slavic name Salva – and, giving His Majesty the benefit of the doubt, you may also credit him with the correct feminine form neptis – but it seems certain that three villages did receive new names. The renaming was aimed at uplifting the morale of fledgling militiamen, still restive and many of them forcibly resettled from other areas, by instilling pride in their Latin heritage. Under Joseph II still, the Transylvanian calendar for 1787 carried German and Latin names for every village of the province, most of them improvised and probably driven by a completist urge.27 Neither these German names nor the ones introduced in the mid nineteenth century did trickle down into everyday use; short of German vernacular names, Saxon authors made use of the Romanian or Hungarian endonym.28 In 1839, the first gazetteer of Transylvania again contained an array of new place-name variants, likely concocted by local contributors, among them ad hoc Hungarian names translated from Romanian for Zarand County, 95 per cent Romanian-speaking by one count:29 Fenyőfalva for Brad (Rom. brad and Hun. fenyő ‘fir’), Nyírfalva for Mesteacăn (Rom. mesteacăn and Hun. nyír ‘birch’), Tehénfalva for Vaca (Rom. vacă and Hun. tehén ‘cow’), etc.30 Attesting to the spuriousness of these forms are the eighteenth-century records of canonical visitations to the area’s diminutive Calvinist communities.31 Had they been employed anywhere, they would certainly have been in the internal record-taking of this culturally Magyar church; and while the records

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made ample references to the surrounding villages, they did so invariably under phonologically adapted Romanian forms.32 Unlike most purpose-made place names, these did have a stubborn afterlife. Twenty-five years later, three Magyar village secretaries from Zarand  – at a time when the county administration used Romanian as its official language – presented some of them to Pesty as the Hungarian names of their villages.33 More to the point, they turned up at the turn of the century in a representative piece of Hungarian Social Darwinist literature, Pál Balogh’s ethnic geography of Hungary, a bulky volume sponsored by the Hungarian government and depicting its subject as a land criss-crossed by trenches along which the ethnic masses were told to wage furious demographic warfare against Magyardom. Upon its publication, the Ministry of the Interior sent complimentary copies to all counties, towns and larger villages.34 The book made creative use of its scanty sources and gave free rein to historical fantasy; notably, it falsely presented the Hungarian variants from 1839 as authentic old names, which had gradually over time given way to new, Romanian ones. That the 1839 gazetteer had been edited by a German – read: an enemy – is emphasized as a circumstance warranting their authenticity: Half a century ago, the old place names were still in circulation. The Austrian lieutenant-general Lenk uses them in his German work. From thence we copy that what is today called Mihelény and Kurety was then Mihályfalva and Káposztásfalva, the Hungarian name of Kristyor was Körösfalva, that of Czereczel Czerneczfalva; Ribicsora was known under the name Kis-Ribicze, Riskulicza as Kis-Riska, the Magyar wrote Fenyőfalva instead of Brád, Nyirfalva instead of Mesztákon; Tehénfalva and not Vaka; Terfalva and not Lunka, Rudfalva and not Ruda, Barlangfalva and not Pestere were the accepted names. People tripped to Patakfalva instead of Valemare, they fed the horses in Koczafalva instead of Szkroffa, watered in Karácsonfalva instead of Krecsunesd, spent the night in Pecsétszeg instead of Tyulesd35 and got home via Kis-Bánya instead of Boitza and Kis-Hátszeg instead of Hadzacsel. In this manner got Romanianized – not only under the burden of the centuries that weighed on us but of our own fault as well – most of Hunyad.36

When the Habsburg administration introduced new German names for nonGerman settlements in the 1850s and 1860s  – usually conspicuous semantic adaptations of the endonyms – these were clearly not intended as the authentic names, and nobody but a few ill-advised German nationalists from Germany, like the geographer Heinrich Kiepert, who also championed the cause of establishing ‘original’ German place names in Lorraine, would ever interpret them within a ‘submerged Germandom’ narrative.37 In use for no more than a couple of years, they nevertheless left a deep mark in the collective memory of the Magyar intelligentsia (as would later the artificial Hungarian names in Romanian minds), even if the actual name changes became muddled up in public memory with

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contemporary spoofs aimed at discrediting them; the example most frequently adduced, Wüthender Armenier (‘angry Armenian’) as the artificial German translation of Böszörmény (Hun. bősz örmény ‘angry Armenian’, but archaic böszörmény ‘Muslim’), was actually the writer Mór Jókai’s satirical invention from 1858.38 Magyars invoked these not just as an excuse for the systematic renaming at the turn of the century, as the historian Sándor Márki did in his programme article from 1894, but the tourism activist Gyula Merza even tried to blur them together with German endonyms when he claimed in 1903 that the leaders of some towns were still making use of such artificial German names.39 With this claim, he could only refer to Transylvanian Saxons, which likely strained the belief of even his most Germanophobic Transylvanian readers. The Hungarian names of settlements were remarkably stable even where the Romanian and Saxon peasantry did not speak Hungarian, leaving aside the Banat, a land demilitarized and reintegrated into the Kingdom of Hungary in 1779 (and its southern stripe after 1873).40 In the Banat, the hiatus in Hungarian administration and the intervening reshuffling of the population created uncertainties as to the proper Hungarian names of the settlements that had come down from the Middle Ages. Local officials and landowners had, by the 1860s, put a few real or supposed medieval forms in circulation, but administrative usage often fluctuated, as between Aranyág and Hernyákova,41 Csákóvár ‘old castle Csák’ or ‘shako castle’ and Csákova (the medieval Csák), Széplak and Mondorlak (Hun. szép and Rom. mândru ‘beautiful’), Örményes and Armenis.42 The medieval name Szörény was resurrected on the historian Mihály Horváth’s advice from 1872, to denote the county superseding the former Banat Romanian Regiment.43 Some old names, however, which had still surfaced in writing in the 1860s, did not make it into national gazetteers after 1867, like Csukás (instead of Ebendorf) and Kövesd (Gavosdia).44 New settlements were being founded continually throughout the Dualist period, especially in the Banat, although at a slower pace than previously. Settlers were increasingly Magyars, but even new German colonies would now first be baptized in Hungarian. Many new villages received commemorative names honouring the landlords or officials who had orchestrated the settlement, a strategy popular since the eighteenth century.45 Around 1893, however, the Budapest government utilized the foundation of Igazfalva and Nagybodófalva with Magyar settlers on Banat Treasury estates to revive medieval settlement names. Although it was quite clear that the medieval Igazfalva had not been anywhere near its modern successor, the annalist of the state settlement programme boasted that the name of the village was not a new invention and that Magyars were not newcomers, but that they had returned to the land.46 Sándor Ujfalvy’s giving the name Romladék to Săcătura/Szakatura, the site of his country mansion between 1819 and 1848, can be regarded as the first deliberate act of place renaming in a historical key. This tiny Romanian village,

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with no historical remains and with a name based on an archaic Romanian word meaning ‘clearing’, offered little to deserve the Hungarian name ‘ruin’, so one is left speculating that what inspired the choice was probably the same Romantic nostalgia for the Middle Ages that also made follies mushroom in England. It is noteworthy that while Ujfalvy as the landowner of the village consistently used his coinage in his letters and his memoirs, neither the otherwise well-informed county historian József Kádár nor the Communal Registry Board were even aware of its existence at the turn of the century, an ignorance well illustrated by the latter’s decision for Szakadás, a name of their own making, to be the new name for the village.47 Other new names proved more successful and longer lasting, but the lack of regulation meant that the change was sometimes less than straightforward. In the 1850s, the physician of the local spa started calling Monyásza Menyháza.48 Since the Hungarian verb monyász(ik) refers to the probing of a hen’s cloaca in search for eggs to be laid, the name betrays a euphemistic intent, which he nonetheless carried out through a Magyarized form (‘the daughter-in-law’s house’ or ‘the house of heaven’). The name first stuck on the spa resort, and only the Communal Registry Board extended it forty years later to the political commune, composed of two further settlement cores. With Gyulafehérvár, things were complicated in a different way. The Latin-rite Catholic bishopric seat and garrison town – the same one that Romanian nationalists had renamed Alba Iulia  – went by two Hungarian names in mid century: in addition to the medieval one, preserving the memory of one of several Magyar dignitaries of the Migration Period, the imperial administration had in the eighteenth century invested it with the name Károlyfehérvár after Emperor Charles VI, patron of large-scale fortification works and the associated overhaul of the urban texture.49 The latter name was used in official life, while the former had taken on an archaic flavour. In 1865, a town councillor interpreted their duality by linking them to the two contrasting periods of local history: the latter to the modern town to the east of the ramparts and the former to the earlier, western-side urban nucleus of pre-Habsburg times.50 In this light, the switch of both the municipality and the bishopric to the daily use of Gyulafehérvár between 1868 and 1871 should be seen as the upending of the local time map, affirming a continuity with the Hungarian Middle Ages instead of an eighteenth-century Habsburg emperor. The memory of the latter would later survive in the German name Karlsburg. Ludwigsdorf, also known as Cârlibaba or Stănișoara, came into being with German- and Romanian-speakers on a tract of land that had been transferred in 1769 from the Bukovina to the then established 2nd Wallachian Border Guard Regiment of Transylvania. Although Pesty’s local informants had indicated Ludwigsdorf as its ‘nationwide known name’, the transition to Hungarian administration saw the name Kirlibaba written on its seal and road entry signs. This latter had the shortcoming of failing to distinguish it from the identically

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named Bukovinian village just across the Bistrița Aurie/Goldene Bistritza River, but one may suspect strife between local Germans and Romanians behind the political commune’s request from 1887 to have this name cancelled from the official sphere. The county prefect Dezső Bánffy might then lean on the local leadership to apply for Lajosfalva of all names, the Hungarian translation of the German one.51 Bánffy, whose government would later introduce the bill on locality names, already presided over the first wholesale name change in the area as the prefect of Szolnok-Doboka County in 1890, when the county administration Magyarized twenty-seven out of the county’s 319 settlement names.52 Only two of these names restored historical forms entirely, and another two in part. Bánffy pushed the issue further by erecting a pole in front of each village hall, which carried the Hungarian name of the locality.53 Temes County followed suit and revised the Hungarian names of its settlements in 1893–94, Magyarizing twenty-one of them, four into revived archival forms. That at least some of these changes went against the grain of the locals is shown by the fact that in the 1900s, four affected communes wanted back some version of their pre-1893 names. All four requests were rejected, but unlike in the case of Szolnok-Doboka, the board reconsidered the county’s recent coinages and replaced six of them with forms that it deemed as more correct or more Hungarian. A few sporadic Magyarizations came about on apparent local initiative, probably some coordination between Magyar or pro-Magyar factions of the politically active locals and the county organs. In Krassó-Szörény County, the Romanian– German Moravica-Eisenstein had its name (partially) translated to Vaskő (‘ironstone’) in 1886 and the Tyrolean German Königsgnade to Királykegye (‘King’s grace’) in 1888, although the village secretary had already quoted the latter in 1864.54 In 1891, Burjánosoláhbuda in Transylvania was renamed Bodonkút, a form rummaged from a 1757 document, and the following year, the councillors of Hungarian-speaking, Calvinist Rittberg in the Banat voted to apply for an artificial name that reified a typical metaphor of the rising ethnodemographic discourse about Hungary’s peripheries: Végvár ‘border fortress’, an outpost of valiant Magyars beleaguered by a sinister mass of national minorities.55

The Ideological Case for the Magyarization of Settlement Names The Magyarization of locality names was driven by the two-pronged ambition that places in Hungary should appear under their Hungarian names in public life and that the Hungarian names should also impress as such. Once proper Hungarian names reigned supreme, it was thought, that would more firmly and closely tie the respective places to the nation’s space and would ‘outwardly signal the belonging of the land to the Hungarian state’.56

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The first half of this equation, which gave absolute priority to name variants in the state language, ultimately sprang from the state sovereignty principle, and incidentally coincided with the not so long ago prevailing definition of endonymy. Several Magyar authors contended that the state had a vested right to name its territory, implying that this right also overrode the will of locals.57 It should be noted that while most European state elites would have willingly granted this right in both domestic and international aspects, as they would have probably recognized state stewardship over national languages, such a rule did not prevail in Austria, which probably added to Magyar eagerness to vindicate it. Oktáv Hangay lashed out against school maps in Cisleithania, which showed Hungary with German names in German schools, with Slavic ones in Czech schools and with Romanian ones in the Romanian schools of the Bukovina.58 The Romanian-speaking parts of Hungary were, as a matter of course, also shown with Romanian names on school maps in Romania. The principal of the Déva/ Deva teachers’ college, a frequent writer on contemporary Romania, attacked the neighbours on this score for ‘officially instilling false names’ in students.59 What caused diplomatic conflict, however, was when Romanian school maps studiously toned down state boundaries, and presented these lands as parts of a larger Romanian entity.60 Some of the vicious language wars of Cisleithania raged over the German versus Italian, Slovenian or Polish versions of place names as they appeared on railway station buildings and in timetables, and German nationalists proved remarkably resourceful in sensitizing their public opinion to alleged slights to the German name variants, another terrain where champions of Hungarian names could look for inspiration.61 Since the Hungarian railway network was mostly state run, and had overwhelmingly implemented a Hungarian-only language policy by the turn of the century, Magyar activists picked a battle with the foreigners who addressed their mail in German, insisting that ‘on Hungarian soil, Kronstadt, Schemnitz, Salzburg, Klausenburg etc. n’existe pas’ (do not exist).62 If places in Hungary were referred to by their German or Romanian names in a third language, that was especially likely to draw sharp comments. Dénes Pázmándy called it la manie des grandeurs (‘delusions of grandeur’) that Magyar and Saxon towns of Transylvania figured under Romanian names in the French text of an irredentist pamphlet, claiming that nobody but the authors themselves ‘understood’ these names either in or outside of Hungary (a claim that would better deserve the same epithet), while the Déva principal flung mockery (in Hungarian) at the Romanian place names gracing the 1906 Bucharest expo pavilion that represented ‘Romanians beyond the borders’, rhetorically challenging geographers to find Avrig, Slimnic and Beuș on the map.63 Sanguine Magyars fantasized that the law on locality names could squeeze out non-Hungarian endonyms from the speech of Romanians and Saxons, thus also simplifying communication.64 Standing on the principle that a place should

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have no more than one name, it seemed to make some sense that Hungarian names were to create a common ground between the various linguistic groups, because ‘otherwise Kronstadt or Brasovi [sic] would alternate as the Saxons or the Wallachs have more children’.65 Such sophistry took a farcical turn when Hangay enumerated the Romanian names of Western Hungarian and the Slavic names of Transylvanian towns among those allegedly increasing the confusion.66 But the actual linguistic complexity of the state seemed big enough to serve as an alibi for official monolingualism. The president of the Hungarian Geographical Society tried to thwart a resolution by the Ninth International Geographic Conference in 1909 that allowed adding an optional additional name to the official one for each place included on the conference’s projected international map, by bringing up as examples towns from Hungary with current names in three, rather than just two, languages; and back in Budapest, he assured his Hungarian colleagues that the question remained to be settled by diplomatic means.67 In accordance with the sovereignty-based idea of linguistic forcing into line, the teacher and tourism activist Sándor Romhányi suggested that Magyars should, as a token of reciprocity, apply the locally official names when referring to places abroad: ‘Wallachs would surely feel more amenable to Kolozsvár instead of Clusiu if they were reassured by the power of law that from now on we are going to call Bucuresci what we have so far called Bukarest’.68 Others objected that the same rule could not apply for Vienna and Breslau, two cities that King Matthias of Hungary had added to his holdings for a brief time in the fifteenth century. These places had once been ‘Hungarian’, and therefore Magyars should maintain the right to call them in their own way.69 History pervaded the quest for ‘more Hungarian’ Hungarian names – ones with transparent meanings or at any rate fitting the phonology and the patterns of Hungarian endonyms. In Transylvania, there were hundreds of villages with ‘good’ Hungarian names but without ethnic Magyars – Pesty called them ‘grave marks of the Hungarian nation’70 – while in the eastern reaches of Hungary writ small and the Banat, the Hungarian forms in use had very often been borrowed from Romanian, and bore a South Slavic imprint from the early modern period. More whimsical historical fantasies decided that all place names in Hungary were ultimately rooted in Hungarian, and set out the task of finding the earlier, original forms. This already familiar idea was all the more powerful as it coincided with the archetypes of a golden age and the evil Other that frustrates efforts to restore the nation to its former fullness. In Hungary, this golden age was sometimes identified with King Matthias’s reign in the fifteenth century. Several of Pesty’s respondents had already speculated about the earlier Hungarian names, and pure guesswork remained a popular method of establishing them. In the meantime, however, Hungarian scholarship made great strides in collecting the toponymic records preserved in the archives. In keeping with the international vanguard of scholarship, Magyars moored their etymologies of

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settlement and other major place names to the comparative study of historical documents, and they made a case for state nationalism out of the medieval Hungarian nomenclature of the peripheries. Accordingly, they focused their toponymic research on the Hungarian Middle Ages  – witness the representative handbooks emerging from this research agenda, the two-volume ‘Historical hydrography of Hungary until the late thirteenth century’ by the Banat-based Tivadar Ortvay, and the five-volume ‘Historical geography of Hungary in the age of the Hunyadis’ by Dezső Csánki, the first volume of which only indicated the earliest attested forms.71 Csánki’s work in particular gave a boost to the idea of reviving old place names. Synchronously with the law on locality names, the first edition of Manó Kogutowicz’s history atlas for high schools came off the press – the first truly Hungarian specimen of a genre that looked towards a bright future, with three of the expert historians on the Communal Registry Board contributing to historical maps of Hungary around those years.72 In public statements about the turn-of-the-century renaming campaign, Magyars emphasized that their goal was the recovery of documented historical forms, and Márki vowed not to touch names of Slavic, Romanian and German origin wherever these had no known Hungarian antecedents and were ‘based upon authentic documents’.73 That he meant this at least in part as a tactical concession becomes likely from some of his name suggestions that lacked any historical reality, and were no more than playful takes on the existing forms.74 Ditto Jenő Szentkláray, another historian involved in the renaming process, who expatiated on the importance of ‘restoring the historical map of Southern Hungary’, but nonetheless praised for its historical relevance the name BogdaRigós, introduced on the insistence of a local landowner, in spite of admitting that ‘it does not correspond to historical truth’.75 Local actors in particular felt that the changes should rap the knuckles of cocky minority nationalist troublemakers, make peasants feel the power of the Hungarian state and bring it home to them that they lived on Hungarian soil. The connection that a Banat district administrator implied in 1908 between the recent flaring up of nationality movements and the need to replace the existing settlement names can scarcely be interpreted otherwise.76 From this standpoint, leaving a place name unchanged was seen as a retreat, whereas a great enough modification conveyed salutary symbolic violence. Along these lines, local councillors from Görgényüvegcsűr argued against the removal of the prefix from their place name, with the odd statement that the full name could not be translated word by word into Romanian,77 while several responses written on behalf of local governments requested new names more distant from the existing ones, based upon the argument that the ones proposed by the board more or less coincided with the Romanian vernacular forms and would not force Romanians to change their pronunciations.78 The most egregious suggestion of this punitive type was hands down the local circle secretary’s bid to rename Marisel into Vasvár in

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memory of Pál Vasvári, leader of a guerrilla outfit sent against the locals in 1849 and killed by them in an ambush. Arranging for different enough names to make it harder for local people to pronounce them comes across as a perverse idea, but it was probably not the main reason why decision makers did not respond favourably to these suggestions. A more indirect form of hostility towards the locals came encoded in the very idea of reinstating the late medieval place-name cover, although that message was hardly visible to the people affected. For Magyar onlookers, what these pronouncedly Hungarian forms did was to manifest the already established topos that described Saxons as guests and Romanians as interlopers into their own home places. Moreover, they symbolically instituted even tiny circles of Magyar administrators as congenial to the land, and as such, more legitimate masters over it than the inhabitants.

The Grand Toponymic Manoeuvre A few people from the Magyar and pro-Magyar elite engaged in social activism to promote real or supposed historical place names, but it was neither particularly efficient without institutional leverage, nor was the circle of names thus advanced too wide; apart from the ones thrown in by the tourist movement, they pushed for a couple of hydronyms (Béga or Böge instead of Bega,79 Egregy instead of Cserna80) and a few settlement names. Their advocacy typically took the garb of verbal hygiene: ‘Do not call it incorrectly x, but use the correct name y’. In the Romanian press, too, the debate seethed over whether Beiuș or Beunș was the correct Romanian name of Belényes (both were used locally),81 similarly to the protracted contemporary quarrel over the vowel in the name of the Styrian capital of Graz.82 Probably on similar grounds, the variant Mármaros was introduced into the administration of Máramaros County in the 1850s, and this elided form must have fallen on fertile ground as it later sneaked back through the backdoor after Máramaros was restored in the 1870s.83 The convenience of falling back on the current names, also the ones accepted in the administrative realm, usually trumped ideological reasoning. Orbán Sipos, a chauvinist school inspector from Bihar County, was alone in massively churning out new settlement names. In his writings, he tried to popularize these by passing over the established names in silence, and he even foisted them on schools in his jurisdiction.84 Manorial centres often received the family or first names of their owners, and a few estate managers tweaked existing names of farms in the Banat into more imaginative Hungarian ones.85 Similar grassroots activism on the part of property owners could effectively remake the toponymy of the Finnmark province of contemporary Norway, but it had limited potential influence on my area, with its dominant compact settlement pattern.86

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Toponymic engineering became a centrally coordinated endeavour with the 1898 law on locality names. The law, eagerly solicited by the opposition in parliament and by nationalist segments of civil society, asserted that the Hungarian locality names needed ‘regulation’ – homonymies between locality names were to be eliminated – and made their use mandatory in official contexts. The ensuing changes are the subject of a Hungarian monograph by the name scholar András Mező, which however concentrates on laying out a formal typology without paying much attention to the ideological underpinnings.87 He also published a collection of data assembling the basic facts about each locality-name change.88 Even though the original archival files are accessible, and I consulted them with profit, this rare volume made it easier to draw up statistics and check my facts for the present chapter.89 As the relevant Hungarian and Romanian literature is scant and tends to perpetuate contemporary partisan readings, it is hardly surprising that reflections in Western languages also show a poor grasp of the process, to the extent that a recent study in English erroneously suggests that the Hungarian government finally refrained from enforcing the law.90 When the same Dezső Bánffy assumed premiership in 1895 who had spearheaded place renaming in Szolnok-Doboka County, the Magyar public opinion, converted to the idea by the tourist movement and by voices from the broader Magyar civil sphere, took it as a matter of course that he would carry out the same programme on the national level. After his government had arranged the most unfair elections of the Dualist Era the following year, symbolic Magyarizing measures became a saving grace for him. He engaged supportive associations in drafting the bill and conducted a preliminary survey inquiring with each local government about the variants of their name as used in official life and everyday communication, and whether they wished to receive a new name. What first needs to be emphasized about the bill  – passed with MP Ágost Pulszky’s amendment and promulgated on 15 February 1898 as Act IV of 1898 – is again its double scope: it relegated non-Hungarian settlement names to an inferior position in print in any language and it decreed a revision of Hungarian names. The law itself avoided any direct reference to Magyarization, and the government tried to frame it primarily as a solution to the chaotic and untenable diversity of name variants and the overlaps between them.91 To this end, the law specified that each Hungarian locality must have a single and unique official name, and it entrusted the task of establishing these names and their authoritative spellings to a National Communal Registry Board (Országos Községi Törzskönyvbizottság), to be set up under the aegis of the Ministry of the Interior. In contrast to the practical reasons emphasized by its makers, the parliamentary debate raged over the Magyarizing thrust of the bill.92 Here, the government found itself between two fires. On the one side, the opposition attacked them for not coming clean on their intent. On the other, since Bánffy had cracked down

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on Romanian nationalists, had stripped them of their parliamentary representation and banned a demonstration against the bill, his Transylvanian Saxon allies were alone to defend minority rights in the debate.93 Saxon pro-government MPs argued that the use of Hungarian names in non-Hungarian documents infringed upon local governments’ and churches’ free choice of language, a claim that pivoted on whether place names are integral parts of a language. The city of Hermannstadt submitted a protest to the government and Brassó to the parliament before the debate on the bill began, and later an all-female Transylvanian Saxon delegation travelled to Vienna to implore the monarch not to sign it into law.94 The protest spilt over to the kin-states of Hungary’s national minorities. Saxony’s minister of the interior made it clear that he would not regard himself as bound by the law.95 The Austro-Hungarian ambassador to Romania reported that the conflict gave a new lease of life to the moribund, irredentist Cultural League. When King Charles summoned him to hear his explanation, he pointed out in a dispatch that he was unable to say anything to defend the law.96 The project came home to roost for Bánffy one week after the parliamentary debate when public outcry and fierce attacks from the völkisch ‘Green Saxons’ forced nine of the thirteen Saxon MPs to leave the governing party, where they had sat since 1890.97 This spelt an end to the party’s majority in the lower house in strictly domestic issues not affecting Croatia.98 It appears that at this point, the government judged it wise to mothball the change of names in the eastern counties, so that before the opposition came to power in 1906, only the less sensitive names of the Szekler counties had been established in the area; meanwhile, the Saxon MPs rejoined the governing party in 1903.99 The opposition denounced the government for dragging its feet, and the independentist Miklós Bartha pandered to the prejudices of many by implying that the ‘proper Hungarian’ names were evident and all the fuss about deciding upon them was just useless hocus-pocus.100 In most counties of the area, the new official names were only introduced around 1910 and were therefore in use for no more than eight years. New names were also established for Hunyad and Fogaras counties, but the outbreak of the war prevented their introduction. Owing to this delay, the Hungarian law reached fruition simultaneously with the Croatian one modelled upon it.101 The 1907 Croatian law on locality names repaid the Magyar political elite in kind, restricting the public use of Hungarian name variants. This prompted prime minister István Tisza in 1913 retrospectively to condemn the Hungarian law: ‘In this respect, they are following our bad example in Croatia’, he commented.102 Tellingly, the Honvéd command in Croatia had instructed its troops to break the law and continue referring to Croatian towns under both their Croatian and Hungarian names.103 The members of the competent Communal Registry Board were delegated by the Hungarian Historical Society, the National Archives, the statistical service,

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the prime minister, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Defence. Sitting there was the historical geographer Csánki and the social historian Acsády. Some of their incongruous decisions can be put down to the distinctive intragroup dynamics at work in a formally non-hierarchical body, mixing academics with complete laymen bestowed with authority. As corresponding experts, they consulted already familiar names such as the Kolozsvár university professors and tourist activists Márki and Szádeczky, the county historians Kádár and Petri, and the Banat scholars Ortvay, Szentkláray and Turchányi. The board was open to suggestions from the public as well, but only one lay person from the area seems to have sent in name proposals on a larger scale. Although the merchant Umhäuser Károly/Carl Umhäuser’s monstrosities, bearing little resemblance to real-life Hungarian settlement names and containing bizarre semantic somersaults, did not find acceptance with the board, his ideas show how the dominant ethnohistorical narrative related to place names coalesced in the mind of an ordinary bourgeois assimilant.104 His method consisted of confronting of the gazetteer with a Hungarian dictionary. ‘With a beady eye, I was, for the most part, able to revert the alienated names to the old Hungarian originals’, he boasted. Only rarely did he need to resort to translation, he continued, and he usually managed to keep the first syllables unchanged.105 In establishing the official names, the board proceeded county by county, adopting the following course. Based on the proposals of the corresponding experts and the National Archives, they made a first, preliminary decision and notified the commune about it.106 The local council discussed this and took a non-binding vote. They then sent their approval, critical comments or counterproposal to the county assembly, which forwarded them back to the board, together with its own opinion. If either the commune or the county disapproved of the proposal, the board went back to the case, once again consulted the National Archives and sometimes accepted a counter-proposal or created an in-between form, but was not under any obligation to reverse its first decision. Eventually, before the new names of a county were promulgated, affected parties could still appeal to the Ministry of the Interior against the change of their names. Although Bánffy’s minister had pledged in his exposition of the bill to give careful consideration to the wishes of communes, only rarely were such appeals successful. In practice, only urban settlements were exempt from the start, and thus the names Versec, Resica, Oravica and Orsova were not Magyarized.107 The majority of county assemblies played along with the board, committed as they were to the idea of symbolic Magyarization. Indeed, they were the more eager to get their villages renamed and to more distant names. Experts on the board were in general critical towards the proposals of county assemblies and district administrators, and the stance of Kolozs and Krassó-Szörény counties, often no less far-fetched than Umhäuser’s, seemed radical even to them. Few of

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their proposals got past the board’s resistance, but these were among the most eccentric and gratuitous new names.108 Quite the opposite was the attitude of the Saxon-majority assembly of Szeben County, which pulled out all the stops to defend the rights of German and Romanian. Far from being a purely symbolic matter, the mandatory use of Hungarian names led to an awkward situation in the former Saxon Land, where the written use of these two languages was dominant in the local administration and widespread in the county administration. The 1900 council meetings of Schäßburg/Sighișoara/Segesvár, for instance, where the town leadership protested against the measure, were minuted in German only.109 The language had rarely preserved its dominance in other parts of Hungary, but in UngarischWeißkirchen/Bela Crkva/Biserica Albă/Fehértemplom, the most nonconformist of Banat towns, all but one elected member and virilist in the town council similarly came down in favour of keeping the German name for official purposes.110 In 1908, the assembly of Szeben County affirmed that they found entirely unacceptable such speculative forms as Mezős instead of Polyán (Hun. mező ‘meadow’, Rom. poiană ‘glade’) and archival forms like Alcsona instead of Alcina. As the ideal solution, they would have preferred the continued use of German, Romanian and Hungarian name variants in accordance with the linguistic context. Given that only a single name was to be declared official, they demanded as the second-best solution that it should be the German or Romanian endonym.111 The list of requested names drawn up accordingly allows for two conclusions. First, even when Saxons positioned themselves as friends of linguistic justice, they did not renounce being more equal and demanded German names for places where Saxons still retained the political upper hand but were in a demographic minority in comparison to Romanians. Second, the Romanian names as assembled by the archdiocesan attorney Livius Lemenyi made a quaint concession to Hungarian orthography (and probably to Hungarian print shops) by marking the sound /ts/ with the Hungarian digraph cz rather than with the letter ț. Although not explicit in the law, the intention that Hungarian names should become the official ones was nonetheless clear; what is more, it was already enforced, as the Szeben County assembly sadly had to conclude. In the last resort, they eventually resigned to this, too, and as their minimum demand, they only insisted that the existing Hungarian names should be kept untouched, at most agreeing to their disambiguation with prefixes.112 They were quite right in their assessment of the situation; even the usually restrained National Archives felt it necessary to reject the requested ‘foreign’ (German and Romanian) names and spellings as running counter to ‘the principle of strengthening the nation-state’.113 The political leverage of Transylvanian Saxons, however, was too strong not to ensure a relatively gentle treatment at least for their Hungarian place names. Later, in the process of decision making, the board handled the Hungarian names of Saxon areas – where 113 local councils requested that their German

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endonyms, and 12 that their Romanian endonyms, should be declared official – with kid gloves compared to other counties. In addition, the minister of the interior later also intervened on behalf of Szeben County and undid ten out of the board’s sixteen name Magyarizations there, with the rest denoting Romanian villages.114 By ratcheting up their demands, the politically well-placed Saxons thus achieved at least not having their Hungarian names suffer modifications. For the analysis to follow, it is crucial to differentiate between Magyarizations and name changes of a technical nature. The latter were overwhelmingly disambiguations by adding, removing or changing name elements other than the core, typically qualifying attributes that referred to the given village’s relative position, size, watercourse, or the county, historical area or district it belonged to. I am not going to consider such changes as instances of Magyarization, chiefly because this was not the board’s intention with them, but rather the creation of a one-to-one relationship between names and settlements. I acknowledge, however, that adding the prefix Küküllő- to a name, for instance, made it look more Hungarian and tougher to pronounce on the receiving end. I also do not classify as Magyarization the simplification of spelling – which led the ministry to sanction the already spreading [-ʃ] pronunciation of the name Dés/Deés115 – or the implementation of the board’s ideas about the ‘correct’ marking of possessive phrases in Hungarian place names.116 Interventions into the sounding of core elements were, on the other hand, always motivated by the purpose of Magyarization, as is also demonstrated by the board’s explanations. The above table is based on a juxtaposition of the 1898 and 1913 gazetteers, and it shows Magyarized settlement names concentrated in the Banat and the western stripe of the area. The disparity is huge. Krassó-Szörény and Arad counties were in the same league as Slovak-speaking Upper Hungary, being the regions most heavily affected by the changes, and seeing the majority of their settlement names Magyarized. The same proportion was below 15 per cent in all counties of Transylvania, with the lowest in the four Szekler and the four Saxon counties. The scarcity of Magyarizations in the latter area proceeded partly from the relatively continuous history of its Hungarian place names, and was partly the result of political considerations, as just shown. The law covered hamlets and manorial centres as well  – places too small to form separate local governments. It ruled that the more important of them should get permanent names and it accorded the competence to decide on these to the communes. Communes would also take account of the smaller ones and would report all these names to the national gazetteer. This arrangement usually made room for Romanian endonyms spelt in Hungarian, but Magyar circle secretaries often Magyarized such minor place names off the cuff. To get a glimpse into how this worked, one needs to consult the first listing of the toponyms of Szolnok-Doboka County under the law, which indicates the new names alongside the earlier ones.117 Archival files also show, for example, how a circle

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Table 9.1  The count of Magyarized locality names and other locality name changes (disambiguations) by county. County

Number of localities

Magyarizations

Other changes

Alsó-Fehér Arad Beszterce-Naszód Bihar Brassó Csík Háromszék Kis-Küküllő Kolozs Krassó-Szörény Maros-Torda Nagy-Küküllő Szatmár Szeben Szilágy Szolnok-Doboka Temes Torda-Aranyos Udvarhely ∑

186 218 98 492 24 63 104 118 234 363 205 125 306 88 241 319 225 140 135 3,684

 22 115   5 123   0   0   3   6  19 235   3   1   9   6   4   20 (+27)*   81 (+21)  19   0 671 (719)

28 20 16 89 4 20 14 18 54 20 36 14 57 9 53 59 34 19 32 596

Notes Without the changes invalidated by the Ministry of the Interior, and without Fogaras and Hunyad counties. I also did not consider such cases where the registered names had already figured on the communal seals, nor changes restricted to spelling and not affecting the spoken forms. * In the case of Szolnok-Doboka and Temes counties, the figures between parentheses refer to villages renamed before 1898.

secretary transformed Kicsora (Chiciora, from Rom. chiciură ‘hoarfrost’), on the periphery of Păiușeni, into the pseudo-etymological Kicsurgópuszta (‘outflowing farm’).118 To further aggravate matters, local officials were regularly out of their depth when it came to transcribing Romanian forms, and their handwriting also often confused the board, which resulted in such corrupt forms in the 1913 gazetteer as Plaintelep (< Plaiu) and Purkaretitelep (< Purcăreți).119 Until a decree of the minister of justice in 1903, surveyors usually aimed at rendering field names in their local forms on cadastral maps; they transcribed Romanian and Serbian names, and fluctuated between translating generic terms (like ‘meadow’, ‘brook’ and ‘forest’) and leaving them in the original.120 This way of handling the microtoponymy in non-dominant languages corresponded to the procedure followed in the Ordnance Surveys of Ireland, Wales and the Scottish Highlands, and in the survey of the État Major, the largest-scale contemporary

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map of France, with respect to French Flanders and inland Brittany.121 One also finds more thoroughgoing interventions into microtoponymy in contemporary Europe, with examples ranging from the representation of Alsace-Lorraine and the coastline of Brittany in the État Major survey to Spanish maps, which transmit the image of an entirely Castilian-speaking country.122 The minor place names of linguistic minorities also appeared in their standard national spellings in a few contexts. Slovene names did so on Habsburg military maps between 1870 and 1918, as did French and Italian ones  – two languages with orthographic traditions difficult to ignore – on large-scale German and Italian maps and on the original sheets of the État Major survey of Corsica. Generic terms were normally translated, however.123 In the wake of the law, the Ministry of Justice ordered in 1903 that ‘fields called in translation, differently by the multilingual population of the commune will be entered into the land registry in the official state language’.124 Put into plain English, this at once clumsy and arrogant phrasing opened the door to the creative Magyarization of the microtoponymy, a significant follow-up on  the 1898 law. The fifteen relevant cadastral maps that are accessible to me from the following decade signal that the decree was not implemented with any consistency; five maps from the Banat surveyed up to 1911, and one from Bihar County from 1912, display the Serbian, Romanian and German endonyms of fields, and only some generic terms appear translated.125 However, on nine maps from the Banat created in the 1906–14 period (six from Temes and three from Krassó-Szörény counties), all Serbian, Romanian, German and Czech names are translated into Hungarian; Dosu purcarului becomes Kanászvölgy (‘pig herd’s valley’) and Comoriște – Kincses mező (‘treasure field’).126 If the new, radical course had been carried through, it would have produced a sanitized cartography on a par with what twentieth-century states enacted in conjunction with ethnic cleansing or in complete denial of the existence of linguistic minorities.127 With a more reduced scope, a similar design was indeed put into effect on the 1941 military map of Hungary, already executed by Hungarian military cartographers. This shows the hills and mountains in the northern part of the area, regained by Hungary the previous year, under fictitious Hungarian names, mostly generated through translation – sometimes by pseudo-etymology (Cibles→Széples ‘beautiful lookout’, Farcău→Várkő ‘castle cliff’) and sometimes by adjustment to the Hungarian onomasticon (Prislop→Piriszló).128

Ethnic Positioning: The Politics of Prefixes The only subset of qualifying attributes that merits attention here is the one denoting ethnicity: Magyar-, Oláh-, Szász- (‘Saxon’), Székely- and Román-. Initially, they always owed their existence to a genuine need to differentiate between

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two or more administrative entities by the same name (e.g. Magyarfodorháza designated the Fodorháza with Magyars, while Oláhfodorháza the one with Romanians), although these could merge together over time, or one of them could disappear, divesting the ethnic attribute of its disambiguating role. More ominously for contemporary observers, the ethnic make-up of a place could also change, bringing about a discrepancy with reality, and turning the ethnic prefixes into sites of memory. Predictably, they brought grist to the mill of the submerged Magyardom myth; on the pen of the ministerial councillor György Szathmári, the fact that dozens of villages prefixed with Magyar- or Szász- were Romanian-speaking in the present justified ‘defensive action’ against the deluge of Romanian arrivals.129 Another Magyar author claimed that the Saxon ancestry of Magyar peasants from Szászfenes, Szászlóna and Szászfalu was unmistakable to an ethnographer’s eye.130 The ethnic attribute was often present in the Romanian names as well, or was, in any event, known to the Romanian dwellers, who might feel obliged to work out a story that could explain its genesis. In 1864, the prefix still sustained collective memory about the former Saxon inhabitants and their destruction by the Tatars in Szászernye and Szászpéntek, while Pesty’s informant from Szászencs attributed the name of his village to the proximity to Saxon settlements.131 A few communities hoped to get rid of the dissonant ethnic attribute and thus to adjust their place names to their self-identities. In 1889 and 1890, the Magyar Oláhfenes and the Romanian–Magyar Szászerked requested a name change and became Magyarfenes and Mezőerked, respectively. During negotiations with the Communal Registry Board, a further five villages (three Romanian, one Romanian–Magyar and one Magyar–Romanian) wished to have the prefix Szász- erased from their names,132 but seventeen villages without Saxon populations indicated no desire to do so. From among the twenty-one villages with Romanian majorities whose names contained the prefix Magyar-, only the council of Magyarbaksa took the opportunity to ask the board for its removal, by the casting vote of the mayor. Their request probably did not stand a chance, and not only because they could think of no better alternative than Felső- ‘upper’, a prefix that would not have contrasted the place name to anything in particular, but also because the local gentry absent at the meeting later appealed the resolution. At the same time, the leaders of the purely Romanian Magyarbogáta and Romanian– Magyar Magyarlégen disapproved – in vain – of the plan to replace the prefix. When removing an ethnic attribute from a name, the board liked to point out that ethnic attributes were generally to be avoided; but in reality, they did not implement this principle for its own sake. Neither did they follow a consistent line when tagging or untagging ethnic attributes, but rather drifted between different strategies of putting their symbolic resources to use. They broadened the range of disambiguations from the locally relevant context to the entire political territory and, as usual, they made short shrift of the disapprovals of communes.

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Their disregard for local preferences becomes clear from their decision to allocate the name Magyarmedvés to the commune that appealed against it instead of to the one that had requested it.133 By a narrow margin, the changes more often than not corresponded to the local ethnic majorities, validating a simple representative function of the ethnic attribute. This tendency prevailed in the handling of Szász- and, to a lesser degree, of Magyar-. Only two out of the seventeen villages that lost Szász- from their names, and seven out of the nine that received it, had Saxon majorities, while ten or eleven out of the fifteen whose names got the prefix Magyar- were largely Hungarian-speaking, and five out of the seven that lost this prefix were not. While the reversion of -magyaros (‘rich in Magyars’) to its etymological and less dialectal form -magyarós (‘rich in hazelnuts’) slightly diminished apparent references to Magyars, several name changes and explanations testify that the distant ideal of a Hungarian-speaking Hungary overrode the criterion of ethnic make-up at the doling out of prefixes. Some villages were barred from taking on new ethnic attributes or were deprived of existing ones, with the dubious explanation that Magyars also lived in them, even if the registered native Hungarian contingent numbered no more than 39 out of 353, as in Oláhhidegkút in 1900. On the other hand, the board saw no problem in allocating the prefix Magyar- to villages with ethnic Romanian majorities, ‘with the purpose of documenting the welcome Magyarization’ (to Szentbenedek) or resurrecting historical forms, as happened to Nagycserged and Opatica, two villages almost entirely without Magyar residents. To boot, they based the latter on a 1337 document that mentioned Tothapacha (‘Slavic Apacha’) as well as Magyarapacha. The board took an utterly different and more consistent line with Oláh-, where it seems that their main objective was to thin out Romanian presence on the map. They removed it from thirty-two names, which amounted to almost half of the relevant ones, and all but three of these villages were overwhelmingly Romanian-speaking. Kolozs County successfully intervened to have it removed from all the locality names there that had it. Moreover, several Magyar- and Szász- standing in opposition with Oláh- were erased as a collateral effect of this thinning, and the names were jointly given new pairs of qualifying attributes. Significantly, the board did not add Oláh- to any name, despite support for its use from the National Archives and the statistician member Alajos Kovács. This also ran counter to the earlier practice of the Ministry of the Interior, which had in 1886 refused the request of Oláhszentgyörgy to have the prefix replaced, and had in 1894 found Oláhtoplica to be a more suitable new name for Toplica than Maroshévíz, the county’s candidate.134 The elimination of the ethnic attribute Román- from all nine place names that had it constitutes a question apart, bearing on the politics of group labels. The Romanian self-ethnonym had always been rumân, but Hungarian had practically

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no synonym for oláh and German for Wallach/wallachisch up to 1848, when young Romanian nationalists, relying on broad popular support, made a formal claim to be called by equivalents of the Latinate romanu, in a bid to assert their Latin ancestry and the prestige derived from it. The Magyar elite fell into line for the moment and bowed to the new ethnonym, but oláh made a slow comeback after the Compromise, as Magyars grew more confident of their power. While official documents from the era usually spoke of román, all census publications contained oláh for denoting both the language and the ethnicity. The two words were used interchangeably, but with a synonym already present, oláh lent itself easily to derogatory and alternative uses. Most notably, some voices wished to ascribe different meanings to the two words, reserving román for citizens of Romania and oláh for Romanians in Hungary. In the Banat and a few other places, the revolutionary fervour of 1848 prompted local clerks to replace the ethnonym in the Hungarian and German place names, transforming, for instance, Oláh Szent Mihály into Román Szent Mihály and Oláh Bentsek into Román Bentsek.135 Some of these changes were undone in the first decades of the Dualism, but the remaining place names prefixed with Román- were still a thorn in the side of those, like the Lugoj high-school teacher and advisor to the board Tihamér Turchányi, who baulked at the word and found that its use was ‘inadmissible’ in Hungary.136 Against his reasoning, the leadership of Románbogsán was right to point out that the laws of the country knew only román and not oláh. In fact, the board itself used the former more often, which was also Sándor Márki’s preferred term in public. The delegate of the Ministry of Defence even recommended adding it to a name with the aim of disambiguation.137 It does not seem that the board concurred with Turchányi’s verdict; they more likely asserted their antiquarian principle when choosing to remove Román-. Whatever other uses this relatively recent ethnonym may have had, it had no place in a national toponymy cleansed to symbolically reflect a distant past. But then, the board also communicated Turchányi’s peremptory lines with Románbogsán and lectured Románszentmihály that oláh had a more widespread use than román. The spuriousness of this argumentation becomes crystal clear if I add that in none of these cases did they restore the pre1848 names complete with Oláh-, but they introduced new forms in their place. In general, Romanian local councils would have preferred Román- over Oláh-; six of them appealed in favour of the former, but none for the latter.138 At the same time, it is far from certain that their majority harboured any dislike for the prefix Oláh-; although they certainly did in Sângeorgiu Român in the former 2nd Năsăud Wallachian Border Guard Regiment, where at a mass rally in 1848, locals demanded the replacement of the old ethnonym. In the 1880s, as the prefect Dezső Bánffy introduced Hungarian into the written administration of BeszterceNaszód County across the board, local leaders were painfully reminded that their village bore the Hungarian name Oláhszentgyörgy and reacted by requesting the

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Budapest government to change this to the neutral Naszódszentgyörgy.139 Other areas, where Hungarian names had been in uninterrupted use, might have felt otherwise. During the turn-of-the-century ‘regulation’, just three local councils wanted to see their names stripped of this ethnic attribute, as opposed to nine that protested against its removal.140 Instead of rushing to conclusions, however, one should also consider that local governments had various other reasons to keep their Hungarian names unchanged, as will be described below.141

Between Reinventing the Past and Adapting to the Twentieth Century About János Corbucz, Romanian Gr[eek] Cath[olic] priest of Cseika, since there is no such commune on the territory of my county, I can form no opinion. —László Beőthy, the prefect of Bihar County142

While one of the recurrent claims about the process, also advanced at the reading of the bill by its rapporteur, Pál Ruffy, was that it only restored lost historical forms; this strictly happened in a mere 231 out of the 671 cases, or in 35 per cent of Magyarizations.143 I do not include here forms tweaked in order to disambiguate them, misreadings, data taken from forgeries or purely made-up data. Once their task was framed as establishing the historical forms, not only lay board members found speculation as good a method as any to achieve this goal, but expert historians too made baseless claims about the original names. The way the Hungarian press liked to interpret the process, that villages got back their old names, held for an even smaller fraction than this one-third. The uncertainties of localizing medieval villages was one factor, most relevant to the Banat, where the matching of modern and medieval names sometimes rested more on their distant consonance than on topography, and in a few cases it was highly unlikely that the revived name had formerly designated the same location on which they imposed it, yet the experts hailing from the Banat were in unison that the benefits of salvaging a historical name trumped any concern.144 It is also often subject to debate just how relevant a resurrected form was in historical terms. A well-circumscribed set of linguistically Hungarian late medieval names were clearly exonyms already back then, and coexisted with Romanian endonyms.145 Further, medieval mentions of a place could display wide variation, and the board’s preference predictably went to forms featuring vowel harmony and otherwise more in line with their linguistic image of Hungarian, at times to the detriment of more frequent ones. As was also the case with the official first-name regime, proponents of the law sought to bolster it with practical arguments. The fact that the same place could be called differently in various domains was found to be confusing, but the main

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problem that allegedly warranted intervention was the existence of multiple homonymies and near-homonymies.146 It is often quite impossible to identify a village that goes by two or three names, so a leader in Erdély, and letters get tossed around between similarly named places.147 On the following pages, I will try to make sense of complete disambiguation between locality names as the professed aim of the process. I argue that it could clearly not justify the remaking of the toponymy in the way it happened, but I also acknowledge that lawmakers and the experts on the board, in general, genuinely attributed salutary effects to it, even if some politicians brandished this argument with dishonesty. Along the way, I will focus on a specific set of names where concerns of disambiguation met with reliance on archival data. True, a few communes complained before or during the process of experiencing difficulties with the mail because of their names. The leadership of Romanian Sikló already mentioned to Pesty in 1866 that their mail often ended up in the town of Siklós in Western Hungary, but they added that those addressed in Romanian never missed their destination.148 Mákó was reportedly mistaken for Makó, Entrádám for Amsterdam, and together with Romanian Bajj and Pusztaszentmiklós, Romanian–Magyar Világos, Swabian Hidegkút and Magyar Köszvényesremete and Nagyfalu, they asked the board for new names or attributes, although the latter two had a hidden agenda.149 But far more villages objected to the disambiguation of their names. The leaders of Csicsér in Arad County and Domoszló in Szilágy County rebuffed the allegation that the name similarity of Csicser in Ung County and the name duplication of Domoszló in Heves was causing them any trouble, while the local governments of two Romanian villages in Bihar and Szolnok-Doboka counties and a Serbian one in Temes touched upon the crux of the matter by arguing, as the board member Sándor Márki also did in the case of a Szekler village, that simply including the name of the county in the address could effectively prevent misdelivery.150 The names of the county and the nearest post office, if there was none locally, formed part and parcel of a full address. So if some mail was being returned owing to incomplete address, that could have been remedied more easily by reinforcing this rule as part of the higher elementary curriculum (though most children were taken out of school by the age of ten) rather than by teaching people completely new Hungarian names. Even after 1918, a letter addressed to ‘Bánya’  – an ambiguous place name for all its apparent uniqueness  – was delivered to its destination in Bănia in the Banat after several zigzags, but not until the sender had added ‘Krassó-Szörény County’ to the address.151 It was not by accident that the creators of the process did not cite European examples on this point; coincidences between locality names occurred everywhere, and in modern channels of communication, they were commonly resolved by specifying the jurisdiction in the address.

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The need for disambiguation also did not warrant the process of Magyarization because the majority of Magyarized names did not disambiguate between homonymous places. I have pointed out, however, that the board was conscientiously making good on the promise of disambiguation by annexing, removing and substituting name elements. In addition, they used another, hidden strategy to achieve the same goal. Given that homonymy had been even more rampant between the historical name variants unearthed from the archives, they got stuck with a surplus of ‘good Hungarian’ forms that they could not implement without further change.152 Since they dismissed the corresponding modern, ‘distorted’ names as ‘no-goers’ from the very start, they chose to add these historical forms to the pool of raw material and went on to disambiguate them, too, from one another and from homonymous contemporary places, with methods that went beyond prefixing with qualifying attributes. Thus Dragomerfalwa, recorded from 1419, was truncated to its personal name element due to its coincidence with another, larger village by the same modern name, and they chose the resulting Dragomér for the Romanian Dragomirest. Conversely, the earliest recorded name of Perkoszova in the Banat, Berkesz (spelt Berkez, 1353), was already ‘taken’, therefore the board appended the element -falu (‘village’) to it. With such tweaked forms included, the share of Magyarized names based on archival data rises to almost half of all Magyarizations. One can easily write off such bricolage as cynical massaging of the historical data, which casts doubt on board members’ sincerity about their revered national past, or it can be argued that they tried to get the most out of the historical record within the limits that the law imposed upon them. When all is said and done, however, the disambiguation of names had another ideological reason to it beyond the quest for precision. When a settlement name from the area was modified to eliminate its homonymy with, or to distance it from, another settlement name from Western and Upper Hungary, that not only eased the operation of the postal service, but it also underlined the relevance of political Hungary as a home for its inhabitants. Wittingly or not, by implementing the Kingdom of Hungary as their framework for disambiguations (an almost, but not entirely absolute one, for they also disambiguated Krakkó in Alsó-Fehér County on account of its coincidence with the Hungarian name of Cracow), the board planted one more indirect message that reinforced their overall symbolic geographical thrust. For example, adding the prefix Kis- (‘little’) to the untouched or Magyarized names of their home places related the Romanians of Baja, Bikis, Kalocsa, Magulicsa and Glogovéc and the Saxons and Roma of Zsolna to some of their compatriots whom they may not have heard about and with whom they shared no common ties other than their citizenship: the Magyars and Šokci (Catholic South Slavs) of Baja, the Magyars of Békés, Kalocsa and Maglód, and the Slovaks and Jews of Galgóc and Zsolna (Hlohovec and Žilina in today’s Slovakia).

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Fabricated Names Wherever there is an ambitious principle set in motion for name-inventing, there it is sure to terminate in something monstrous and fanciful. —Thomas De Quincey, ‘Educated Women the Depositories of Good Style’153

In its correspondence with communes, the Communal Registry Board took a confidently narcissistic tone, pontificating about the intrinsic worth of their names from the perspective of an ideal upper-class native Hungarian-speaker or reviling them for being disharmonious (e.g. Klokotics, Kuptoreszekul, Oprakercisora, the suffix -est),154 hard to pronounce (e.g. Cermura, Dsoszán-Gurbest, Földra or Sztrigy, the Hungarian name of the Strei River), foreign-sounding, meaningless (e.g. Kornicel, which they understood enough to Magyarize it as Báródsomos, cf. Rom. corn and Hun. som ‘cornel’), too long, monotonous, secondary, distorted or historically unjustified. Claiming to speak in the name of the Hungarianspeaking majority, they denounced endonyms as particularistic and projected the Hungarian exonyms as the real endonyms, allegedly known to most people. Local Saxon councillors who wished to protect German names received the boilerplate response that ‘too few people knew them’, and sometimes that ‘a name used by the minority cannot take the place of the historical name known to everyone’, while villages along the Bega/Begej River got notification that the ‘nationwide known name’ of the river was Béga,155 a fair enough statement compared to the previous ones considering that educated non-locals may have indeed heard about this river, which was hardly the case with an average Transylvanian Saxon village. The logic latent in such arguments was that positing the entire Hungarian citizenry as collective beneficiaries of the changes allowed an authorized, national body like the board to ignore the voices of local communities in what affected them in the first place, with the stricture (and here comes into play the collapsible character of the multilingual Hungarian nation as a constitutional fiction) that non-Magyars were not to be reckoned with at all, thanks to the otherwise paper-thin majority held by native or dominant Hungarian-speakers in Hungary. Another, still more arrogant rhetorical device that the board implemented was writing to local governments as if they had possessed no name at all and had been just about to receive one, referring to the current name as the one ‘requested’. Unless the size or prominence of the settlement called for restraint, the board paid no regard to continuity or the inconveniences of change, and gave no ­preference to the existing names. In very general lines, the National Archives tended to refute board members’ gratuitous claims about the original, historical names, but its mandate did not include criticizing forms suggested simply for being aesthetically pleasing,

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Hungarian-sounding or even for being easy to pronounce and recall, and the majority of new names were just such fabrications on the basis of the existing names rather than forms grounded in archival data.156 They were created by diverse methods, most of them operational in spontaneous naming as well. Contemporaries often applauded the Magyarization of place names as the creation of meaningful Hungarian forms, and roughly three-quarters of these creative renamings indeed yielded meaningful forms. The laymen on the board, and lay contributors in general, preferred transparent Hungarian names, and they were perhaps baffled to find out that many of the resurrected historical names did not belong to this type. Most name Magyarizations can be broadly classified as translations and halftranslations; they translated meaningful parts of the Romanian, Slavic or German originals or copied their structure.157 Some recurrent Romanian elements were translated uniformly; all villages called Ohába became Szabadi or Szabadja (‘freedmen’s’) in Hungarian, all Pojána Mező (‘field’) and all Lázur Irtás (‘clearing’). As far as Romanian is concerned, the numerous mistakes can be blamed on the lack of proper philological apparatus (they used the Năsăud high-school headmaster Ion Gheție’s translating dictionary) and the lack of a specialist on the board after László Réthy had left at an early stage. They translated, for example, Stej as Vaskohsziklás (Hun. sziklás ‘endowed with cliffs’, cf. Rom. stel ‘craggy cliff’, but this could not be the etymon, rather Rom. șchei ‘Slavs’) or Zgribest as Krassógombás (Polish grzyb ‘mushroom’, Hun. gombás ‘rich in mushrooms’, in fact derived from the personal name Zgrib or Zgriba).158 The board rightly felt insecure about its attempted translations from Romanian, and when the leadership of Szuplái countered that their name did not contain the word ploaie (‘rain’), but the ambiguous plai (‘mountain path’ or ‘grassland zone of a mountain’), the board complied and gave up on translating it. Another popular method that produced meaningful if all too often unlikely Hungarian names was phono-semantic matching, the more accepted term for what I earlier called folk or pseudo-etymology. It consisted of tweaking the original forms just enough to make some sense in Hungarian, and it produced seventy-eight new names; for example, Burda→Borda (‘rib’) and Fonáca (< Rom. fânațe ‘hay fields’)→Fonófalva (‘spinning village’).159 Semantic remotivation created completely new names from some aspect of reality, like a nearby natural feature (Magura→Szamosfő; the source of the Szamos River),160 historical monument (Koronini→Lászlóvár; ruins of the eponymous castle) or some other local characteristic (Szelnice→Erdőszállás; forests, Hun. erdő ‘forest’)161 (twentyeight new names). Ácsfalva, the district administrator’s invention for Acsuca, fell somewhere in the middle between these two types. It would be a proper example of the latter had the inventor been right about his cover story that the village was home to many carpenters (Hun. ács ‘carpenter’). This seems to have been a gratuitous claim, however.162

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New names that were neither meaningful nor based on archival data present particular interest because of what they reveal about the euphony of Hungarian place names as existed in the minds of the academic members and advisors who suggested them. Five operations were carried out on forms that they felt were unduly foreign and that lacked a better alternative in the historical record, to turn them more ‘Hungarian-sounding’. Two of these were performed without exception and therefore can be described as rules, while the other three were strong tendencies. The ‘foreign sounding’ of the earlier names borrowed from Romanian and Slavic rarely implied a violation of even soft phonological constraints of Hungarian – a small wonder given that they had already undergone phonological integration. In various ways, each one of these operations overgeneralized a phonological trait of the core Hungarian onomasticon, and the curious fact that they were not implemented on settlements with Magyar communities or with an accepted historical significance puts in relief the overdrawn fear of linguistic contamination that was partly responsible for them. In this way, it was sometimes the non-Magyar population of the place rather than the actual form that marked out a name as ‘foreign’, which also made Romanian villages more exposed to change than Magyar ones, even beyond what their names accounted for. The two rules and three tendencies were the following: Rule no. 1. Simplification of name-initial consonant clusters (Brestye→Berestye, Drinova→Derenyő, Globureu→Golbor, Gross→Garassa, Kráncsesd→Karáncsfalva, Priszián→Perestyén, Szlagna→Szalakna, Trojás→Torjás, etc.). Historically a strong tendency in Hungarian, this had ceased to work in new loanwords by the turn of the century.163 If the core of the native onomasticon by and large abided by it, that was mostly because of the conservatism of place names. At least for an educated person, discerning foreignness in an initial consonant cluster was also a question of settings and will. The /vl-/ in Vládháza, for example, is as unusual as it can get in Hungarian; nevertheless, Hugó Maszák referred to the name in 1859 as visibly Hungarian and allegedly revealing the Magyar origins of the place.164 /br-/ and /kr-/ would strike nobody as foreign in the familiar place names Brassó and Krassó, but board members became alert to foreign influences when they turned to the names of difficult counties, and they did not spare the same wordinitial clusters in the names of Romanian or South Slavic villages.165 Rule no. 2. Elimination of vowel clusters and glides (/j/ and /w/).166 Standard Hungarian was supposed to lack glides, and the vowel clusters in Greovác, Szkeus and Trimpoel could genuinely be felt alien.167 Tendency no. 1. Dogmatic enforcement of Hungarian vowel harmony. Hungarian is famous for its agreement of vowels in backness. However, the concept of Hungarian vowel harmony as implemented by the board reflected an unqualified understanding of the phenomenon as more sweeping than is the case168 – namely, Hungarian front unrounded vowels {e, é, i, í} in fact behave neutrally in this respect and can mix with black vowels {a, á, o, ó, u, ú} in the

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same word stem.169 If a few settlement names (Börza, Kröcsma, Mörul) actually violated Hungarian vowel harmony, the majority that the board corrected were forms combining front unrounded and black vowels (Dubricsony→Doborcsány, Gális→Szebengálos, Kernyécsa→Kernyécse).170 Such place names had always existed in Hungarian, to such an extent that the first document containing Hungarian toponyms, the foundation charter of the Tihany (tichon) Abbey from 1055, is already flush with them.171 The experts on the board thus had a blind spot not only for the historical data contradicting the theory but also for the similar contemporary names of many a settlement with Magyar majorities or with long-standing Magyar presence.172 Tendency no. 2. Raising and lowering of vowels to get a pattern of oneheight steps from one syllable to the other. Since Hungarian has a three-height vowel system, this means that out of the groups A {i, í, u, ú, ü, ű}; B {é, o, ó, ö, ő} and C {a, á, e}, the sequences AB, BA, BC and CB were favoured in consecutive syllables (Bucsum→Bucsony, Szeszárma→Szészárma).173 Although there indeed exists a preference for narrow vowel-height ranges in Hungarian place names, particularly noticeable in contrast with Romanian ones, examples of two-height steps are also easy to collect from the entire Hungarian-speaking domain.174 Unlike vowel harmony, the board followed this ideal in an unreflective manner, but again, they left unchanged similar forms that they could identify as Hungarian. Tendency no. 3. Effacing of Slavic and Romanian place-name formants.175 The board’s decisions show high awareness especially of Slavic place-name formants and the historical trends of their adaptation to Hungarian, thanks to the expertise of the Slavicist János Melich. The Romanian -ești and -eni had often been spontaneously mutated into the native -esd and -ény, a development that the board blithely replicated, but it also disrupted existing -esd and -ény endings where these violated its overdrawn interpretation of vowel harmony. At least by design, all new names relied on distant analogies in the native onomasticon and the archival data, but sometimes close parallels were available. Once the board had Magyarized a settlement name with or without archival basis, they assigned the same new form to its homonyms and disambiguated them with prefixes. In a few cases, they could replicate Hungarian place names of Slavic origin;176 in others, they recycled existing place names of whatever provenance based on phonetic resemblance.177 While the experts on the board knew full well that a large proportion of the villages they renamed did not have medieval precursors, the activity of the body was on the whole pervaded by the ethos of redressing history. As soon as lay members got a handle on Romanian and Slavic suffixes and phonology, they thought to be cleansing earlier, Hungarian forms from the dregs of foreign influences, and they presented their sometimes very frail brainchildren as the likely original names.

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The Reaction of Local Governments Two features circumscribed popular representation in the Dualist Hungarian system of local autonomies: virilism and the employment terms of village secretaries. Apart from showing what arguments were able to sway the Communal Registry Board’s decisions, the responses of communal leaderships also give a rare opportunity to assess how far local governments were strapped by these two control mechanisms. A brief description will be in order to grasp the working of the system. The local franchise itself was rather broad and democratic in all but the largest localities, as all adult male residents and corporate bodies that paid local taxes had the right to cast a vote, on an equal and direct basis. As a rule of thumb, the councils of rural settlements had one member for every hundred voters. Every three years, half of the elected members were up for election, each serving a sixyear term. Only one half of the council was elected, however, and the other half consisted of the biggest local taxpayers. This plutocratic institution called virilism was openly designed to prioritize the opinions of the rich and educated and, in non-Magyar localities, of Magyars or the pro-Magyar. Landowners or companies could represent themselves in each of the communes where they qualified as virilists, although I have already noted that some areas lacked a traditional class of big property owners. Voters also elected mayors and other communal office-holders for three years, with the crucial exception of village secretaries, the only qualified bureaucrats in the leadership of villages, who were elected for life out of three candidates nominated by the district administrator. This latter not only nominated village secretaries but only he could initiate a disciplinary action to remove them, a provision meant to tie their loyalty to the county administration rather than to the people whose affairs they transacted and who paid for them. Indeed, county leaders counted on Magyar village secretaries as agents of state nationalism. Playing into their hands was not simply council members’ ignorance of the law, but especially their unfamiliarity with Hungarian. Contemporary sources report on numerous incidents involving district administrators who pressed their protégés into office against the will of locals.178 For better or worse, only wealthier communes could manage their own village secretaries  – Saxons and Swabians typically did  – while poorer ones were organized into circles administered by so-called circle secretaries. Three communes on average made up one such circle in 1910, an arrangement that placed circle secretaries further aloof from the people.179 It becomes clear from the files that circle secretaries would sometimes misuse their power and would act against the will or even behind the backs of the communes under their charge. This is the likely explanation in five cases, where

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communes requested new names in the preliminary stage and later rejected them. In Székás, Temes County, for instance, two aldermen testified that the former circle secretary had initiated the new name Arankafalva (‘Aranka’s village’) as a compliment to his wife Aranka and in defiance of the council’s protest.180 Already in the course of the preliminary survey in 1895–96, just a tiny fraction of local councils asked for name changes; either then or later during the process, a mere twenty-nine communes came forward with requests for new Hungarian names. In contrast to these, the majority, roughly 63 per cent of the local councils whose names the board had decided to Magyarize, insisted in their responses on keeping the old ones. The data leave some margin for interpretation because the board understood the existing names to be the ones in the latest gazetteer, while local councils understood them to be the ones on their seals; but the same rate would, in any case, be higher if only Romanian villages were counted. Votes were divided along ethnic lines in the twin village of Kuptoreszékul, where the majority of Romanian council members from Kuptore rejected, and the Germans from Székul assented, to the clumsy half-translation Kemenceszék as their new name (Rom. cuptoare ‘ovens’ ~ Hun. kemence ‘oven’, while Rom. sec ‘dry’, the etymon of the second term, sounds similar to Hun. szék ‘chair’).181 Since disapprovals were put down on paper by village secretaries, this snapshot dating from the time of the Coalition Government, hardly known for its leniency towards the national minorities, qualifies the image of Romanian local councils as being muzzled by despotic district administrators and village secretaries  – an assumption often encountered in contemporary as well as historiographical accounts. Councils appear instead as independent actors. Sharpening this profile was the dissenting opinion of several village secretaries, so eager to demonstrate their loyalty to the state nationalist agenda as to ostentatiously attach minority reports to the responses of their communes. This precaution took massive proportions in Krassó-Szörény County, with nine circle secretaries adding such provisos, while one of their colleagues from Kolozs County went to such lengths as to call locals’ reluctance to have their old name Budurló changed to Bodorló an ‘anti-Magyar act’.182 It needs to be emphasized that Romanian communes were not defending their Romanian, but their traditional Hungarian names. This circumstance perhaps goes some way to explaining the surprising scarcity of nationalist rhetoric in the protests, also pointed out by the board in their report to the minister on the names of Krassó-Szörény County, in which they concluded that the opposition of communes could rarely be attributed to ‘nationalist agitation’, but sprang from their conservatism and fear of expenses183  – or at least council members were unable to reproduce nationalist discourse competently. When objections were framed in national terms, it was mostly as vague allegations that the government had tried to cause a nuisance to the Romanian folk with the name changes, or else had tried to label them with monikers that were insulting in Hungarian.

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Those among local councillors who shared this latter fear, however, were apparently not proficient enough in Hungarian to substantiate it.184 Apart from the well-justified aversion to the unnecessary disturbance brought about by the change of their names, rural councils also held to their old seals, which were usually not that old after all. Although the board chose not to dispel the Porcsesd local council’s idea that they could escape the related costs by having their name truncated to Porcs and carving off the ending from their seal, ultimately all local governments, even those with unchanged names, were made to procure new, standardized seals from Ignác Felsenfeld’s Budapest company.185 Only a hundred communes were finally allowed to keep their earlier names (eleven with disambiguating attributes) instead of the Magyarized or archival forms determined by the board. Ten out of these had German, six Magyar and the balance Romanian linguistic majorities. However, the protests of thirty-six communes were first swept aside by the board, their new names promulgated and the earlier ones subsequently restored on appeal by the Ministry of the Interior. Of course, the local governments most often filed the appeal, including the Lutheran Germans of Liebling in the Banat, who went so far as to petition the monarch against having their name translated into Kedvenc (‘favourite’), and Kornya, where the local leadership had never been consulted about the name change because the board had decided on keeping the old one in the first round, and only later did the new name Somfa (‘cornel tree’) emerge somewhat mysteriously, as an attempted translation.186 The latter village appealed to the ministry in vain. This was in spite of the board’s earlier, contradictory decision, the dissenting opinions of both the county and the National Archives and a request by Ilie Petrașcu/Petraskó Illés, who had been elevated to the nobility with the title ‘de Kornya’.187 A few disgruntled landlords who wanted to avoid the erasure of their titles of nobility from the maps lobbied the ministry to undo the respective name changes, and with the sole exception of Petrașcu/Petraskó de Kornya, this argument carried more weight with the board than the protest of locals. The number of those who intervened should not be regarded as high, considering how many noble families were affected. The barons Wodianer de Kapriora, for instance, apparently did not feel concerned about this danger or were unaware of it. The ones who appealed and whom I could identify were Elek Brazovay de Brázova, Ádám Buda de Galacz et Illye, a former minister of agriculture on behalf of his mother-in-law’s family, the Athanaszievics de Valeapáj and the spa physician Ákos Litsek de Macsova (who made a valid historical point against the new name Macsó), apart from probably a member of a local landowning family on behalf of Gavosdia.188 By the time the board discussed Hunyad County, they had themselves paid attention to this aspect, and the name of Branyicska, for example, would have remained unchanged out of respect for the Jósika family.

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Returning to the phase where local councils gave their opinions about the proposed new names, it will be useful to probe which arguments worked the best in the responses and which did not work. To be sure, it is not clear just when the reaction of communes had any bearing on the board’s final decisions, and the pool of cases is also rather small, but a few general tendencies nevertheless stand out. The locals stood no chance of striking a chord with the board by asserting local knowledge, praising the longevity of their Romanian or German endonyms or comparing them positively to the Hungarian names as the more widespread.189 The many Saxon and few Romanian local councils who argued along these lines the board repaid in kind for their ill-placed narcissism, only too happy to document the priority of Hungarian names and to attribute wide notoriety to them. Neither did it particularly advance the case of locals if they complained that they were unable to pronounce the proposed forms, or as the Gross local council put it, the new name Marostönköd would make the simple villager ‘incapable of naming his own village’.190 The official ideology dictated that citizens should know Hungarian, and so the vast majority of Romanians who did not were not to be indulged. The board only made exceptions when it was pointed out to them that the new forms were liable to be distorted into something indecent in the local tongue.191 Communes were better off standing on the ground of Hungarian and defending their names on the terms that the board dictated. Eight out of the thirteen that called these sufficiently Hungarian-sounding, and all three that objected to the negative connotations or inappropriate meanings of the proposed forms in Hungarian, could keep their existing names.192 To sustain their arguments, some of them pointed to the differences between their Romanian and Hungarian names, and the Libaton council came up with a rather crude, potentially tonguein-cheek Hungarian etymology (liba a tón ‘goose in the lake’). The most resourceful in accommodating the ideas guiding the board was arguably the council of the overwhelmingly Romanian Borzova: how could their name be foreign, they asked rhetorically and with probably feigned naïveté, as the village had borne it for the last two or three hundred years, from a time when ‘there lived neither Romanians nor other nationalities in the village, perhaps not even in the entire county, only just pure Magyardom?’. Besides, an even higher number of local councils negotiated out compromises by devising Hungarian forms less distant from their endonyms than the ones offered by the board, which was after all always content to receive acceptable suggestions from the communes. The councillors of Tomest, for instance, if they could not save their village from being renamed, were at least able to avoid the upheaval of a shift to Szapód by inventing the manageably different form Tamásd along the way. The board was ready to honour compliance with its principles with concessions. I mentioned in the Introduction that the history-laden response of Mehadia to the Communal Registry Board was exceptional in its kind. Although Magyar

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intellectuals regularly suspected treason and separatist conspiracy under every Romanian bush, the report of the board pointed out that the general resistance to the changes of place names was in this county of the Banat indebted to conservatism and the fear of expenses rather than to national sensibilities. Reading the files confirms this impression for Romanian local governments across the entire region. Let me raise the question of whether the vast majority of disgruntled responses that repeatedly missed the point, as if the local leaders of the 1900s could not get their heads around the logic behind the board’s decisions, should be taken at face value, in particular considering the many priests that sat on local councils. Arguably, the overall conjecture here is that councillors strategically avoided nationalist language, even though there is no trace of a coordinated posture. Indeed, the fact that each local council read only one decision by the board goes some way towards explaining their puzzlement at its comments. But it would not be far-fetched to propose that some local councils were simply unable to improvise a compelling counterargument in the nationalist vein, something that many historians feel uncomfortable assuming. That may apply in particular to local councils that made conspicuously little effort to tone down their anger. Nationalist commitment does not presuppose having a grasp of a panoply of hot and combative subjects, but it does mean plugging into some news sources, favouring certain explanations and authorities over others. In practical matters, especially in such unusual ones as the ‘establishment’ of settlement names, this implied looking for guidance and argument schemes from the favoured authorities. In the case in question, however, even Romanian priests and other village intellectuals were caught unprepared by the board’s decisions. The topic received sustained coverage in the press, although by then several years had passed since the debate on the bill. But they had no clue as to how many names would be affected  – in earlier rounds of changes it was relatively few. They could genuinely believe that their Hungarian place names were sufficiently Hungarian (or were left dumbfounded by the board’s creations, which made no more sense in Hungarian after all), and the Romanian press did not prepare them for the type of strategy to follow if they wished to minimize harm.

Domains of Mandatory Use Section five of the law mandated the use of the official Hungarian settlement names in public documents of state, county and local government agencies, on the seals of communes, on road signs, in school maps and in notarial acts in any language. In school textbooks, corporate registrations and certified private documents, an amendment to the bill, designed to appease the Saxon MPs, allowed other name variants to be displayed after the official ones, in the form ‘Brassó

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(Brașov)’ or ‘Brassó (Kronstadt)’. In 1902, as the future of renamings loomed uncertainly, the minister of the interior ordered the use of the existing Hungarian names of the counties not yet discussed by the board.193 In mapping out some of these domains to put the regulations in context, I will in the following pages also trace back earlier, formal and informal policies that affected Romanian and German settlement names. The large majority of non-Hungarian communal seals had been replaced by Hungarian ones during the 1870s and 1880s.194 This was almost invariably the case with Romanian, but, as a unique exception, Tiliska in the Saxon-led Szeben County had Tilisca written on its seal in the 1900s.195 Saxon towns, however, managed to preserve their German names on their seals, and these were only phased out in consequence of the law. Village entry signs stood along highways and sometimes along minor roads. They had long served as vehicles for symbolic messages. In the 1860s, Zarand County and the District of Năsăud painted their village entry signs in Romanian national colours, while as prefect of Szolnok-Doboka and Beszterce-Naszód counties, Dezső Bánffy had them repainted in the tricolour of the Hungarian flag.196 Late in 1899, the minister announced that new signs would be erected as the Communal Registry Board would determine the official place names.197 There is some vague indication, however, that at least some Saxons villages of Nagy-Küküllő County received bilingual signs.198 In the 1890s, there was an outcry among the Magyar intelligentsia of Kolozsvár over the long-established exonyms Klausenburg and Klausenbourg appearing on envelopes and parcels, resented as an ‘intentional and malicious Germanizing tendency’.199 A milder reaction was the EKE’s call to its sister clubs abroad to address their mail to Kolozsvár, but it caused more excitement that Kolozsvár professors rejected inappropriately addressed mail, along with brusque comments.200 Contributing to their sensitivity was a similarly impatient nationalist thread of discourse in contemporary Germany, which culminated in a 1900 decree prohibiting the delivery of mail not exclusively addressed in German.201 The pan-German Alldeutsche Blätter reacted in the harshest terms to the action of Magyars, urging its readers to avoid using the Hungarian place names in personal and business correspondence.202 Romanians from Hungary often told the opposite to visitors from Romania, warning them that their mail would not be delivered unless they use the Hungarian place name in the address.203 This seemingly practical advice was given and understood as a political comment exposing official chauvinism in Hungary. Although the postal service had introduced Hungarian-only stamps in 1867, the handling of addresses remained flexible until the 1890s. It is hard to assess the exact trends because private collections have preserved much less evidence from the period before 1896 when illustrated postcards went on the market; however, no ‘mail returned for inappropriate address’ can be found in online postcard

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auctions, actual stories are hard to come by in the contemporary Romanian press, and indeed the abundance and variety of names overwhelming the postal system served as the main justification for the law. In 1884, the minister warned post offices that an unintelligible address was not a reason not to deliver a letter. He urged them to learn the names of villages and hamlets in the minority languages, or at worst to send tricky addresses to the ministry for translation.204 The following year, the clear-headed Ladislau Vaida/Vajda László still blamed a few overzealous postmasters instead of the postal service for cases of deliberate non-delivery.205 An 1887 decree enjoined local governments and, significantly, church authorities (which enjoyed franking privilege in Hungary) to address their mail in Hungarian.206 Things really turned for the worse in the 1890s. Ominously, the Hungarian postal service removed non-Hungarian place names from the list of telegraph offices submitted to the International Telegraph Union, and when the latter left them in its directory, Hungarians protested and demanded their deletion.207 At around the same time, the non-Hungarian name variants disappeared from the gazetteer as well, which had thus far helped the sorting of the mail that had made use of them. By 1900, an assistant school inspector could write the following in an internal review of a Romanian primer: ‘School prepares for life. Now, if the future citizen sends a letter to Gyulafehérvár, there is no use writing “Alba Iulia” on it since the Hungarian Royal Post does not know any such town’.208 The law brought an abrupt change to German schoolbooks, but it merely sanctioned an existing policy regarding Romanian ones. Virtually all Transylvanian Saxon children went to school long enough to learn about the geography of Hungary and the home county, and Saxon schools were caught unaware by the law. Until 1902, Saxon-inhabited places and other major cities figured under German names in Saxon textbooks.209 The law relegated these to a secondary role. Hungarian settlement names would subsequently appear in the first place in school atlases and geography manuals, and, set in Roman type, they would stand out from the black-lettered German text.210 Saxon textbook writers punctiliously observed these rules, save for section headings and the occasional pragmatic strategies to signal their reservations. Fritz Reimesch, for example, a girls’ school teacher once incriminated on charges connected to his opposition to the law, successfully applied what I call the ‘three is less than two’ principle by indicating the Romanian or the Saxon name along with the Hungarian and the German.211 In contrast, the government banned the standard Romanian school wall map of Hungary, and by 1883 had already directed Romanian authors to revise their geography manuals.212 From then on, Romanian settlement names had to stand between parentheses after the Hungarian ones and were obliterated from maps, although the names of mountains and waters continued to show up in Romanian.213 In 1887, the Romanian education writer Ioan Dariu made

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a covert reference to censorship in his preface to a new geography book for Orthodox primary schools: ‘I have inserted the map of Hungary at the end, also in Hungarian. It could not be executed in Romanian since it would have cost too much ...., moreover, its names would have differed from the ones on the wall map, which would have raised difficulties’.214 A Romanian daily denounced the ensuing pedagogical deadlock in the following words: ‘It is more than ridiculous to see how Romanian schools teach, for example, the geography of Transylvania, with its old Romanian names of settlements, mountains, valleys, rivers and fields, without being allowed to use the names proper to the language’.215 The ministry outlawed at least thirteen more Romanian textbooks for non-compliance with the law, and the banning of recalcitrant Romanian textbooks was the order of the day as late as 1913.216 School inspectors rebuked Romanian schools for making use of Romanian place names in geography classes, like the flagship Orthodox school of Săliște/Großdorf/Szelistye in 1908, and again in 1912.217 This, however, should be balanced against the fact that the vast majority of Romanian children never made it to the fifth grade, where the geography of Hungary was taught.218 Not only textbooks got banned on this basis, but the ‘bad faith’ about place names also regularly cropped up in ordinances as a reason for forbidding the circulation of journals and books published in Romania. Going by this requirement, almost any publication coming from Romania could be seized. This was, of course, impossible to enforce in practice, but the law now hung over the heads of the minorities. It certainly gave ample ammunition to gendarme patrols out harassing peasants at random, suspecting them of possessing illicit material, as these would indeed likely harbour at least an old textbook at home. This is a sign that enforcement of the law went off the rails from the very top. As also seen on the example of the first name regime, it usually took some time for the state bureaucracy to fall in line. In 1907, the minister of commerce chided his own apparatus for not complying with the law – he certainly found fault with the use of the old Hungarian names.219 At the same time, those in the county and local administration who had already made a sport of harassing minority elites understood the legislation as an open season on Romanian and German place names in all domains of life, and Hungarian papers only confirmed their impression. By an unanimous vote, for example, the Felsőbánya/ Baia Sprie town council banned the summer gathering of the Szatmár County Greek Catholic Teachers’ Association on the pretext that the name of the town figured in Romanian on the Romanian invitation cards. The local newspaper that reported on the incident implied that such invitation cards constituted a provocation.220 The press did not fall under the purview of the law. Book publishers moved to indicate the place of publication in Hungarian on the cover, but major Romanian and Transylvanian Saxon papers carried on using the native forms.

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The Hungarian place names would turn up in their official communications, in the ads and in the railway timetable. In gentry-dominated Temes County, however, the German press saw itself constrained to purge its columns of the German place names. Even in rebellious Ungarisch-Weißkirchen, the local weekly Die Nera would refer to the town as Fehértemplom in the early 1910s. For Temes-Kubiner Wochenblatt/Temes-Kubini Hetilap, compliance with this abusive interpretation of the law meant that it also changed its title according to the new official name ascribed to this little town on the Danube. As Illustration 9.1 shows, the transition did not go very smoothly. The typesetter or the editor apparently got the new name wrong, and an additional r sneaked into the title. Contemporaries were cautiously putting the Hungarian place names on their mail, but elite members often signalled their preference for other name variants and gave the precise directions in Romanian or German. This was reason enough for non-delivery, but the postal service did deliver such letters. The Czech philologist Jan Urban Jarník consistently wrote ‘Sibiu, Transilvania, Nagy-Szeben’ on his letters to his colleague Andrei Bârseanu, while Nicolae Iorga, who began to court his future wife Catinca Bogdan in 1900, regularly addressed his letters to ‘Brașov (Brassó)’ and always put the Romanian name of her street.221 (Other similar cases can be found in online postcard auctions.)222 In general, the Romanian elite made broader use of distancing strategies against the mandatory Hungarian names. The jubilee volume of the ASTRA’s Romanian girls’ civil school, for example, used the words ‘today’s official name’ to refer to students’ birthplaces.223 And while Iorga sought to convey the impression in his Hungarian travelogue that the Hungarian names were imposed by fire and sword, even in the speech of the lower classes, the Romanian press in Hungary continued to display the Romanian variants unperturbed, and Romanian local governments were also slow to react, defying the literal, intrusive provisions of the law.224 It was far from obvious, then, that Saxons should toe the line and so faithfully display the Hungarian names as they did in the last fifteen years of the Dualist regime. Most of the time, Saxon municipal officials did not even add the German names between parentheses, although they were shielded from intervention by a county administration full of fellow-Saxons.225 I would not refer to the German sense of duty as a reason here, had it not been a recurrent Saxon argument against the law that it made it impossible for Saxons to remain law-abiding Hungarian citizens. At the same time, the use of the Hungarian names in compliance with an insidious law against which Saxon society had just a few years earlier mounted the biggest wave of protests in a generation was hardly an innocent act. Precisely because they felt it highly unnatural, it could function as a memento of Saxons’ political and cultural subjection, and overdoing it should not be read as a sign of automatism, nor necessarily of timidity even, but at least in some cases as a backhanded gesture of dissent.

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Illustration 9.1  The first issue of the weekly Keveváraer (formerly Temes-Kubiner) Wochenblatt after the place was renamed from Temes-Kubin to Kevevára. Source: EPA (Elektronikus Periodika Archívum), published with permission.

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An Uneasy Legacy …taking into account that Magyars go crazy about ‘autochthonizing’ foreign place names… —Facebook post by the administrators of the Romanian Philo-Magyar online community MaghiaRomania, 17 March 2017226

The law also sparked shriller protests from Transylvanian Saxons than from Romanians, leading to another historic low point in their relations with Dualist Hungary after the dismantling of Saxon autonomy in 1876. They poured all their pent-up grievances on the Hungarian regime over this offence, which could cast an air of extreme oppression on it. Saxons also put different emphases on the subject from Romanians. Both elites framed it as an infringement of the linguistic rights contained in the 1868 Law of Nationalities, taking it for granted that place names were a constituent part of language, and both liked to debunk its pragmatic justification. Since they could make broader use of their language in official life, however, Saxons were more sensitive to the status planning aspect of the law, regardless of what particular Hungarian forms it prescribed for them. The Saxon counter-discourse celebrated place names as the community’s bond with its physical environment, which they argued instilled in new generations the sense of a tradition going back eight hundred years. With the ancestral place names wiped out, the survival of the language and the community supposedly came under threat. These conclusions came wrapped up in the anxiety about decline, characteristic of Saxon identity discourses at the time. Historical references were not missing from the Romanian version either, but it was advanced with more confidence and with less concern for the legality; it called attention to the ‘futility’ and ‘comedy’ of the whole enterprise, and it laid the main stress on the Magyarization of existing names. In A.P. Bănuț’s sketch, one Romanian student’s home village, Secătură (˂ archaic Rom. ‘forest clearance’), now goes by the cartoonishly cumbersome official name Napsugarasszárazfalva (Hun. ‘sunny-dry-village’), and he instructs his sweetheart, a Magyar chambermaid from Brassó, to put this name on her letters, also indicating the post office, Verebeketetőpataka (Hun. ‘sparrow-feeding-brook’), in fact Vrăbiești (˂ Rom. vrabie ‘sparrow’).227 One recurrent charge against the Magyarized names was that many of them, unlike the fictional ones in the example, made as little sense in Hungarian as the earlier ones. The idea that renaming was useless unless it created meaningful forms squared with the expectations of a large segment of the Magyar elite. When Francis Hosszu Longin submitted a draft resolution to the Hunyad County assembly in protest against the law, the former MP Károly Pogány sprang to its defence with the argument that it would bestow a meaningful name on each

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village. What does Pâclișa, for example, mean in Romanian, he asked rhetorically; to which Hosszu retorted by asking whether the name Lozsád, the county’s purest Magyar village, made any sense in Hungarian.228 Romanian intellectuals grafted these perceptions onto the learned myth of the medieval Magyarization of a Romance place-name cover, and thus created the essentializing image of Magyars as inveterate falsifiers of place names. The oblique function of this myth was to imply that by Magyarizing place names, Magyars themselves admitted that these were alien to them and were really ‘ours’ – that is, Romanian. In Xenopol’s interpretation, the Hungarian exonym of a place with few Magyar residents like Râșnov could only owe its existence to the ‘Magyars’ tendency to Magyarize the entire geographical terminology of the Romanian lands included in their kingdom’.229 Owing to the multifaceted nature of the renaming campaign and what they saw as its concomitants, Romanians could also project onto it any of their clichés about the Magyar phenomenon. A few farmsteads named after their Jewish owners, for instance, provided material for a 1904 number of Re˘vașul to unmask the Hungarian state as ‘Yiddifying’.230 As a matter of fact, the Hungarian state could be somewhat plausibly denounced to its enemies as an avid falsifier of place names even before a single new Hungarian name had been invented, simply because, in the measure that Hungarian replaced German in the administration after 1867, Hungarian names also replaced the familiar German ones, even if their supporters only knew many of the latter from maps. This perception fuelled János Hunfalvy’s debate with Heinrich Kiepert, who was confident that the ‘true’ and ‘old’ German place names in Hungary stood in opposition to the ‘false’ and ‘recent’ Hungarian ones. More detached, the Saxon Johann Wolff described the toponymy of Transylvania and Hungary as an eternal battleground between conflicting ethnonational interests ever since the time of medieval notaries and chroniclers, and accused the anonymous chronicler of the medieval Gesta Hungarorum of doctoring his toponyms.231 The law spurred the ASTRA to publish the first Romanian place-name dictionary of Hungary, which in its first edition still contained the old Hungarian names.232 Four similar German ventures saw the light of day, all four outside of Hungary.233 While these publications ostensibly gave practical advice to people conducting correspondence with Hungary but baffled by the Hungarian place names, they were rather political statements pointing to the endangerment of German toponymic heritage. In the very same years, two activists published a similar dictionary listing German place names from the French-speaking part of Switzerland, the use of which allegedly also suffered a decline.234 The outrage took long to subside, as indicated by the renaming in 1914 of five public spaces in Vienna after Hungarian cities and towns, in an attempt to perpetuate their ‘lost’ German names.235 The new names included Klausenburger Straße.

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The new names were bound to have a hard time striking roots in Romanian and Saxon villages. They had not even been promulgated before the neighbours began to tease the Germans of Lindenfeld (Hársberek), the Karaševci (Catholic South Slavs) of Klokotics (Krassócsörgő) and the Romanians of Pervora (Porhó) about their new, Magyarized names.236 Catholic Swabians, whose intelligentsia was largely pro-Magyar, may have received them with acquiescence; the official Hungarian names, like the enigmatic Öthalom, appeared on German ex voto plaques at the Catholic shrine of Radna.237 Owing to the brevity of their official existence, they could not replace even the Hungarian endonyms unless local Magyars wished to get rid of them, but even this could be thwarted if the Romanian names coincided with them.238 Leaping forward in time, the 1913 gazetteer of Hungary, the first and last to contain the new, artificial names, has gained some standing in postsocialist Hungary as the guide to Hungarian settlement names in the neighbouring states. In fact, it had already established itself to some extent in the Socialist era, at least within the confined circles of antiquarian academics who made such choices in writing. While the problem that the names invented around 1910 seldom turn up in primary sources has called for some work of de- and recoding and extra footnotes on the part of scholars, the preference for them has not been purely ideological as they have the undeniable merit of identifying places with precision. All this amounted to little until 1989, when these names suddenly broke free from the bounds of humanist scholarship and out to a broader public, gracing numerous road and tourist maps, and were accepted as the main variants in the freshly popular genre of place-name dictionaries and in the last two original, paper-based encyclopedias in Hungarian, both of which devoted a separate entry to each Hungarian settlement as of 1910.239 Owing to the prestige enjoyed by these publications, the same nomenclature has also gained general online ­acceptance, including the Hungarian Wikipedia and Google Maps. The principal lobbyists for the 1913 gazetteer have not been humanist scholars, but rather cartographers and geographers from Hungary, who since 1989 have regarded the dissemination of these names as a veritable mission. This group of people have often justified their preference in unabashedly ideological terms, voicing their concern for ethnic Magyars abroad. It seems that most of them have been unaware or have not cared about the historically ungrounded and artificial nature of a large number of these names.240 Many cartographers had also absorbed admiration for the renamings of the 1900s as being a great feat of standardization. Indeed, the drive of the Communal Registry Board for complete disambiguation has also survived in Hungarian official practice, and as the legal successor to this body, the toponymy committee of the Hungarian government has even been trying since 1990 to avoid homonymies in the context of pre-1920 Hungary, clinging (not always successfully) to the authority of the 1913 gazetteer as a benchmark.241

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The most serious challenge to this idyllic self-enjoyment of rump-Hungarian nationals came from ethnically Magyar communities and their representative bodies in the successor states, who acquired some state recognition for their Hungarian settlement names and sometimes chose the ‘old’ variants.242 In Romania, the divergence was usually confined to qualifying attributes, except for a few innovations and the village of Nagyzerind/Nagyzerénd, which returned to the form abrogated in 1907. The official list, worked out in 2001 by philologists from Bucharest and amended with suggestions from the Magyar ethnic party, from mayors and the Budapest toponymy committee, already differed from the 1913 gazetteer on multiple points,243 and some communes even departed from this list, seemingly off their own bat, to put their pre-1910 names on village entry signs.244 In an attempt to do away with this gap, which emerged in most successor states, a research network jointly run by Hungarian linguists in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine and Austria put it on its agenda to recodify the Hungarian toponymy of the ‘Carpathian Basin’, but the project soon ran out of steam.245 Arguably, only in a tiny portion of the places with Hungarian names Magyarized in the 1900s does any Hungarian name have legal status today (a 20 per cent local population threshold applies in Romania for minority place names), and the debatable names typically denote relatively minor settlements with no Magyar populations to speak of. The ambition shared by this project, and by most contributors to the debate, that such places need Hungarian names standardized and approved by an official agency in Hungary, would scarcely be defensible at any international forum, and it is in general hard to imagine any meaningful, non-symbolic, use for them, except in academic contexts. On the practical side, the names of the 1913 gazetteer have by now become so deeply entrenched in repositories of knowledge that it would be very difficult to dislodge them without a structural change of this domain. Ironically, while the names rooted in the historical fantasies of the 1900s have long fallen out not only of official use but also of local memory, they now cater to new fantasies in the nostalgic Magyar public about the Magyar character of pre-1920 Hungary. Somewhat on the grotesque side, the 1913 gazetteer is now also being carved in granite. As I am writing these lines, Viktor Orbán’s regime is busy constructing a large irredentist memorial at the entrance of a street, right in front of the Budapest parliament. To be inaugurated in June 2020, on the hundredth anniversary of the Treaty of Trianon (Versailles), some people predict that the hundred-meter-long ramp will double as a roadblock obstructing the way of future demonstrators. Its walls will flaunt the names of all localities of Hungary as of 1913, in their then-official forms.246 In the course of the twentieth century, while Hungarian settlement names were not only devoid of legal recognition but sometimes even their public use was under a ban, the official Romanian toponymy of the area also underwent

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massive remodelling.247 In the first step in 1918–20, hundreds of new Romanian names were created for places in the Szeklerland and in the new border zones that had none – far from just close phonetic adaptations of the Hungarian endonyms, but for the most part, forms that falsely suggest a long pedigree. The subsequent campaigns that took place in 1924–26, 1956, 1964 and 1968, as well as the sporadic renamings in between, hit more ethnically Romanian than minorityinhabited places. While there are hints that the communities were sometimes consulted in the interwar period, later renamings were approved over the heads of local people. Without the changes later unmade, and applying the same criteria used for the Hungarian renamings, that is discounting technical changes of qualifying attributes and spelling, the count of entirely new Romanian names that were made official is in the region of 730 to 740, which roughly equals the tally of Dualist Hungary.248 In the same period, four settlements were renamed in Serbian out of the forty-six from the territory under study annexed to the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes.249 The new Romanian artificial names certainly had much in common with the earlier Hungarian ones. At least in the interwar period, they were similarly sold as attempts at returning to the original, lost names, and their distribution was also unequal, vaguely as a reverse image of the Hungarian process, concentrating as they did in the Szeklerland and today’s Mureș and Cluj counties. The most common methods of creating them were also the same, but this does not reveal too much as these methods were at once the most universally available: the appending of a native toponymic suffix (-ani/-eni; -ești; -(i)a; -el; -ița; -in), translation (Șonfalău→Cornești, cf. Hun. som and Rom. corn ‘cornel’) or half-translation (Bicălat→Făgetu Ierii, cf. Hun. bikk ‘beach’, Rom. făget ‘beach forest’), semantic remotivation (Beșimbac→Olteț, from the River Olt) phonosemantic matching (Szövérd→Suveica ‘weaving shuttle’) and analogies from the native onomasticon (Székelyszentkirály→Sâncrai). Here, too, translations were peppered with blunders,250 and Hungarian or German names were occasionally translated even where there were Romanian vernacular names unrelated to them (Ger. Schöndorf/Hun. Szépfalu→Frumuseni, cf. vernacular Seredin). Ironically, the Romanian authorities also subjected to semantic adaptation Érszőllős and Kézdikővár, two innovations from the 1900s.251 As a general feature, the incipient Romanian administration of 1918–20 often mechanically converted the official Hungarian nomenclature rather than paying heed to the vernacular Romanian names, as is reflected in their choices of qualifying attributes and in the Romanian alternate names in the Tables A.1 and A.2 (Appendix A), where the forms of the left-hand column were made official, which also stand closer to the Hungarian and German variants. It is mainly the differences, however, that stand out when comparing the two projects – one conducted systematically, in the space of a few years and left unfinished, and the other spanning seventy years. There was no fumbling

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through the historical record in the quest for more Romanian names, but name-givers relied entirely on their imagination. The idea of reviving Roman or Dacian place names may have tempted those in power, but it only materialized in a handful of cases.252 The uniqueness of names was a matter of very secondary concern, so much so that the name-givers often increased multiple homonymies by taking no chances and replacing unwanted settlement names with others already frequently found in Romanian toponymy.253 Among the latter, they had a preference for those taken from the sphere of nature, which have as a whole conjured up a bucolic landscape complete with springs (Fântânele), flowers (Florești), oak groves (Dumbrava), orchards (Livezile), vineyards (Viișoara), brooks (Vâlcelele) babbling across meadows (Lunca) and so forth, and have thus made Romanian artificial toponymy somewhat similar to the make-believe Turkish map of Kurdistan, with its tedious repetition of Green Valleys, Happy Brooks and Pretty Mountains.254 Also, while the main goal of renaming was to erase the linguistic traces of Hungarian and sometimes of German (4%) or South Slavic (1%) from the map  – traces that were as a rule lost on monolingual Romanian residents – the share of euphemistic or beautifying changes was, at 7 per cent, much higher than in the Hungarian case,255 as was that of commemorative names (5 per cent have survived the Communist regime), often after figures with no local connections.256 Finally, a likeness that encloses difference, both processes were coordinated by voluntaristic states that arrogated full powers over the names in their territories, rode roughshod over living traditions and the will of locals, and imposed artificial place names on hundreds of communities, which they perceived as a punishment. This state of affairs, however, lasted less than a decade in a pre-war and wartime Hungary that turned increasingly authoritarian, plus four more years under autocratic rule during the Second World War in the northern partition of the area, whereas it has been in place for a century in Romania, almost thirty years of which in a broadly democratic context.

Closing Remarks It is still standard practice in history writing and book editing to choose between variants of settlement names heeding to the principle of state sovereignty, to identify places in forms such as ‘Bozen (today Bolzano)’ or to make statements of the genre ‘in 1920, Kassa changed its name to Košice’. While this certainly raises interesting questions, the way it is most often done is plainly wrong. It seems somewhat more appropriate to write ‘Reichenberg, today Liberec’, ‘Smirna, today İzmir’ or ‘Danzig, today Gdańsk’ in cases involving ethnic cleansing, especially from a longue durée perspective. But one gets the impression that historians or their editors have thought of ethnic cleansing or some unlikely, instant form of

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assimilation as regular features of all transfers of state sovereignty. The truth, of course, is that Kassa was already called Košice in Slovak in the Dualist Era, and it is still called Kassa in Hungarian, while both languages have been continuously spoken in the city. What happened to these names around 1920 should not even be regarded as a name-policy measure, but merely a mundane consequence of the shift in government to the language then postulated as ‘Czechoslovak’, which also entailed the official use of established Slovak name variants. In the foregoing, I have treated such village names as those of the former Banat Military Frontier as parts of the Hungarian onomasticon. After the area went under Hungarian administration, its names were wrapped in a Hungarian cloak and got popularized as such in encyclopedic works like Pesty’s on Szörény County.257 By the same token, I have also treated transcribed and minimally adapted post-1918 official names of Szekler villages as part of the Romanian onomasticon. But my choice was largely a matter of convenience. At any rate, such names belong to the outer periphery of the onomasticon in that there was hardly any native community of practice at the time of their emergence other than the transition teams dispatched to the area, whose mental map featured these places as solid reference points. This created a scenario different from Košice, Bolzano, Liberec, İzmir or Gdańsk, where native variants were readily available. Here, the state first presented these names as Hungarian or Romanian using the instrument of spelling, and the speakers only appropriated them later and slowly. But states also have more specific means to refashion the place-name cover of their territories. The proper field of toponymic codification ranges from softer interventions  – the choice between spelling alternates or disambiguation with attributes – to reinstating obscure historical forms and imposing new ones derived from them or created out of whole cloth. In the nationalist version, renaming has aimed at expanding the patterns of the native onomasticon’s endonymic core to its peripheral elements and at creating greater semantic transparency. This does not mean that endonyms have invariably, or even mostly, transparent meanings or native roots; the majority of Romanian endonyms in my area had neither, and residents of these places have not thought of their place names as alien. But the officials and specialists in charge of renaming campaigns put themselves above local perceptions. They validated the principle that place names belong to the entire nation embodied in the state rather than to the people who use them, and they implemented the linguistic doxa of the time rather narrowly. This is why artificial naming has often been puristic and hypercorrect in its quest for nativesounding place names. Where entirely new official names have been devised for ethnic minority settlements without expelling their inhabitants, they have functioned prominently as painful reminders of who holds legitimate power and the right to define. This is because local people will unavoidably see them as fictitious, designed to discipline them and make their difference invisible. This perception will persist

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as long as the endonyms remain in use to provide contrast. And they will remain in use for as long as the language survives.

Notes 1. C. Val Julián, La realidad y el deseo: Toponymie du découvreur en Amérique espagnole (1492–1520) (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2014); online edn, Part I, Chapter 2, para. 34 available at http://books.openedition.org/enseditions/1583 (last accessed 15 September 2019); and I. Szabó, Ugocsa megye [Ugocsa County] (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1937), 439. 2. R. de Figuères, Les Noms révolutionnaires des communes de France: listes par départements et liste générale alphabétique (Paris: Société de l’Histoire de la Révolution Française, 1901); D. Milo, ‘Le Nom des rues’, in P. Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de mémoire, Vol. 2, La Nation, Sub-vol. 3 (Paris: Gallimard, 1986), 295; and A. Gascon, ‘“Chacun devrait porter le nom que l’homme lui aurait donné”: la politique des noms en Éthiopie’, L’Espace géographique 37 (2008), 118. 3. G.Rh. Tucker, ‘Re-Naming Texas: Competing Mexican and Anglo Placenaming in Texas, 1821–1836’, Names 59 (2013), 141–42. 4. On the Royal Commission for the Toponomastic Revision of Italy’s Map, see A. Cantile, ‘Sulla nascita della cartografia ufficiale italiana: gesuiti, scolopi, laici e militari, tra le esigenze della polemologia, le occorrenze dell’amministrazione e le necessità della scienza’ [On the birth of official Italian cartography: Jesuits, Piarists, laymen and soldiers between the demands of warfare, the needs of administration and the requirements of science], in A. Cantile (ed.), La cartografia in Italia: nuovi metodi e nuovi strumenti dal Settecento ad oggi [Cartography in Italy: new methods and instruments from the eighteenth century up to the present] (Florence: Instituto Geografico Militare, 2007), 45–46. On the Danish committee, see F.J. Ormeling, Minority Toponyms on Maps: The Rendering of Linguistic Minority Toponyms on Topographical Maps of Western Europe (Utrecht: Utrechtse Geografische Studies, 1983), 146. See also the Russian Empire, where the gubernatorial authorities of the former New Russia decreed after 1890 that German settlements should take on new, Russian names, while the administration standardized the toponymy of the Caucasus in the wake of the 1897 census; D. Neutatz, Die ‘deutsche Frage’ im Schwarzmeergebiet und in Wolhynien: Politik, Wirtschaft, Mentalitäten und Alltag im Spannungsfeld von Nationalismus und Modernisierung (1856–1914) (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1993), 119 and A.A. Dabaghyan, ‘Place Renaming Practices in Post-war Karabakh/Artsakh’, Acta Ethnographica Hungarica 56 (2011), 406. 5. E. Kyramargiou, ‘Renaming the Balkan Map: The Change of Toponyms in Greek Macedonia (1909–1928)’, in D. Stamatopoulos (ed.), Balkan Nationalism(s) and the Ottoman Empire, Vol. 1, National Movements and Representations (Istanbul: The Isis Press, 2015), 180. 6. Ibid., 182; and A. Liakos, ‘Hellenism and the Making of Modern Greece: Time, Language, Space’, in K. Zacharia (ed.), Hellenisms: Culture, Identity, and Ethnicity from Antiquity to Modernity (Aldershot, Hampshire: Ashgate, 2008), 231–32. 7. Stewart, 341–54. 8. Ibid., 276, 302–3, 305–6, 349 and 351.

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9. E.g. Palmerston→Darwin, Desterro→Florianópolis, Kumayri→Alexandropol, Vasa/ Vaasa→Nikolaistad/Nikolainkaupunki, Principele Ferdinand, Principele Carol, Carmen Sylva (three newly founded places in the Dobruja), Golyama Gutlovitsa→Ferdinand and Deli Syule→Dragomirovo in Bulgaria, and villages named after Queen Draga Mašin in Serbia; Britannica Online, available at http://academic.eb.com (last accessed 15 September 2019); A. Room, Alternate Names of Places: A Worldwide Dictionary (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2009), 80 and 215; D.-V. Pătrașcu, Dobrogea: Evoluția administrativă (1878–1913) [The Dobruja: administrative development, 1878–1913] (Iași: Institutul European, 2014), 165 and 308; B. Esmein, ‘Société plurielle et guerre des noms’, Signes, Discours et Sociétés 8 (2012), 5 – available at http:// www.revue-signes.info/document.php?id=2625 (last accessed 15 September 2019); B.  Njagulov, ‘Identity, Church and State: A Bulgarian Pole among the Catholics in the Village of Dragomirovo’, Bulgarian Historical Review 42 (2014), 38–48; and M.B. Petrovich, A History of Modern Serbia 1804–1918, Vol. 2 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), 481. 10. Bánffytótfalu (Tótfalu), Gyerőfalva (Pányik), Mikószilvás (Oláhszilvás), Radákszinye (Szinye), Sándorhomok (Homok), Vasasszentegyed (Szentegyed) and Vasasszentgotthárd (Szentgotthárd). The Magyar Kőrös and Ilosva became Csomakőrös and Selymesilosva after the locally born orientalist Sándor Kőrösi Csoma and the poet Péter Ilosvai Selymes, while the Saxon Nagyszőllős became Keménynagyszőllős after prince János Kemény, died there in battle. All data referring to locality name changes and not otherwise specified are from A. Mező, Adatok a magyar hivatalos helységnévadáshoz [Data on official Hungarian locality naming] (Nyíregyháza: Bessenyei György Tanárképző Főiskola Magyar Nyelvészeti Tanszéke, 1999). 11. To Csatófalva. In 1893–94, however, Temes County renamed Bresztovác into Aga and Janova into Margitfalva, after the landowners; E. Reiszig, ‘Temes vármegye községei’ [The communes of Temes County], in S. Borovszky (ed.), Temes vármegye [Temes County] (Budapest: Országos Monografia Társaság, n.d.), 105. 12. H.-P. Müller, Die schweizerische Sprachenfrage vor 1914: Eine historische Untersuchung über das Verhältnis zwischen Deutsch und Welsch bis zum Ersten Weltkrieg (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1977), 54. 13. H. Feigl, ‘Änderungen von Siedlungsnamen in Österreich’, in R. Schützeichel (ed.), Ortsnamenwechsel: Bamberger Symposion 1. bis 4. oktober 1986 (Heidelberg: Winter, 1986), 189–90. 14. Kyramargiou; Liakos; A. Couderc, ‘Nation et circonscription: construire et nommer le territoire grec, 1832–1837’, in G. de Rapper and P. Sintès (eds), Nommer et classer dans les Balkans (Athens: École française d’Athènes, 2008), 217–35; Mackridge, 21–23; and R.Sh. Peckham, National Histories, Natural States: Nationalism and the Politics of Place in Greece (London: I.B. Tauris, 2001), 35. 15. Quoted in Kyramargiou, 179–81. 16. Rose-Redwood, Alderman and Azaryahu, 461. 17. Ch. Pletzing, ‘Die Politisierung der Toponymie: Ortsnamenänderungen in den preußischen Ostprovinzen während des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in P.O. Loew, Ch. Pletzing and Th. Serrier (eds), Wiedergewonnene Geschichte: zur Aneignung von Vergangenheit in den Zwischenräumen Mitteleuropas (Wiesbaden: Harrasowitz, 2006), 266–75; Tims, 139–40; and M. Tilse, Transnationalism in the Prussian East: From National Conflict to Synthesis, 1871–1914 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 17.

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18. Pletzing, 272–74. 19. M. Azaryahu and A. Golan, ‘(Re)naming the Landscape: The Formation of the Hebrew Map of Israel 1949–1960’, Journal of Historical Geography 27 (2001), 178–95; K. Öktem, ‘The Nation’s Imprint: Demographic Engineering and the Change of Toponymes in Republican Turkey’, European Journal of Turkish Studies 7 (2008), available at http:// ejts.revues.org/2243 (last accessed 15 September 2019); B. Çakır, ‘Crafting Symbolic Geographies in Modern Turkey: Kurdish Assimilation and the Politics of (Re)Naming’, MA thesis (Erasmus University, Rotterdam, 2013), available at http://thesis.eur.nl/ pub/15395/ (last accessed 15 September 2019); J. Yoshioka, ‘Imagining Their Lands as Ours: Place Name Changes on Ex-German Territories in Poland after World War II’, in T. Hayashi and H. Fukuda (eds), Regions in Central and Eastern Europe: Past and Present (Sapporo: Slavic Research Center, Hokkaido University, 2007), 273–87; and Tomasz Kamusella, personal communication. See also F. Mentz, ‘Die Ortsnamenverdeutschung in Elsaß-Lothringen’, Zeitschrift des allgemeinen deutschen Sprachvereins 31 (1916), 40–46. 20. Kranzmayer, 106; M. Gorrotxategi Nieto, ‘Normativización, oficialización y normalización de la toponimia en Euskal Herria’ [Standardization, officialization and normalization of the place-name cover in the Basque Country], in G. Peral and M. Dolores (eds), Lengua, espacio y sociedad: Investigaciones sobre normalización toponímica en España [Language, space and society: Investigations on the toponymic standardization in Spain] (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2013), 85–86; J. Kramer, Italienische Ortsnamen in Südtirol: Geschichte  – Sprache  – Namenpolitik (Stuttgart: Ibidem, 2008), 60–64; C. Nash, ‘Irish Place Names: Post-colonial Locations’, in L.D. Berg and J.Vuolteenaho (eds), Critical Toponymies: The Contested Politics of Place Naming (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 140; P. Garde, Le discours balkanique: Des mots et des hommes (Paris: Fayard, 2004), 250; and Georgelin, 210 and 213. 21. Likely the misreading of Ausena, the name of a mountain in Gothic Iberia. 22. The name of a Roman town in Italy. 23. A. Treb[oniu] Laurian, Istoria româniloru din timpurile celle mai vechie pîno în dillele nóstre [History of Romanians from the earliest times to our days], 2nd edn (Bucharest: Nifone, 1862), 5–14; and S. Fetti, Chart’a Marelui Principatu Transilvania [Map of the Grand Principality of Transylvania] (Sibiiu: Crabs, 1862). 24. Treb. Laurian, 12; and G. Barițiu, Apulum, Alba-Iulia, Belgrad in Transilvania: studiu [Alba Iulia in Transylvania: study] (Bucharest: Academiei Române, 1887), 25–26. Peasants from the area, however, continued to prefer Bălgrad; D. Prodan, Memorii [Memoirs] (Bucharest: Editura Enciclopedică, 1993), 144; and Iorga, Neamul romănesc, Vol. 1, 79. 25. Cristureanu, ‘Latinismul’, 31. 26. N. Drăganu, Toponimie și istorie [Toponymy and history] (Cluj: Ardealul, 1928), 88; and D. Radosav, Arătarea Împăratului: Intrările imperiale în Transilvania și Banat: (sec. XVII–XIX); discurs şi reprezentare [The Showing of the Emperor: imperial entries in Transylvania and the Banat, 17th to 19th c.; discourse and representation] (ClujNapoca: Presa Universitară Clujeană, 2002), 134–36. 27. A. Miskolczy and Á. Varga E., Jozefinizmus Tündérországban: Erdély történeti demográfiájának forrásai a XVIII. század második felében [Josephinism in Fairyland: demographic sources for the history of Transylvania from the second half of the eighteenth century] (Budapest: Tarsoly, 2013), 115.

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28. For contempary comments on the new German names of the 1860s, see Bariț, ‘Cum se se scria connumele neromanesci’; Pesty Frigyes helynévgyűjteménye 1864–1865: Székelyföld, Vol. 1, 79; George Gherman, village secretary of Drăguș, OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 22, and village secretary Nicolae V... and mayor Nicolae Popa from Făget; ibid., reel no. 37, at Oláhbükkös. 29. According to a census from 1846; P. Kozma, Zaránd-vármegye’ földirati, statistikai és történeti leirása [The geographical, statistical and historical description of Zarand County] (Kolozsvártt: Kir. Főtanoda, 1848), 40. 30. Lenk von Treuenfeld. 31. D. Buzogány and S.E. Ősz, A hunyad-zarándi református egyházközségek történeti katasztere, 1686–1807 [Historical register of Calvinist parishes in the Diocese of HunyadZaránd, 1686–1807], 3 vols (Kolozsvár: Kolozsvári Református Teológiai Intézet Egyháztörténeti Tanszéke and Erdélyi Református Gyűjtőlevéltár, 2003–7). 32. Mesteacăn/Mesztákon, for instance, is mentioned at least 25 times, and Vaca/Váka 17 times. 33. János Ung, József Korhány and István Szakáts; OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 74, at Brád, Mesztákon, Miheleny and Zsunk. 34. Decree no. 3,967/1902 of the Minister of the Interior, in Belügyi Közlöny 7 (1902), 289. 35. Balogh confuses Chiuiești (Hun. Pecsétszeg) in Solnocul Interior/Belső-Szolnok with Tiulești (Tyiulesd) in Zarand. 36. P. Balogh, A népfajok Magyarországon [The races of people in Hungary] (Budapest: Royal Hungarian Ministry of Worship and Public Instruction, 1902), 771. Emphases in the original. He writes Hunyad instead of Zaránd because the administrative reform of 1876 had annexed the latter to Hunyad County. 37. J. Hunfalvy, ‘Die magyarischen Ortsnamen und Herr Prof. Kiepert’, Ungarische Revue 3 (1883), 405–6; and C.T. Dunlop, Cartophilia: Maps and the Search for Identity in the French–German Borderland (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), 79–80. 38. Az Üstökös 3 (1858), 101. 39. Márki, 220; and za-la [Gyula Merza], ‘Földrajzi sovinizmus’ [Geographical chauvinism], Erdély 12 (1903), 148. 40. On the Banat under direct Habsburg administration, see S. Kókai, A Bánság történeti földrajza (1718–1918): A Bánság helye és szerepe a Kárpát-medence földrajzi munkamegosztásában [The historical geography of the Banat (1718–1918): the place and role of the Banat in the geographic division of labour in the Carpathian Basin] (Nyíregyháza: Nyíregyházi Főiskola Turizmus és Földrajztudományi Intézete, 2010). 41. Village secretary Károly Láng and the illiterate mayor Mihai Gheorghe from Herneacova; OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 61. 42. Réső Ensel, Vol. 1, 74. On the revival of medieval place names in the Banat during the nineteenth century, see M. Lendvai, ‘A temesvármegyei községnevek “magyarosítása”’ [The ‘Magyarization’ of the locality names of Temes County], Történelmi és Régészeti Értesitő 26 (1910), 94–95. 43. MNL OL K150, batch 152, 21,882/1870. 44. H. Lay (ed.), Ebendorf: Monographie und Heimatbuch einer deutschen Marktgemeinde im Banat (1786–1992) (n.p.: Heimatortgemeinschaft Ebendorf, 1999), 126; and L. Schedius and S. Blaschnek, Vollstaendige General Posten- und Strassen-Karte des Königreichs Ungarn... (1855–56) [originally 1833–36], on the CD-ROM enclosed to Plihál.

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45. Eötvösd, Deákbánya, Lónyaytelep, Bressonfalva, Szapáryfalva, Újjózseffalva, Simonyifalva, Szapáryliget, Bethlenháza, Gézafalva, Kendetelep, Andrássytelep, Eczkentelep, Erzsébetemlék, Gyulatelep. 46. D. Csernovics, A délmagyarországi kincstári birtokok és telepes községek múltja és jelene [Past and present of the Treasury estates and colonist settlements in Southern Hungary] (Arad: Magy. Kir. Államjószágigazgatóság, 1913), 182. 47. S. Ujfalvy, Emlékiratai [Memoirs] (Kolozsvár: Erdélyi Múzeum-Egyesület, 1941); and J. Kádár et al., Szolnok-Dobokavármegye monographiája [Monograph of Szolnok-Doboka County], Vol. 6 (Deésen: Szolnok-Dobokavármegye közönsége, 1904), 274–78. 48. Mező, Adatok, 253. For the sake of simplicity, I depart from my usual way of handling the names of settlements in this chapter and I indicate the Hungarian names whenever discussed in connection with their change. 49. On the medieval name, see L. Benkő, Az ómagyar nyelv tanúságtétele: perújítás DélErdély kora Árpád-kori történetéről [The testimony of Old Hungarian: review of trial on the history of Southern Transylvania in the early Árpádian Age] (Budapest: MTA Történettudományi Intézet, 2002). 50. Elek Kovács to Pesty; Pesty Frigyes helynévgyűjteménye 1864–1865: Székelyföld, Vol. 4, 51–54. 51. MNL OL K150, batch 1,553, 65,517/1886 and 37,019/1887; ANR Bistrița, Fond Prefectura Județului Năsăud 9/1887, 20–21 and 63; and S. Retegan, Satele năsăudene la mijlocul secolului al XIX-lea: mărturii documentare [Villages of the District of Năsăud at the mid nineteenth century: documentary evidence] (Cluj-Napoca: Accent, 2002), 101. 52. It was not a debut in Hungary at large, however, as Zólyom County had already Magyarized more than a hundred of its locality names five years earlier. 53. ‘A beszterce-naszódi főispán lemondása’ [Resignation of the prefect of BeszterceNaszód], Budapesti Hírlap 9 January 1891, annexe. 54. OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 35. 55. L. Szmida and I. Nikolényi, Temes vármegyei Végvár (Rittberg) nagyközség multja és jelene [The past and present of Végvár/Rittberg/Tormac large commune in Temes County] (Temesvár: the public of Végvár commune, 1901), 45. 56. Report of the chair on the Communal Registry Board to the Ministry of the Interior on the locality names of Krassó-Szörény County; A. Mező, A magyar hivatalos helységnévadás [Official Hungarian locality naming] (Budapest: Akadémiai, 1982), 143. 57. Zs. Farkasházy, ‘Szászok szélmalomharcza’ [Saxons’ windmill fight], Erdély 8 (1899), 46; D.S. Telkes, ‘A helynevekről’ [On place names], Földrajzi Közlemények 26 (1898), 265; J. Nyárasdy, ‘Nemzetietlenségek’ [Breaches of the national spirit], Népnevelők Lapja 31 (1896), 229; and Márki, ‘Erdély helynevei’, 216. 58. Hangay, Harcz a magyarságért!, 139–40. 59. E. középajtai Barna [pseudonym of E. Barabás], Románia nemzetiségi politikája és az oláhajkú magyar polgárok [The nationalities policy of Romania and the Hungarian citizens of Romanian tongue] (Kolozsvár: E.M.K.E., 1908), 89. 60. G. Volkmer, Die Siebenbürgische Frage (1878–1900): Der Einfluss der rumänischen Nationalbewegung auf die diplomatischen Beziehungen zwischen Österreich-Ungarn und Rumänien (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004), 79–82; and T. Pavel, Mișcarea românilor pentru unitate națională și diplomația puterilor centrale [Romanians’ movement for national unity and the diplomacy of the Central Powers], Vol. 1 (Timișoara: Facla, 1979), 29–31.

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61. P. Mechtler, ‘Streiflichter auf das Nationalitätenproblem bei den österreichischen Eisenbahnen’, Mitteilungen des Österreichischen Staatsarchiv 15 (1962), 444–47; and Müller, 64–65. 62. Merza, Földrajzi sovinizmus, 146. 63. Pazmandy, 37–38; and Barabás, 125. 64. S. Romhányi, ‘A földrajzi tulajdonnevek helyes elnevezése’ [The correct forms of geographic names], Turista Közlöny 5 (1898), 3; and Károly Eötvös’s speech in the House of Commons on 6 December 1897; Képviselőházi napló 1896, Vol. 10, 229. 65. Farkasházy, ‘Szászok szélmalomharcza’, 46. 66. Hangay, Harcz a magyarságért!, 139–40. 67. L. Lóczy, ‘Elnöki megnyitó’ [Presidential keynote speech], Földrajzi Közlemények 38 (1910), 149. 68. Romhányi, 5. 69. J. Nyárasdy, ‘A földrajzi tulajdonnevek helyes elnevezése’ [The correct forms of geographical names], Turista Közlöny 5 (1898), 120; and Telkes, ‘A helynevekről’, 265. 70. Pesty, A helynevek és a történelem, 57. 71. T. Ortvay, Magyarország régi vízrajza a XIII-dik század végéig [The historical hydrography of Hungary until the late thirteenth century], 2 vols (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1882); and D. Csánki, Magyarország történelmi földrajza a Hunyadiak korában [The historical geography of Hungary in the age of the Hunyadis], 5 vols (Budapest: Magyar Tudományos Akadémia, 1890–1913). 72. I. Acsády et al., Történelmi iskolai atlasz [School history atlas], 3 vols (Budapest: Kogutowicz és Társa Magyar Földrajzi Intézete, n.d.). On the genre, T. Kamusella, ‘School History Atlases as Instruments of Nation-State Making and Maintenance: A Remark on the Invisibility of Ideology in Popular Education’, Journal of Educational Media, Memory, and Society 2 (2010), 113–38. Apart from Acsády and Márki, who coauthored the former, Márki also designed maps for Pallas Nagy Lexikona, and Ortvay collaborated with the cartographer László Hrubant on maps showing the ecclesiastical divisions of the medieval Kingdom of Hungary. 73. Márki, ‘Erdély helynevei’, 221. 74. Alsópihenő ‘lower rest’ for Alsópián (‘we gain a name that announces its great age’), Hóföld ‘snow field’ for Fófeld (‘on the model of Hóstát in Kolozsvár’), Ilona (‘Helen’) for Illenbák, Ráró archaic ‘saker falcon’ for Guraró (‘they would soon get used to it’), Rés ‘chink’ for Resinár, and Vászoly (the old Hungarian form of Basileios) for Vaszolya. 75. J. Szentkláray, A társadalom nemzeti feladatai Délmagyarországon [The national tasks of society in Southern Hungary] (Temesvár: Temesvár-József- és Erzsébetvárosi Társaskör, 1897), 18; and J. Szentkláray, A csanád-egyházmegyei plebániák története [The history of the parishes in the Csanád Diocese], Vol. 1 (Temesvár: Csanád-egyházmegyei Nyomda, 1898), 394. 76. ‘In view of the well-known nationalist stirrings, I find it desirable that the currently existing names should undergo change under any circumstances.’ MNL OL BM K156, 458. 77. It is not clear why they even thought that it cannot be: Glăjărie Gurghiului. 78. Gurahonț/Gurahonc, Hosdát/Hășdat and Păiușeni/Pajsán in Mező, Adatok and Sintea/ Szintye in MNL OL BM K156, box 35, 807. The Bozovici district administrator made the same argument about Bănia/Bánya and Gârbovăț/Gerbovec, the former in MNL OL BM K156, box 54, 376.

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79. D. Papp, ‘A Rátótiak’ [The people of Rátót], in A. Szalai (ed.), Századvég [Fin de siècle], Vol. 2 (Budapest: Szépirodalmi, 1984), 420; G. Czirbusz, Magyarország a XX. század elején [Hungary at the beginning of the twentieth century] (Temesvár: Polatsek, 1902), 274; and Á. Jancsó, A Bega, a Bánság elkényeztetett folyója [The Bega/Begej, the spoiled river of the Banat] (Temesvár: Mirton, 2007), 15. 80. G. Téglás, ‘Az ősi magyar helynevek s a magyarság pusztulása Hunyadmegyében’ [The ancestral Hungarian place names and the destruction of Magyardom in Hunyad County], Földrajzi Közlemények 16 (1888), 213; and I. Gaál, ‘Úti vázlatok Hunyadmegyéből’ [Travel sketches from Hunyad County], in K. Dénes (ed.), Hunyadvármegyei almanach 1909 [Hunyad County Almanac] (Déva: self-published, 1909), 78. 81. Em. Petrovici, ‘Material onomastic din Atlasul lingvistic român II’ [Onomastic material from the second Romanian language atlas], in Anuar de lingvistică și istorie literară 32(A) (1988–91), 165. 82. J.J. Egli, Geschichte der geographischen Namenkunde (Leipzig: Brandstetter, 1886), 122–23 and 244. 83. G. Várady, Hulló levelek [Falling leaves], Vol. 3 (M.-Sziget: Sicherman, 1895), 213–14. 84. Sipos, especially 19–20; and Mező, Adatok, 61. 85. F. Milleker, Geschichte der Gemeinde Nagy-Zsám, 1370–1909 (Temesvár: Csendes, 1909), 45; and Wettel, 68. 86. K.R. Helander, ‘Toponymic Silence and Sámi Place Names during the Growth of the Norwegian Nation State’, in L.D. Berg and J. Vuolteenaho (eds), Critical Toponymies: The Contested Politics of Place Naming (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2009), 253–66. 87. Mező, A magyar hivatalos helységnévadás. 88. Idem, Adatok. 89. I am grateful to the late Mihály Hajdú for my copy of the book. 90. Nemes, 35. 91. See the minister of the interior’s exposition of the bill in Kemény, Vol. 2, 629–30. 92. Képviselőházi napló 1896, Vol. 10, 220–30 and 285–92. 93. Kemény, Vol. 2, 240–41 and 243–44. 94. Göllner, 198–205; and Tribuna 16/28 November 1897, 1,018. 95. Budapesti Hírlap, 9 August 1899. 96. Volkmer, 326–28. 97. Göllner, 203. 98. Kemény, Vol. 2, 324–25. 99. I. Schmidt, Beiträge zur Geschichte des südostdeutschen Parteiwesens 1848–1914 (Munich: Schick, 1939), 88. 100. Képviselőházi napló 1896, Vol. 17, 223–24; Képviselőházi napló 1901, Vol. 17, 200 and Vol. 20, 180–81; and Bartha, Vol. 3, 338, 484 and 544–45. 101. I. Mataija, ‘Promjene imenâ naselja na hrvatskome području: u svjetlu administrativnih određenja od 1860. do 1960. godine’ [Changes of the settlements’ names in the Croatian lands in light of the administrative determinations in the period 1860 to 1960], Folia Onomastica Croatica 20 (2011), 125–26. 102. G. Gratz, A dualizmus kora: Magyarország története, 1867–1918 [The Dualist Period: a history of Hungary, 1867–1918] (Budapest: Magyar Szemle Társaság, 1934; reprint, Budapest: Akadémiai, 1992), Vol. 2, 278. 103. Pesti Hirlap 11 November 1908, 3.

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104. E.g. Cseppkőbánya ‘dripstone mine’ (Tuffier), Délest ‘afternoon’ (Delinyest), Drágamérés ‘expensive measurement’ (Dragomirest), Góbékiráld ‘Szekler Kingston’ (Globukrajova), Gólyaköröm ‘stork’s nail’ (Gruin), Németéhesfalu ‘German hungry village’ (Németgladna), Ostrom ‘siege’ (Osztrov), Serénynyugvás ‘busy rest’ (Schnellersruhe), Sumák ‘dorky’ (Sumica), Szélcsend ‘doldrums’ (Szelcsova), Turul the totemic bird of the Árpád dynasty (Turnul), Végcél ‘end goal’ (Marzsina). 105. MNL OL BM K156, box 66, 3,422–23. 106. On behalf of the National Archives, the chief archivists Gyula Pauler and Gyula Nagy made proposals and comments. 107. Kemény, Vol. 2, 630. 108. E.g. Alsópozsgás ‘lower ruddy-cheeked’ (Románpozsezsena), Borzasfalva ‘umkempt village’ (Botyest), Kőkaró ‘stone picket’ (Kakaró), Kürtös ‘bugler’ (Kurtics, the early modern Kurtafejéregyház), Parázs ‘embers’ (Prezest), Perlő ‘claimant’ (Prebul), Sisak ‘helmet’ (Suska). 109. The mayor of Schäßburg on behalf of the town council, on 22 September 1900; MNL OL BM K156, box 61, 1,068–69. 110. Délvidék 23 September 1900, 3. 111. There was no village with a Magyar majority in Szeben County. 112. Mező, A magyar hivatalos helységnévadás, 141–43. 113. MNL OL BM K156, box 37, 1,163. 114. Árokfalva (Vále), Bodapataka (Szibiel), Hűhalom (Vurpód), Nagybenefalva (Bendorf), Oltgalambok (Glimboka), Osztorgály (Sztrugár), Paplaka (Popláka), Porcs (Porcsesd), Szád (Cód) and Szászóvár (Alcina). 115. The traditional pronunciation was [-ʒ]. See Zs. Simonyi, ‘A hivatalos helységnévtár’ [The official gazetteer], Magyar Nyelvőr 26 (1897), 27–28. 116. Nyegrefalu→Nyegrefalva, but Rózsapataka→Rózsapatak. They believed that names with a first element that was historically a personal name should carry possessive marking, whereas those where it was a common noun should not. One problem here is obviously the criteria upon which to decide whether a form went back to a name or a common noun. 117. The new names were created by translation (La Frásziny→Juhar, Vályabogeci→ Bogátaivölgy) and remotivation (La Bástya→Szamosárok, Pojánaonci→Bezdédmező, Szalatruk→​Pecsétszegiút); Belügyi Közlöny 15 (1910), 309–21. 118. MNL OL BM K156, box 35, 560–61. 119. Both MNL OL BM K156, box 37, 372. 120. On the relevant ordinances, see G. Mikesy, ‘A korai kataszteri térképezés névanyagát befolyásoló utasítások, rendeletek’ [The orders and decrees influencing the name corpus on early land registry maps], Helynévtörténeti Tanulmányok 10 (2014), 110–14. 121. Ormeling, 57–68 and 72–84; and Wolf, 65 and 76–78. 122. Ormeling, 80–81, 89 and 191. 123. Ibid., 89, 101, 130, 171 and 186. 124. Igazságügyi Közlöny 13 (1904), 55. 125. The cadastral maps of Kubin/Kovin/Cuvin (1903), Kruščica (1905), Jasenovo (1906), Weißkirchen (1909), Poieni (1911) and Sohodol (1912); MNL OL S76 nos 1,196/1–52, 567/1–16, 530/1–19 and 363/1–33; Ruszkatő Krassó-Szörény vármegyei kisközség kataszteri térképe (Budapest: M. kir. állami ny., 1911); and MNL OL S76 nos 42/1–20.

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126. Česká Ves/Ablian (1906), Chevereșu Mare (1906), Dupljaja (1906), Izbište/Izbischte (1910), Mramorak/Mramorac (1910), Zagajica (1911), Sokolovac (1913), Teregova (1913) and Luncavița (1914); MNL OL S76 232/1–4, 869/1–26, 1216/1–17, 508/1– 51, 473/1–60, 383/1–18, 898/1–23, MNL OL S78 1913, no. 1–173 and 1914, no. 1–22. On the last two, the Romanian endonyms are displayed between parentheses. 127. Azaryahu and Golan; Öktem; Çakır and Yoshioka. 128. http://mapire.eu; Military Survey of Hungary (1941). 129. Gy. Szathmáry, Nemzeti állam és népoktatás [National state and primary education] (Budapest: Lampel, 1892), 103–7. 130. Z. Vizoly, ‘Adatok Erdély néhány helységnevének magyarázatához’ [Contributions to the origin of a few place names of Transylvania], Egyetemes Philologiai Közlöny 6 (1882), 16. 131. Mayor Ioanne Thodoran and village secretary Ioanne Roman; OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 37; village secretary Károly Keresztesi; ibid., reel no. 30 and village secretary Dimitrie Merkan (?); ibid., reel no. 18. 132. Szászakna, Szászbanyica, Szászpéntek, Szászkisalmás and Szászlóna. As against the way they figured in the 1892 Hungarian gazetteer, see J. Jekelfalussy (ed.), A magyar korona országainak helységnévtára [Gazetteer of the countries of the Hungarian crown] (Budapest: Országos M. Kir. Statisztikai Hivatal, 1892). 133. Medves (Temes County) received it, whilst Medvés (Alsó-Fehér County) became Nagymedvés. 134. ANR Bistrița, Fond Prefectura județului Năsăud 8/1886, 20; and K. Czirják, Taplóczától Maroshévízig, avagy Maroshévíz monográfiája [From ‘Taplócza’ to ‘Maroshévíz’, or a monograph of Toplița/Maroshévíz] (Maroshévíz: self-published, 2010), 20. 135. OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 61, at Románbentsek and Románszentmihály; ibid., reel 35, at Románoravica and Románszászka; ibid., reel 36, at Románkecel and ibid., reel 63, at Romántelek. 136. Mező, A magyar hivatalos helységnévadás, 324. 137. To Tés. 138. Oláhivánfalva, Barakony (Alsóbarakony), Kustély (Mélykastély), Ópécska, Szászpéntek and Újszadova. The argument of Oláhivánfalva reads ‘the word oláh is long outdated, the civilized world does not use it’. 139. ANR Bistrița, Fond Prefectura județului Năsăud 8/1886, 20. On the language question in Beszterce-Naszód County under Bánffy, see Adrian Onofreiu, ‘Contribuții documentare privind istoria comitatului Bistrița-Năsăud: 1876–1899’ [Documentary contributions regarding the history of Beszterce-Naszód County, 1876–99], Arhiva Someșană, 3rd series, 5 (2006), 289–348. 140. Oláhgyéres, Oláhnyíres and Oláhszilvás (Mikószilvás) vs Oláhandrásfalva, Oláhhidegkút, Oláhhodos (Béltekhodos), Oláhhorvát, Oláhkakucs, Oláhmeddes, Oláhnádas (Görgénynádas), Oláhnádasd and Oláhújfalu (Szamosújfalu). 141. On the consistent removal of ethnic slurs from place names in the United States, see M. Monmonier, From Squaw Tit to Whorehouse Meadow: How Maps Name, Claim, and Inflame (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2006). 142. László Beőthy, the prefect of Bihar County, to the Minister of Worship and Public Instruction on 26 September 1897; Popovici et al., 454. The village in question is Ceica/ Magyarcséke in Bihar County. 143. Kemény, Vol. 2, 632.

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144. For the latter type, Dunaorbágy (Jeselnica), Kengyeltó (Rafnik), Krassócser (Cerova), Vizes (Vodnik). 145. I have in mind the type cavalierly called ‘parallel place naming’ in Hungarian scholarship, where Romanian names derived from Byzantine-Slavic personal names with the suffix -ești and their Hungarian counterparts with -falva. 146. L. Buday, ‘Magyarország községneveinek törzskönyvezése’ [The registering of the locality names of Hungary], Földrajzi Közlemények 34 (1906), 224–25; and the Ministry of the Interior’s explanatory note on the bill, in Kemény, Vol. 2, 629–31. 147. Zs. Farkasházy, ‘Magyarország község neveinek helyesbitése’ [The correction of Hungary’s locality names], Erdély 5 (1896), 97. 148. Assistant village secretary Tudor Surdu, mayor Mihutiu and elders Gyorgye Murgu, Iuon Mandru and Vasilie Ventila, 1866; OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A, reel no. 2. 149. Mező, A magyar hivatalos helységnévadás, 121. Köszvényes means ‘gout-stricken’, and Nagyfalu already had Szilágy-Nagyfalu written on its seal. 150. On Csicsér, MNL OL BM K156, box 35, 36. Cf. Karl Schmidt’s speech in the House of Commons on 10 December 1897, in Képviselőházi napló 1896, Vol. 10, 286. 151. L. Bányai, Kitárul a világ: önéletrajzi jegyzetek [The world opens up: autobiographical notes] (Bucharest: Kriterion, 1978), 104. 152. Cf. V. Tóth, Településnevek változástipológiája [Typology of locality name changes] (Debrecen: Magyar Névarchívum, 2008), 13. 153. ‘Educated Women the Depositories of Good Style’, in Essays on Style, Rhetoric, and Language (Boston, MA: Allyn and Bacon, 1893), 12. 154. MNL OL BM K156, box 37, 1,027. 155. Mező, Adatok, 329. 156. In at least two cases, however, it also happened that the board’s final decision gave its own concoctions the undeserved epithet ‘historical’; Beletháza (Belotinc) and Karáncsfalva (Kráncsesd), in Mező, Adatok, 46 and 207. 157. Charlottenburg→Saroltavár, Kelecel→Kiskalota (Călata/Kalota hydronym), Engelsbrunn→Angyalkút, Mundra→Széptelek (Rom. mândră and Hun. szép ‘beautiful’), Oresác→Homokdiód (Serbian orah and Hun. dió ‘walnut’), Plugova→Ekés (Rom. plug and Hun. eke ‘plough’), Remetelunga→Hosszúremete (Rom. lungă and Hun. hosszú ‘long’), Tarkaica→Tárkányka (Tárkány/Tărcaia toponym + diminutive suffix), Vracsevgáj→Varázsliget (Serbian vrač ‘sorcerer’, Hun. varázs ‘magic’) etc. 158. R. Crețan and V. Frățilă, Dicționar geografico-istoric și toponimic al județului Timiș [Geographical-historical and toponymic dictionary of Timiș County] (Timișoara: Editura Universității de Vest, 2007); and C. Reuter, ‘Zgribești (Krassógombás)’, Magyar Nyelv 111 (1987), 115–16. Curiously, Jenő Szentkláray also pointed out this etymology to the board. 159. Brezonfalva (after the Austrian Railway Company chief executive George Bresson)→Bársonyfalva (‘velvet village’), Brostyán (< Rom. Broșteni < Rom. broască ‘frog’)→Krassóborostyán (borostyán ‘amber’), Cseszora (Ceișoara, perhaps < Rom. teișor ‘little lime tree’; L. Kiss, ‘Helynévmagyarázatok’ [Toponymic etymologies], Magyar Nyelv 102 (2006), 498)→Cseszvára (‘Csesz’s castle’), Gáttája→Gátalja (‘foot of the dam’), Labasinc→Lábas (‘saucepan’), Nadalbest→Nádalmás (Hun. nád ‘reed’ + almás ‘rich in apples’), Ópaulis (medieval Pálülése)→Ópálos (‘old Pauline monk’), Sászavinca

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(two settlement units, Șasa from Rom. șeasă ‘plain’ + Vința)→Szászavinc (szász ‘Saxon’), Spatta→Bégapata (Hun. pata ‘hoof’), Vaszoja→Vészalja (‘the bottom of disaster’) etc. 160. Between parentheses stand the objects referred to: Bucsa→Királyhágó (the eponymous mountain pass), Grappa→Haragosalja (the Haragos Hill), Luska→Szamospart (the Szamos River), Szuplái→Ciblesfalva (the Cibles Hill), Valeadoszuluj→Nagyompoly (the Ompoly River). 161. Szkulya→Szigetfalu (on an isle, Hun. sziget ‘isle’), Szolsica→Temesszőlős (viticulture, Hun. szőlő ‘grapes’), Trimpoel→Kénesd (pyrite mine, Hun kén ‘sulfur’). 162. The home industry of the area has been described in detail, and there is no mention of carpenters in Aciuța; N. Dunăre, ‘Sate din Zărand specializate în meșteșuguri țărănești’ [Villages in Zarand engaged in home industry], Sargetia 3 (1956), 117–71; and Gy. Kovács, ‘A háziipar törzskönyve’ [The registry of home industry], in S. Matlekovits (ed.), Magyarország közgazdasági és közművelődési állapota ezredéves fennállásakor és az 1896. évi ezredéves kiállítás eredménye [The economic and cultural state of Hungary at the thousandth year of its existence and the result of the millennial exposition of 1896], Vol. 8, Ipar, Kereskedés, Közlekedés [Industry, Commerce, Transport] (Budapest: Pesti Könyvnyomda, 1898), 311–80. 163. P. Siptár and M. Törkenczy, The Phonology of Hungarian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, [2000] 2007), 99. 164. Ibid., 98–99; and H. Maszák, ‘A toroczkói völgy: Erdélyben’ [The Torockó Valley: in Transylvania], Vasárnapi Újság 6 (1859), 327. The name is a Hungarian possessive phrase, but the first element is plainly not Hungarian. 165. Other such names that the board did not think about modifying include Drág, Kraszna, Krizba, Prázsmár and Sztána. 166. Gaura→Kővárgara, Gruin→Grúny, Nyimoesd→Nyimesd, Rieny→Rény, Valeadény→​ Váldény, etc. 167. Siptár and Törkenczy, 124–25. 168. Zs. Simonyi and J. Balassa, Tüzetes magyar nyelvtan történeti alapon [Comprehensive Hungarian grammar on historical grounds], Vol. 1, Magyar hangtan és alaktan [Hungarian phonology and morphology] (Budapest: M. Tud. Akadémia, 1895), 36–38. 169. Siptár and Törkenczy, 63. 170. Bazest→Bázosd, Belotinc→Beletháza, Dekányesd→Dékányos, Dobrocsina→Döbörcsény, Dubest→Dobosd, Kakacseny→Kakucsány, Mercsina→Mercsény, Radimna→Rádonya, Siád→Sajád, Tirnova→Tornó, Torpest→Toposd, Vercserova→Varcsaró, etc. 171. I. Hoffmann, A Tihanyi alapítólevél mint helynévtörténeti forrás [The Tihany foundation charter as a source of historical toponymy] (Debrecen: Debrecen University Press, 2010). 172. Albis, Batiz, Bernád, Béta, Bibarc(-falva), Bihar, (Magyar-)Bikal, Bikszád, Bita, Boncida, Cikó, Cséffa, Csernát(-falu), Csiba, (Csík-)Csicsó, Dámos, Déva, Ditró, Esztár, Fugyi, Gilvács, Giród(-tótfalu), Girolt, Görgény, Hermány, Ikland, Iklód, Iloba, Ilosva, Inaktelke, Kapnik, Kénos, Léta, Lippa, Majtény, Majtis, Máré(-falva), Margitta, Menaság, Méra, Mikola, Milota, Miriszló, (Vásáros-)Namény, Páké, Panit, Pécska, Piskolt, Rigmány, Szabéd, Visa, Vitka, Zilah, Zsibó, etc. 173. Binis→​Bényes, Gyigyiseny→​Gyegyesény, Kavna→​Kávna, Koroj→​Bélkaroly, Letka→​Létka, Lunka (several)→​Lonka, Szurduk (several)→​Szurdok, etc. 174. Budak, Bürgezd, Csucsa, Egri, Füle, Gyalu, Gyula, Hunyad, Idecs, (Magyar-)Igen, Illye, Kakucs, Keszi, Keszü, Kide, Micske, (Mező-)Petri, Pürkerec, Sepsi, Sülelmed, (Magyar-) Sülye, Sütmeg, Szinye, Szucsák, Türe, Ugra, Uraly, Ülke, Vice, etc.

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175. Borlova→​​Borló, Divics→​Divécs, Ferendia→​Ferend, Gajtasol→​Gajtas, Gerbovec→​ Gerbóc, Honcisor→​Honcér, Honoris→​Honoros, Hovrilla→​Hávord, Komoristye→​ Komornok, Koramnik→​Koromnok, Lalaspublicinc→​Lalánc, Lodormán→​Lodormány, Mirkovác→​Mirkóc, Nermet→​Nermed, Pirosa→​Pirosd, Pocsavalesd→​Pócsafalva, Rogozsel→​Havasrogoz, Segyest→​Szegyesd, Sust→​Susd, Szervestye→​Szervesd, Tiszovica→​ Tiszóca, Verendin→​Verend, etc. 176. Bruznik→​Borosznok (cf. Slovak Bruznik/Hun. Borosznok), Glogovéc→​Kisgalgóc (cf. Slovak Hlohovec/Hun. Galgóc), (Maros-, Mikó-)Szlatina→​Szalatna (cf. Slovak Veľká Slatina/Hun. Nagyszalatna). 177. Berindia→​Borosberend, Berzova (< Sl. brěza ‘birch tree’ + -ova)→​Marosborsa, Bikis (the medieval Bükkös)→​Kisbékés (on the analogy of Hun. Békés/Rom. Bichiș), Diécs (< Rom. dieci, pl. of diac ‘student, scribe’ < Hun. diák idem)→​Décse, Oláhgirbó→​ Oláhgorbó, Kisszredistye→​Kisszered, Kopacsel (< Rom. copăcel ‘little tree’)→​Kiskopács, Krokna→​Koroknya, Obersia (< Rom. obârșie ‘source’)→​Óborsa, Szelcsova→​Szolcsva. 178. Telegrafulu Romanu 11/23 March 1873, pp. 78–79; Tribuna Poporului 28 March / 9 April 1898, p. 286; A.C. Popovici, La question roumaine en Transylvanie et en Hongrie (Lausanne: Payot, 1918), 211–16 [originally 1892]; and Nagysolymosi Szabó, 3. 179. MNL OL BM K150, 30,646/1875, bundle 451; and Magyar Statisztikai Közlemények, new series, Vol. 39 (Budapest: Magyar Kir. Központi Statisztikai Hivatal, 1913), 175. 180. Councillors Demeter Morar and Gábor Köhler, in Mező, Adatok, 353. 181. MNL OL BM K156, box 55, 2,006. 182. MNL OL BM K156, box 35, 468 and 1,041; box 61, 291, 443 and 799; and box 55, 1,259, 1,277, 1,299, 1,573, 1,610, 1,633, 1,689, 1,699, 1,734–35 and 1,762; and Mező, Adatok, 70. 183. MNL OL BM K156, box 66, 3,847. 184. Cf. the Ciclova Română/Románcsiklova Orthodox priest Ioan Maran’s argument at a local council meeting that csikló was a derisive term in Hungarian, which he refused to develop at the village secretary’s insistence; MNL OL BM K156, box 55, 1,610. 185. Mező, Adatok, 307; and MNL OL BM K156, box 37, 1,058. 186. On Liebling, Tribuna 15/28 February 1911. Cornea does not mean anything in Romanian, although the locally used, vernacular endonym was Corni, which can in fact be interpreted as the plural of Romanian corn ‘cornel’. Cf. Stoica de Hațeg, 61 and passim. 187. MNL OL BM K156, box 55, 2,069, 2,490–93, 2,509, 2,512 and 2,560. Cf. the rejected appeals of Tiliska/Tilicske (ibid., box 37, 1,204–7), Gális/Szebengálos (ibid., 612, 620 and 1,215), Klokotics/Krassócsörgő (ibid., box 55, 2,060–1 and 2,071), Mehadika/ Kismiháld (ibid., 2,411 and 2,420), Kornyaréva/Somosréve (ibid., 2,521 and 2,524) and Pervora/Porhó (ibid., box 64, 494–97). 188. MNL OL BM K156, box 66, 3,961, 3,694–97 and 3,980; and Mező, Adatok, 65, 120 and 319. 189. E.g. the responses of Várorja/Vărarea, MNL OL BM K156, box 41, 957; and of Berethalom/Birthälm, Báránykút/Bekokten, Felmér/Felmern, Hétúr/Marienburg, Kaca/ Katzendorf, Kőhalom/Reps, Mirkvásár/Streitfort, Nagydisznód/Heltau, Nagyekemező/ Groß-Probstdorf, Nagyszőllős/Groß-Alisch and Balázsfalva/Blasiu in Mező, Adatok. 190. See also Bogodinc/Bagotény, Csaba/Bálványoscsaba, Dumbravica/Felsődombró, Glombukrajova/Kiskirálymező, Kisszredistye/Kisszered, Nyágra/Nagyfeketefalu, Priszáka/Gyepü, Rujen/Pokolfalva and Szohodollázur/Aszóirtás.

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1 91. The cases of Lindenfeld (MNL OL BM K156, box 55, 1,081) and Tőkés. 192. Aranyospolyán, Borzova, Felsőpodsága, Libaton, Polyán, Prodánfalva, Körpa, Kosna (MNL OL BM K156, box 41, 682–83), Buttyin, Klic, Ohábamutnik, Kapruca and Tuffier (ibid., box 55, 1933). 193. Decree no. 16,698/1902; Belügyi Közlöny 7 (1902), 271–77. 194. Cf. M. Vertan, Sigilii de sate, comune și târguri din Banatul istoric: secolele XVIII–XIX [Seals of villages, communes and market towns in the historical Banat: 18th–19th centuries] (Timișoara: Brumar, 2006), 22–23 and 25. On Szolnok-Doboka County’s ban on communal seals with Romanian inscriptions after 1877, see Retegan, Drumul greu al modernizării, 118. 195. MNL OL BM K156, box 37, 645–47. 196. Prefect Ferenc Nopcsa to Chancellor Nádasdy, 12 June 1862; S. Retegan (ed.), Mișcarea națională a românilor din Transilvania între 1849–1918: documente [The Romanian national movement of Transylvania between 1849 and 1918: documents], Vol. 5 (Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române 2008), 575–76; Hangay, Harcz a magyarságért!, 222; and response to Pesty from Bârgău Tiha, signed by the village secretary G. Salvan, the mayor Larion Socină and elders Gabriel Județiu and Tănase Gorea, 1865; Retegan, Satele năsăudene, 76–77. 197. Decree no. 134,392/99 of the Minister of the Interior; Belügyi Közlöny 5 (1900), 40. 198. R.W. Mildt, Martinsdorf: Eine siebenbürgisch-sächsische Gemeinde im Wandel der Zeiten (Munich: Siebenbürgisch-Sächsische Stiftung, 1996), 32. 199. Hangay, Harcz a magyarságért!, 147. 200. Ibid., 147–48; Merza, 146; Kl. Löffler, ‘Klausenburg oder Kolozsvár?’, Grenzboten 69(3) (1910), 305–6; and the Straßburg/Strassbourg bookseller Karl Ignaz Trübner’s letter to Adolf Schullerus, 14 February 1898, in M. Vlaicu (ed.), Adolf Schullerus (1864–1928): Korrespondenzen und Vorträge des siebenbürgischen Pfarrers, Gelehrten und Politikers (Vienna: Böhlau, 2018), 96. 201. Glück, 361–65. 202. Hangay, Harcz a magyarságért!, 52. 203. Al. Odobescu, ‘Călătoria în Ardeal în 1894: scrisori adresate Doamnei Sacha Odobescu’ [The journey to Transylvania in 1894: letters to Mrs Sacha Odobescu], Convorbiri Literare 67 (1934), 714; and Al.D. Xenopol, ‘Rîșnovul pe lîngă Brașov: satul Rîșnovul’ [sic] [Râșnov/Rosenau/Barcarozsnyó near Brassó/Brașov/Kronstadt: Râșnov village], Viața Romînească 7(5–6) (1912), 195. 204. Postai Rendeletek Tára 18 (1884), 286–87. 205. Vajda, 30. 206. Ibid. 21 (1884), 86. 207. Erdély 9 (1900), 28. 208. Hivatalos Közlöny 8 (1900), 64. 209. K. Werner, Geographie von Österreich-Ungarn: Ein Leitfaden für die höheren Volksschulen, Bürgerschulen und die unteren Klassen der Mittelschulen der ev. Landeskirche A. B. in Siebenbürgen (Hermannstadt: Krafft, 1888); and F. Reimesch, Heimat- und Vaterlandskunde für die Volks-, Elementar- und Bürgerschulen der evangelischen Landeskirche A. B. der siebenbürgischen Landesteile Ungarns (Kronstadt: Zeidner, 1897). 210. Bartos-Elekes, Nyelvhasználat a térképeken, 133; and V. Brandt, Heimatkunde für die evangelischen Volksschulen A. B. des Komitates Nagyküküllö (Brassó [Kronstadt]: Zeidner, 1908).

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211. Göllner, 204; and F. Reimesch, Vaterlandskunde für die Volks-, Elementar- und Bürgerschulen der evangelischen Landeskirche A. B. der siebenbürgischen Landesteile Ungarns (Brassó [Kronstadt]: Zeidner, 1904), 7 and 9. 212. Decree 1,883/40784 of the Ministry of Worship and Public Instruction; Biserica și Șcóla 20 (1896), 155. The map at issue was the second edition of E. Bordeaux, Mapa tieriloru tienetorie de corona Ungariei [Map of the lands belonging to the Hungarian crown] (Clusiu: Coll. Ref., 1871). 213. N. Pop and N. Pilția, Geografia Ungariei și Elemente din geografia generală pentru șcólele poporale [Geography of Hungary and elements of general geography for primary schools], 7th edn (Brașov: Zeidner, 1894), preface. 214. I. Dariu, Geografia patriei și Elemente din geografia universală pentru șcólele poporale române [Geography of the homeland and elements of universal geography for Romanian primary schools], 3rd edn (Brașov: Zeidner, 1893), 4. Four dots in the original. 215. ‘Răpire a limbei’ [The rape of language], Gazeta Transilvaniei 27 November / 9 December 1897. 216. Hivatalos Közlöny 16 (1908), 105; Hivatalos Közlöny 18 (1910), 217, 334 and 351; Hivatalos Közlöny 20 (1912), 617; Hivatalos Közlöny 21 (1913), 9; and Néptanítók Lapja 44(7) (1911), 4. 217. M. Hanzu, Monografia școlilor din Săliște Sibiu [Monograph of the Săliște schools] (Sibiu: Honterus, 2009), 124. 218. Berecz, Politics of Early Language Teaching, 108–9; and Tanterv a nem magyar ajku népiskolák számára: az 1868iki XXXVIII. és az 1879iki XVIII. t. czikkek értelmében [Curriculum for the primary schools with medium of instruction other than Hungarian: by virtue of Acts XXXVIII of 1868 and XVIII of 1879] (Budapest: n.p., 1879), 23. 219. Decree 1,842/1907, in Az iparoktatás az 1906–1908. években [Industrial education in 1906–8] (Budapest: Kereskedelemügyi M. Kir. Ministerium, 1909), 706. 220. Felsőbányai Hirlap 15 July 1909, 3. 221. J.U. Jarník, Corespondență [Correspondence] (Bucharest: Minerva, 1980), passim; and Nicolae Iorga, Scrisori către Catinca: 1900–1939 [Letters to Catinca, 1900–39] (Bucharest: Minerva, 1991), 23–62. 222. See also Em. Munteanu, Istoria poștală a Sibiului pînă la unire [A postal history of Hermannstadt before the Unification] (Sibiu: Transilvania, 1980). 223. V. Bologa, Monografia școalei civile de fete cu internat și drept de publicitate a “Asociațiunii pentru literatura română și cultura poporului român” din Sibiiu, pe 25 de ani dela înființare [Monograph of the ASTRA’s Hermannstadt public girls’ civil school, endowed with a residence hall, on the 25th anniversary of its founding] (Sibiiu: Tipografiei Archidiecezane, 1911), 33. 224. Iorga, Neamul romănesc, Vol. 1, 313–14. 225. ANR Bistrița, Fond Primăria orașului Bistrița (inv. 619); ANR Brașov, Fond Primăria orașului Brașov, Serviciul Silvic 144/1913; ibid., Fond Breasla cizmarilor din Brașov, bundle 25 and ANR Târgu Mureș, Fond Primăria orașului Reghin (inv. 258) 111/1912, 165f on the municipal practice. 226. ‘… având în vedere că maghiarii adoră să “autohtonizeze” toponime străine …’. 227. Bănuț, 57 and 59. 228. ‘Lupta Românilor în congregația din Deva’ [The struggle of Romanians in the Déva assembly], Tribuna 5/17 December 1897. 229. Xenopol, ‘Rîșnovul pe lîngă Brașov’, 195.

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230. Re˘vașul, 30 July 1904. 2 31. J. Wolff, ‘Deutsche Ortsnamen in Siebenbürgen’, in Programm des evangelischen UnterGymnasiums und der damit verbundenen Lehranstalten in Mühlbach (Siebenbürgen) für das Schuljahr 1878/9 (Hermannstadt: Krafft, 1879), 7; and idem, ‘Zur Deutung geographischer Namen Siebenbürgens’, Zeitschrift für Schul-Geographie 4 (1883), 167 and 214. 232. S. Moldovan and N. Togan, Dicționarul numirilor de localități cu poporațiune română din Ungaria [Dictionary of the names of Hungarian settlements with Romanian populations] (Sibiiu: Editura ‘Asociațiunii’, 1909). 233. H. Kreye, Verzeichnis deutscher Ortsnamen in Österreich-Ungarn: Für den Gebrauch im Geschäftsleben (Hanover: Ahlfeld, 1905); L. Steiner, Schematismus ungarischer Ortsnamen mit Bezeichnung ihrer früheren deutschen Benennung (Vienna: Szelinski, 1908); Verein zur Erhaltung des Deutschtums in Ungarn (ed.), Deutsche Ortsnamen in Ungarn: Unentbehrlicher Behelf für den brieflichen Verkehr mit Ungarn (Vienna: Holzwart and Berger, 1912); and V. Lug, Deutsche Ortsnamen in Ungarn (Reichenberg: Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein, 1917). 234. Müller, 27. 235. Wiener Zeitung, 22 January 1914. 236. MNL OL BM K156, box 55, 1,081 and 2,061; and box 66, 490. 237. Zs. Péter and E. Vass, ‘Remembering and Remembrance: The Quantitative Analysis of the Votive Picture Gallery in Radna’, in P. Hannonen, B. Lönnqvist and G. Barna (eds), Ethnic Minorities and Power (Helsinki: Fonda, 2001), 162. Enigmatic not only because, for whatever reason, the Communal Registry Board thought that the local council had asked for this name in the preparatory stage and it later insisted, despite the latter’s protest, that the five mounds (the meaning of Öthalom) had to be commemorated, but also because if they really wished to rename the village after an important monument located there, the ditches of the first Arad castle were of greater historic significance than said tumuli – incidentally, far more than five in number; OSZK BM K156, box 35, 62; and H. Gehl, Heimatbuch der Gemeinde Glogowatz im Arader Komitat (Abensberg: Heimatortsgemeinschaft Glogowatz, 1988). 238. Thus, Google gives results for the inflectional forms of Nyén, Pacalusa and Peselnek in historical contexts only. Dragsina, on the other hand, which the representatives of the local Magyar minority had in the 1900s requested be replaced by Temesfalva, still appears in the local Hungarian press as the colloquial Hungarian name of the village today, probably not unrelated to the fact that it is also called Dragșina in Romanian. For the appropriation of an officially allocated prefix, consider the folk song ‘Magyarózdi toronyalja’, recorded in Magyarózd (earlier Ózd) in 1968; I. Pávai, Magyarózd népzenéje Horváth István gyűjtései tükrében [The folk music of Magyarózd as reflected in the collections of István Horváth] (Budapest: Hagyományok Háza and MTA BTK Zenetudományi Intézet, 2015), 78. 239. See P. Engel, ‘Kitalált helységnevek’ [Invented settlement names], História 18(7) (1996), 31–32. 240. The fullest exposition of this argument is the 1996 manifesto of HUNGEO, the World Meeting of Hungarian Geoscience; in József Hajdú-Moharos, Magyar településtár [Hungarian gazetteer] (Budapest: Kárpát-Pannon, 2000), 681–83. Although less wellinformed supporters of the 1913 gazetteer like to quote the principle of ‘the last official names under Hungarian sovereignty’, this document is notable for deviating from this principle with respect to the former Subcarpathian Ruthenia, where Horthy’s regime

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restored the late nineteenth-century names in 1939, and to Croatia, where the 1907 Croatian law on locality names declared the Croatian variants as the sole official names. 241. G. Mikesy, ‘Helységneveink 1913-as tükörben’ [Hungarian settlement names in a 1913 mirror], Névtani Értesítő 35 (2013), 45. Cf. the Committee’s following decisions: 78/715 from 13 December 2010, annexe (‘Kürtös’) and 80/735 from 19 June 2012, annexe (‘Temesrékas’, ‘Temesmóra’, ‘Maroshévíz’, but also ‘Resica’, recte ‘Resicabánya’ and ‘Alsósztamóra’, recte ‘Alsósztamora’); https://www.kormany.hu/download/0/c5/ a1000/fnb%202_108%C3%BCl%C3%A9sek%20d%C3%B6nt%C3%A9sei.pdf (last accessed 21 October 2019). 242. G. Szabómihály, ‘A határtalanítás a helynevek területén’ [De-bordering in the field of place names], in S. Matiscsák (ed.), Nyelv, nemzet, identitás: Az [sic] VI. Nemzetközi Hungarológiai Kongresszus (Debrecen, 2006. augusztus 22–26.) nyelvészeti előadásai [Language, nation, identity: proceedings of the linguistics section of the 6th International Congress of Hungarology, Debrecen, 22–26 August 2006] (Budapest: Nemzetközi Magyarságtudományi Társaság, 2007), Vol. 1, 155–64. 243. Decree 1,415/2002, as amendment to the annexe to Act 215/2001. M. Csomortáni, ‘A romániai magyar kisebbségi helységnév a nyelvi tervezés érdeklődési körében’ [Hungarian minority settlement names in Romania in relation to language planning], Névtani Értesítő 36 (2014), 86; and Zs. Bartos-Elekes, ‘Helységnevek a romániai köztudatban: Az endonima és exonima mezsgyéjén’ [Place names in the common knowledge of Hungarians from Romania: On the boundaries of endonyms and exonyms], Geodézia és Kartográfia 54(4) (2002), 22–23. 244. Several villages of Harghita County put back the references to their former Szekler districts to their names: Gyergyóditró (Ditrău), Gyergyószárhegy (Lăzarea), Gyergyótekerőpatak (Valea Strâmbă) in accordance with 1415/2002; and Csíkkarcfalva (Cârța), Csíkkozmás (Cozmeni), Csíkmenaság (Armășeni), Csíkszépvíz (Frumoasa) and Csíkvacsárcsi (Văcărești) in violation of it. In addition, Kécz (Magyarkéc, Cheț, Bihor County), Magyarkakucs (Nagykakucs, Cacuciu Nou, ibid.), Mezőkövesd (Székelykövesd, Cuieșd, Mureș County) and Szásznyíres (Nyíres, Nireș, Cluj County) in accordance with 1415/2002 and Ilosva (Selymesilosva, Ilișua, Sălaj County), Nagyzerind (Nagyzerénd, Zerind, Arad County) and Szentbenedek (Magyarszentbenedek, Sânbenedic, Alba County) in breach of it. 245. Csomortáni, 87–90; and J. Péntek, ‘Termini: magyar nyelvészeti kutatóállomások hálózata a Kárpát-medencében’ [Termini: a network of Hungarian linguistics research points in the Carpathian Basin], Kisebbségkutatás 17(4) (2008); available at https://epa. oszk.hu/00400/00462/00040/1623.htm (last accessed 15 September 2019). 246. Again, the concept is less clearly defined than that. On the visual plans for the memorial there appeared Zágráb, Hungarian for Zagreb, a form that was excluded from the 1913 gazetteer. 247. S. Biró, The Nationalities Problem in Transylvania: A Social History of the Romanian Minority under Hungarian Rule, 1867–1918 and the Hungarian Minority under Romanian Rule, 1918–1940, trans. M.D. Fenyo (Boulder, CO: Social Science Monographs, 1992), 450–54. 248. Regarding the Szeklerland, I also took into consideration the earlier Romanian names used in the two Romanian church administrations, as evidenced by the pre-1918 church almanacs. 249. Fabijan→​Češko Selo, Karlsdorf→​Banatski Karlovac, Kutric→​Gudurica and Udvarsalaš→​ Dobričevo.

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250. (Székely-)Csóka→​Corbești, Felsőboldog(asszony)falva→​Feliceni, Ménaság→​Armășeni, Póka→​Păingeni, Szótelke→​Sărata, Szotyor→​Coșeni. 251. Érszőllős or Pățal (the vernacular Romanian name) became Viișoara (Hun. szőllős and Rom. viișoară ‘vineyard’), and Kézdikővár Petriceni (Hun. kő and Rom. piatră ‘stone’). The earlier Hungarian names, Nagypacal (cf. Hun. pacal ‘tripe’) and Peselnek (coinciding with plural 3rd form of ‘to piss’), had by the 1900s become the objects of shame for the Magyar inhabitants. 252. Cârna→​Blandiana, Cluj→​Cluj-Napoca, Grădiște→​Sarmizegetusa and Jidovin→​ Berzovia. 253. G.I. Lahovari, C.I. Brătianu and Gr.G. Tocilescu, Marele Dicționar Geografic al Romîniei [Comprehensive geographical dictionary of Romania], vols. 2–5 (Bucharest: Societatea Geografică Romînă, 1900–2). 254. Öktem. 255. Romanian-speaking areas were carefully purged of names found depreciative, indecent or ‘cacophonic’, but Szeklers were not spared of derogatory artificial names like Drojdii (‘dregs’) or Jigodin (cf. jigodie ‘mutt’). In contrast, only six villages were renamed for such reasons in the 1900s: Kakad, Kispacal, Krasznapacalusa, Nagypacal, Peselnek and Szolnokpacalusa. 256. Aciuva→​Avram Iancu, Balintfalău→​Bolintineni, Chemenfoc→​Avram Iancu, Chetfel→​ Gelu, Dealul Calului→​Poiana Horea, Glogovăț→​Vladimirescu, Ieciu→​Brâncovenești, Pănatu Nou→​Horia, Recsenyéd→​Rareș, Sânmihaiu de Jos and de Sus→​Mihai Viteazu, Utviniș→​Andrei Șaguna, Vacsárcsi→​Văcărești, Zoltan→​Mihai Viteazu. 257. Pesty, A Szörényi Bánság.

Conclusions

d In this closing chapter, I shall reconsider some central points made in the Introduction in the light of the evidence assembled in the course of the book. At times, my reflections will inevitably leave me with more questions than answers. I first review the transition of names to become the cultural stuff of nationalisms, focusing on the kinds of ideological stakes they were invested with along the way. I then offer some conclusions on the nationalization of the peasantry and the peculiar character of peasant nationalism. Finally, I examine the drivers and consequences of Dualist Hungary’s naming policies and broader symbolic Magyarizing agenda.

The Uncanny Power of Names Individual national projects and the different strains within these projects did not all show the same eagerness in codifying names, and nor did the various categories of names lend themselves to ease of codification. The forms of given names, like most of the old cultural stuff that national cultures gobbled up, underwent some uncoordinated selection process in a way that place names typically did not, while family names were largely left to the responsibility of their bearers. But in one way or another, the names of the people and the land, which were seen as constituting the nation, were reinterpreted as the nation’s cultural reserve, and in addition to continued ordinary use, they were also described, etymologized, listed in alphabetical order for practical purposes, cherished as unique or evocative, and sometimes endowed with historical meanings. Only a minority were discarded outright as being inappropriate, and it was mainly to replace these that new inventions were thrown into circulation. On the fuzzy fringes of the nation, activists needed place and family names to be visibly rooted in the national language to feel them safe. Short of that, place names were at least expected to conform to the sound patterns of the language or have some obvious analogy in the core toponymy. But I do not call the outer fringes of the nation ‘fuzzy’ without a reason. In practice, such classification

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ought to become relational and subject to framing. The Communal Registry Board stamped out similar Slavic place names in Upper Hungary to the ones it reinstated in the South. Elements of outside origins that were, to some extent, assimilated into the host culture, like a few Slavic name formants that were common among the Hungarian gentry, could pass as home grown in certain lighting. But a recognizably foreign ancestry in a name would linger on, and it could, at any time, be turned against the bearers or reclaimed for another national community, to name but two common rhetorical strategies. Complying with the above criteria endowed the right names with an indexical role. They were thought to represent the community to the outside world as much as to its members. Appearing on the international stage with the proper personal names had a particular significance for early Romanian nationalists, not unlike the choice of the Latin over the earlier Cyrillic script, because recognizably Romance names helped to confirm their strategic bid to depict Romanians as the Eastern outpost of Latin civilization under threat from barbaric, Asian oppressors. Since the inherited cultural stuff was lacking these kinds of names, the need emerged to completely overhaul the given-name inventory. On all sides, place names that seemed to be in conformity with the national language could justify the envisioned national territory as rightly ‘ours’. Nationalist scholarship scrambled for the possession of the original forms underlying modern variants, which could back up claims on the first occupancy, a more profound and genuine familiarity with the place, and thereby ownership rights over it. Names as cultural heritage were supposed to bring home such meanings to the culturally emancipated constituency, which in the Magyar case prominently featured assimilants, and to showcase an ideal harmony of the language even when they had no transparent etymological meanings. In the hands of Magyar writers, the etymological argument based on place names became a rhetorical tool to install Magyars as the legitimate masters in even the most remote and least Hungarian-speaking nooks and crannies of their land, and especially the agents of the Hungarian state against the locally born and resident citizens. It simultaneously helped to redefine Romanians and Saxons as guests at best, and as intruders at worst. From all sides, the place names of the adversary were derided as spurious, ridiculously twisted and at times as deliberate fabrications with a political agenda, and Magyar opinion leaders increasingly cast the public use of non-Hungarian place names as a security threat. The nationalizing elites of the area considered family names as ancient and indicative of their bearers’ remote origins. In reality, the peasantry’s family names normally went back no more than a couple of centuries, had often been imposed by literate outsiders, and they coexisted with vernacular personal nomenclatures, better geared towards tightly knit networks. The supposed ethnic indexicality of family names was then put to rhetorical uses to label people, so as to bring them into or cast them out of the national fold. It was a beloved strategy to question

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the adversary’s moral integrity by pointing to their ‘foreign’ family names and exposing the gap between their self-identity and their origins. But commonsensical though the indexicality of family names seemed, it could easily be suspended. Such assaults mostly took place against national others, and all sides were incomparably more broad-minded towards any alien names of ingroup members. Family names also added fuel to one of the era’s major demographic obsessions, which I have called the myth of submerged Magyardom; namely, the assumption that some external marks (most notably names, distorted as may be) revealed the Magyar origins of a considerable proportion of Romanian peasants, an idea predicated on the repeated devastation that had hit the lowlands in Ottoman times. That became a signature theme of a sensationalist genre in Hungarian political literature, which sought to awaken its readers to the reality of a multilingual and multinational Hungary, where minorities were said to have grown out of control and, emboldened by nefarious foreign powers, were on the lookout to overcome their masters. The same writings might also overstate the frequency of Latinate names among Romanian peasants to get across the threat of an unchecked Romanian identity project. The subtext that the theme of submerged Magyardom created, here and elsewhere, was that this diversity was artificial and recent, and that it cried out for remedy. Through this juncture, the theme was closely bound up with rejuvenation narratives, and it was a common pretext for ‘re-Magyarizing’ the ‘de-Magyarized’; but at the same time, it also nurtured a victimhood narrative in the constituency, an essential safety valve for small nationalisms. The Romanian counter-myth to this narrative was similarly based on the idea of victimhood, casting its community as the quintessential subalterns. On the losing side in the contest for etymologies, Romanian intellectuals subverted the ideas above about the indexical character of linguistic origins, and began to contend that the forefathers of their Magyar adversaries (apparently driven by the same logic) had alienated their lot by renaming it. This story was embraced more openly with regard to personal than place names, with the result that from erstwhile Magyars, Romanian-speakers with Hungarian family names were transformed into walking proofs of Magyars’ allegedly ingrained, eternal passion for Magyarizing the names of others. The broadly liberal middle-class culture of Hungary was described by Romanian writers as fake and shallow, a culture of assimilants that relied on extensive renaming to keep up some thin and derisory facade of authenticity, and they liked to typify it in the figure of the Jew posing as a Magyar under a Hungarian name. In this light, which owed much to the stereotypes of Viennese and Hungarian Catholic papers, both a non-Hungarian family name and a ‘suspicious’ Hungarian one gave away one’s false identity. Then, too, it gave comfort to Romanian nationalists; unlike mercurial Jews, neither their mass base nor their intelligentsia took part in this masquerade by Magyarizing their names. Note the affinities of the politically dominant and

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subordinate voices here to the civic and ethnic components in the definition of the nation, which enabled a reversal of roles as political fortunes shifted. Nationalist accretions to culture were not meant to be perceived as new  – quite the reverse. They typically drew their power from the pretence of being ancient and, like the majority of national names, they often had the function of creating a linchpin to the imagined golden age. Of course, they also did not arise from a socially aseptic environment but were the creations of nationalizing elites, and as such, they bore the imprint of the elite’s diverse, sometimes rather fleeting views, goals, sensibilities and cultural tastes. A prime example of a turnaround in cultural and linguistic ideologies, to which I returned time and again, was the swift realignment of the Romanian cultural mainstream in the 1870s and 1880s from a radical variety of purism obsessed with national rejuvenation to an organicist paradigm. New strains of Romanian nationalism displaced the source of authenticity from foundation myths to the contemporary popular classes, and extolled organic development without major convulsions, continuity breaks or deliberate human intervention. That clipped back the excesses of Latinist fiddling with names, but ironically, the new emphasis also ended up reintroducing a series of outgoing first names. Upper-class origins are the most manifest behind the erudite cultural references contained in the new Hungarian mountain toponymy. The small set of urban pioneers who first picked up hiking as a pastime baptized the natural environment largely for their own purposes and, initially, unperturbed by rival day trippers. Guided by the unique considerations of upper-class pleasure walkers, they fixed a different grid of orienting landmarks from local people. To be sure, they did not intend their new names for the locals, but they were also heedless that lower-class Hungarian-speakers might eventually follow them to the crests of mountains and the interior of caves. Their sometimes esoteric creations, quite unlike the output of the Communal Registry Board, reflect this class bias. In more than one sense, nineteenth-century nationalism retained an elite character. I have used the term ‘elite’ in a broad sense in this book, to include both those who wrote and those who read broadsheets and weekly magazines. These people were expected to take sides in the national conflict and live up to their choice. Loyal national members were to refrain from designating national assets with the names of the adversary, and were strongly discouraged from giving their offspring names that contradicted the national self-image. In their quest to inculcate these norms, writers sometimes played up ways of boundary transgression that under closer scrutiny prove to have been highly unusual. Thus Romanian authors exposed family-name-Magyarizing Romanians at a time when they were largely fictitious, or drew attention to supposedly Romanian families who had given their children Hungarian national names. It is remarkable, on the other hand, how little even those who articulated such demands cared to bring their practice in line with their allegiances. Some

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of them took momentous steps towards remaking their public faces, but they readily slipped back into habits that were at odds with their principles. Romanian nationalists would call one another by Hungarian hypocoristics. Others spelt their family names according to Hungarian rules if these recognizably derived from Hungarian, and left intact the Hungarian place names of their noble predicates. Similar ‘crossover’ or ‘hybrid’ practices remained deep within the comfort zone of Romanian intellectuals in Hungary and mostly went unreflected, in accordance with the usual pattern of nationalist vanguards eager to guard their popular constituencies from the hegemony of the high cultures that they themselves participated in. The examples mentioned reflect upper-class solidarity, but other practices testify more broadly to the resilience of routinized habits to nationalist arguments. Early Magyarized place names, for instance, were very slow in taking hold until the state embraced their cause.

Was There Peasant Nationalism? All nationalizing forces ran up against one major obstacle in the countryside: the tightly knit local community, which controlled all aspects of life and provided a protective cocoon for its members. Nationalism had originally been conceived as a surrogate for intimate, face-to-face-communities, and this role made little sense wherever such traditional communities were alive and well. To some extent, their cultural habits grounded in patriarchal ways of life also shielded rural people from the encroachments of state nationalism. They made little use of family names, and called one another by individuated diminutives, therefore they may not have cared too much when their full names were respelt or translated in official practice. They had limited competences in other languages, and they may have been blissfully unaware of the touristic names that upper-class gentlemen and ladies tagged onto their environments. Illiteracy, in particular, could filter out or slow down influences from a nationalized urban world, and in some godforsaken mountain areas, entire Romanian communities remained illiterate until the First World War. But even where literacy rates were on a steep rise and the inroads of the money economy created new forms of competition among the now property-holding peasantry, the traditional community showed no signs of breaking up. Therefore, the nationalizing process was not so much about instilling new myths, ideas, values or norms in individuals one by one as about permeating local cultures as wholes. The sources explored in Part I indicate that nationalist cultural accretions, wherever they spread, spread from the top down. Dating from the beginning of the process, the snapshot pieced together from Pesty’s returns can only confirm that national origin myths and historical master narratives were such accretions and that they stemmed from the nationalizing elites. In the 1860s, the local

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cultural memory of peasants sooner populated the distant past of their physical surroundings with giants and Jews than with Roman veterans or pagan horsemen. Using national names as an indicator, my survey of baby-naming trends also captured the progress that national marking made among peasants in the following half a century. Paradoxically, with the rebuilding of the given-name inventory, people received a tool to display loyalty for history by scrapping the names of their parents and grandparents. It usually took several generations until peasants could recognize themselves in the mirror of the brazenly new (though supposedly old) national names, unsanctioned by Christian hagiography and not fixed anywhere in the course of the year. It should be acknowledged that the ethnic infrastructure could work against the absorption of the full nationalist message, especially if one is ready to attribute a more widespread, even if only periodically surging, sympathy for the national cause among peasants than the rather low mark of national names would suggest  – and there is ample evidence to recommend this view. It is hard not to see a direct link between the utter novelty of the three clusters of national names in ethnic cultures and their sluggish advance. It also needs pointing out that the logic through which they marked membership in the ethnic nation was also novel for the peasantry. Instead, peasants started to redefine their ethnic belongings as national membership by using familiar ways of ethnic marking – focusing on holidays and marking the body – or by twisting the meanings of a cultural (often religious) item that was already treated as significant. Then, rather than grappling with the question of whether peasants became conscious nationals before the First World War, it would be more fitting to subvert this question and conclude that their majority had by then unbroken recourse to a nationalist line of interpretation of the world and their place in it. Far from engaging with it unreservedly, they treated it as one out of several alternative explanations, which they would occasionally repurpose for their own ends, but would remain sceptical towards some of its elements. At the risk of reification, however, it can be added, based on the spread of national names, that a significant minority of Romanian peasants resonated with and were committed to a nationalist narrative of history. They were numerous in all areas with exponentially growing rates of mother-tongue literacy, where they likely resented the decreasing recognition of Romanian writing in the public sphere. Besides, national consciousness also disseminated fast in the Apuseni Mountains and in the basins of Hunyad County, areas that were still quite illiterate. It is also worth attention that the first adopters of Romanian national names among the lower classes were not peasants, but craftspeople, miners and servants in aristocratic manors, who lived at the crossroads of cultures, not unlike the Romanian elite, and as such had a convenient foil against which to reconstrue their Romanian identity.

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The picture is ambiguous with regard to Magyar peasants, who keenly embraced some national names endowed with patron saints, but gave a wide berth to pagan ones. For reasons unrelated to the evidence presented here, my hypothesis is that post-1918 nationality policies and the revolving door of the 1940s played the pivotal role in their nationalization process, thus replicating the experience of Romanian peasants under Hungarian rule. As people were becoming more literate and the bureaucracy was making great strides, the increasing encounters between the mostly Magyar administrators and non-Magyar peasants did not fail to generate more grounds for conflict. To be sure, no state power particularly endeared itself to peasants’ hearts. But one that in addition to the usual scourges of taxes, monopolies and conscription, also waged an unrelenting war on some of their basic verbal reference points in the name of a not altogether sincere assimilatory project, predictably made itself less attractive than its culturally closer alternatives. Unfortunately, studying the ways national activists interpreted these troubles for the benefit of the masses gives little help in assessing this elusive boomerang effect. Most names at stake were not nationalist accretions, but came from the old, inherited ethnic culture. By presenting them as timeless and a national patrimony, activists could amplify peasants’ gut feelings; but peasants needed no further advice to feel that the names as they used them were precious and to feel harassed by encroachments into them, especially as they were not used to switching between linguistic variants. Also, the intended symbolic meanings mattered less for the peasants than the pragmatic annoyance and the feeling of injustice. As shown by the responses of local councils to their proposed name changes, peasant nationalism was down to earth and deaf to much of the symbolism behind the Magyarizing policies. Peasants’ command on nationalist language was poles apart from the sophisticated repertoire of professional nationalists like journalists and lawyers, and they failed to improvise consistently nationalist responses to unforeseen provocations. Ultimately, the backlash against the aggressive Magyarizing state policies acted as a major push nationalizing some of Dualist Hungary’s ethnolinguistic minorities, as it lent credence to the nationalist propaganda disseminated by the rural minority intelligentsia and by the dawn of the new century, the popular press and party politicians. One or the other stimulus did not suffice. Lacking not only state backing but also everyday experiences consonant with their message, minority nationalists would have been less successful in overcoming ordinary people’s conservatism and scepticism. On the other hand, Magyarizing policies were enacted as pre-emptive measures in the first place, in response to minority national movements. Similar policies would easily have antagonized any politically unorganized population with basic levels of language loyalty, but it would have taken the form of socially amorphous murmur, without any far-reaching consequences. Indeed, it needs to be laid down as a general rule that grassroots protest against state nationalist measures need not originate in anti-state

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nationalism. Such allegations from either side should be taken with a grain of salt and checked against the nuisance that the measures objected to could cause to any person. The outrage at the Dualist Hungarian government’s name policies, for instance, was warranted, regardless of the particular attitudes on the receiving end. One household reference in discussing the nationalization of East European peasantry is Jan Słomka, mayor of Dzików and author of the best-known peasant autobiography in Polish, who memorably did not know that he was a Pole until he began to read books and papers.1 A similar perspective comes to light from the unpublished memoirs of his Transylvanian Romanian colleague Dumitru Iclănzan from Iclănzel (Torda-Aranyos County), written in the Stalinist period. Born in 1880, he converted to Romanian nationalism not because of his personal experiences as a high-school student in Hungarian-speaking Marosvásárhely, but upon hearing a stiff and elevated ideological retelling of ‘the sufferings of Romanians under foreign rule’ from his brother-in-law, a relatively comfortable farmer from the next village, who had accompanied the delegation of the famous Romanian Memorandum to Vienna and subscribed to the peasant newspaper Foaia Poporului. Although Iclănzan describes his revelation as if his brother-inlaw had been referring to people from a different country, those were people and events familiar to him, only placed in an intriguingly new lighting. He was subsequently elected mayor of his native village at the age of twenty-three, and in 1907, according to his recollection, he spoke at a nationalist rally, applauding the Romanian masses for heroically preserving their mother tongue in contempt of the barbarian hordes.2 I have not dealt here with the unexpected course of nationalization, one of crossing over to another national culture than what was predictable based on one’s language and religion. That is simply because this kind of assimilation took place almost exclusively among the elite, in non-agricultural and diasporic communities, and then most often intergenerationally. The surprisingly high rates of ethnically mixed marriages among urban Romanians stood in stark contrast with the strictly enforced ethnic endogamy in the villages. No Romanian villager, to say nothing about Transylvanian Saxons, felt the urge to Magyarize their surname, and with a few peripheral exceptions, peasants also did not choose national names across national camps for their children. A higher Hungarian school far from the family nest was practically the only setting where a few Romanian peasant boys decided to symbolically identify with the (one would assume) vibrant Hungarian social and cultural milieu surrounding them. But this was unusual even in Hungarian schools, and a newly chosen Magyar identity was hardly tenable if the assimilant returned to a Romanian-speaking environment. In this way, places with local populations indicated as Romanian, Magyar and so on in 1839 remained, almost without exception, Romanian-/Hungarianspeaking in 1910, and the mixed ones remained overwhelmingly mixed. Peasants

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did not enter the epoch of nationalism with a blank slate and certainly did not drift to one or another camp at random. Aside from generational change, the process of nationalization did not reshuffle the corresponding, old ethnic labels extensionally but redefined them, coalesced local, face-to-face communities into imagined political ones on a grand scale and endowed them with the matching high cultures. As the old ethnic churches turned into national institutions, were complemented by nationalizing state entities and segmented civil society, and as literacy spread, people were increasingly born and socialized into these national communities, and few of them made choices about where they belonged. To be clear, this did not necessarily entail a passion for nationalist politics, even less political militancy. For most people, the war years of 1916–18 marked the first more sustained emotional engagement with nationalist ideas, when Romania was at war with Austria-Hungary, German troops were stationed in Transylvania and the Hungarian government enacted a series of unprecedented oppressive and discriminative measures against the Romanian minority.

The Balance of Magyarization Policies Symbolic Magyarizing measures, like the ones affecting names and naming, did not usually come as clear provisions openly spelt out in laws in Dualist Hungary but were hidden in implementing regulations and ministerial decrees, and often in more or less oblique references that presupposed partisan interpretation from the executing officials. That calls the historian’s attention to the importance of studying legal sources in conjunction with the related debates in the press and parliament, with the interpretations that their champions gave to bills and with implementation. The spectacular 1898 upsurge in the number of family-name Magyarizers in public service also reveals that Hungarian governmental agencies occasionally resorted to strong-arm tactics to achieve the desired effect, without passing any formal order. Thus, it seems that Budapest politicians sometimes chose not to own up to their actions. The pragmatic justifications they gave for their homogenizing cultural policies, usually favoured when talking to an outside audience, constitute a somewhat different matter. Intervening in the domain of names was meant to alleviate the burden of officials and oil the wheels of a bureaucracy encumbered by an impenetrable tangle of name variants. Just how honestly they wielded this argument may have varied from case to case, but it had its own, independent logic, and penetrating it gives us a stronger grasp of Dualist Hungary’s ­nationality policies. Governmentality everywhere pushed early modern and modern states towards imposing names where they did not exist, and freezing them where they were in flux. This drive stood behind the officialization of surnames, street names, field

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names and so forth, as convenient identification tools. Hungary arguably carried it far by aiming at a fully disambiguated settlement-name cover, but all over the world there was a passion to codify, standardize, disambiguate (and thereby reinforce common frames of reference), make signs uniform and create consistency between them, as states sought to enforce legibility on their subjects. From the point of view of administrative reason, everything and everyone ideally ought to have one single name, and that name had to be unique; a clear correspondence had to be established between spoken and written forms, and the record had to make it obvious whether a name-bearer was a man or a woman. Magyar nationalists postulated national homogenization as synonymous with modernization, and spurned political autonomies as leftovers from a murky, medieval system of privileges. Under the spell of the French and Prussian models, eagerly copied in newly independent European states, they viewed all dynamic contemporary polities, from the United States to Russia, through this prism. Through the requirement of efficient state machinery, they attached expectations of modernity to a monolingual public life – a monolingualism that also tended to imply Hungarian names. Public opinion in Hungary usually accepted this idea, including those who did not sympathize with coercive Magyarization. It dovetailed with the more widely shared Magyarizing agenda, but it also dovetailed with Magyar politicians’ desire to project a Hungary that was at the forefront of modernization, a vision often used as an argument to legitimate their rule, domestically and abroad. Since modernity and a linguistically uniform public space were widely seen as just two faces of the same coin, it is rather unhelpful to reject pragmatic justifications out of hand as a pretext for Magyarization. The relationship could even work the other way around, as government politicians were not shy to emphasize the hidden Magyarizing effects of policies that were otherwise controversial among the Magyar public in order to whip up popular support for them. There is, of course, another, seamy side to such measures. Rather than linking them to straightforward and level-headed assimilatory expectations, they can also be regarded as a form of symbolic violence, the affirmation of an asymmetrical relationship through which the state could impose upon its subjects a legitimate view about who they were and where they lived. Maintaining this subordination, realized in acts of naming, may have mattered more for state nationalism and especially for its local representatives than the actual content of the view. The vision that the Magyar/Hungarian political elite offered through such symbolic legislation gained its strength from the message it carried about the nation’s power. In the eastern peripheries of Hungary, however, this power was hard and coercive rather than soft and hegemonic, particularly so in rural contexts. On the outside, Magyar politicians and political commentators talked much about the culturally integrative function of their onomastic Gleichschaltung policies, appealing to the inherent truth of their vision and the inexorable logic of modern state sovereignty, but the effect of such policies was bound to be the opposite, at least

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on Romanians and Transylvanian Saxons. These populations had access to robust minority nationalist ideologies endowed with institutionalized cultural authorities, which thus enjoyed a structural advantage over any state-sponsored vision. Hungarian names, when applied to the intimate sphere, necessarily emphasized the cultural distance that separated the self and its immediate face-to-face group from the state. Influential rival nationalisms validated this perception and called the attention of their claimed constituencies to the aggression that the Hungarian state perpetrated by imposing bits of an alien culture on them. Certainly, Hungary’s lawmakers and law enforcers would have fiercely resented my labelling the officially promoted culture alien to Hungarian citizens  – not on empirical grounds though, but by apodictically referring to the political subjects’ obligation of loyalty to their sovereign state. Given the Hungarian establishment’s ingrained obsession with the lurking threat of irredentist designs (pan-Slavic, ‘Daco-Romanian’ or pan-German), failure to surrender designated parts of one’s cultural identity in the public sphere was treated as a breach of civic loyalty or even as an incitement against the Hungarian state and nation. Clearly, this politico-legal figment itself shows that the ultimate problem with Hungary’s non-Magyar subjects was that they were seen as alien and therefore unreliable. The knee-jerk response to the perceived threat, especially among the Magyar elites of non-Magyar-majority areas, was not always the heightening of genuine assimilationist expectations, but often the demand that the authorities reduce the non-Magyar masses to a quiet resignation and an acceptance of their second-rate status. The assimilationist agenda could happily coexist with these drives in a harder or softer version, openly or in a concealed manner, as a legitimizing discourse or to blame peasants for being slow in acquiring knowledge of the state language. Many public servants and landowners were not in fact particularly enthusiastic about the possibility that non-Magyar peasant masses actually learn Hungarian, and many young radical nationalist Magyars gave up the belief in large-scale linguistic and cultural Magyarization after the turn of the century. But they could equally find pleasure in the newly devised disciplining strategy that put them in the position of being better able to pronounce some non-Magyars’ ‘legitimate’ names than the bearers themselves. Captive to a hard version of the nation-state ideology, the ruling political elite regarded the contest between national ideologies in Hungary as a zero-sum game, and power-sharing as tantamount to complete surrender. With symbolic Magyarizing measures, they wanted to fight back against the threat of minority nationalisms, but to the extent that these policies actually hit people, they hit the minority population indiscriminately. Magyar politicians and journalists took pains to distinguish between the ‘Daco-Romanian’ and ‘pan-German’ instigators on one hand, and humble, God-fearing folk on the other. Such measures, however, implicitly equated these two targets, and by doing so, they were bound to become counterproductive.

270  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

Fundamentally, the Magyar political elite used similar means to other national movements to nationalize their inner constituency. But being in power gave them a clear advantage by enabling them to police their rivals and stifle the dissemination and transmission of undesired cultural models. To recall two examples: the crippling of Romanian schools in the 1900s reversed the spread of Romanian literacy for a whole generation, while a state-run civil registry prevented national minorities from tinkering with their family names, something assimilants were encouraged to do. State power also gave Magyar nationalism additional rhetorical resources, and this was true even when Magyar writers presented themselves as victims of foreign intrigues and as ‘oppressed in their own country’. Magyar actors could exploit nation-state ideology by virtue of their ruling position. Magyars found it easier to take their language and culture for granted in Hungary than minority intelligentsias. The confident cultural narcissism expressed in Béla Barabás’s words that ‘everyone should write his name as it is pronounced’ or in the boilerplate insults that the Communal Registry Board threw at local councils, calling their place names ‘bad to the ear’ or ‘meaningless’, were hence more readily available to a dominant standpoint. Magyarization pundits could play on national security concerns when comparing unquestionably Hungarian place or family names to property seals that allegedly prevented other nations from laying claim on their referents, and they could justify the translation of personal names with the ingenious argument that it ensued from the Hungarian state language. Symbolic Magyarization policies culminated under Bánffy’s premiership between 1895 and 1899, and the Coalition years of 1906–10. The thickening legislation and the uptick in government activity at the turn of the century were, however, preceded by a relentless hammering of these ideas in the press, the counties, the associational sphere and from the opposition benches. Although public writers sometimes rhetorically distanced themselves from the ‘excesses’, a notion by which they apparently meant infringements of individual rights, this chorus prepared the ground for a consensus among the voters of mainstream parties that the current situation of names in Hungary was unfair, that it served the interest of the nation’s enemies and that it called for intervention. The prominence of the historical myth of ‘submerged Magyardom’ in public discourse had a fair share in selling this view. Grassroots activist groups like the EKE, which lobbied governments for symbolic Magyarization, continually felt frustrated in their hopes. Forty-eightist and sixty-sevenist opposition parties often belittled the measures passed as crumbs thrown to the public. They accused the government of slackening its commitment to enforcing them and of seeking to appease the minorities, and they demanded more drastic steps to cover up the visible marks of non-Magyar presence. County officials and village secretaries might not agree with the government on the wisdom or possibility of assimilating the minorities, but they would still welcome any measure affecting them as an opportunity to ‘teach them their place’. Along

Conclusions  |  271

these lines, some of them wished to have the entire population rebaptized to newly coined Hungarian given names, while others applauded the renaming of villages as a punitive endeavour. Many of these officials also imposed the changes overzealously on minority institutions; but at the same time, they often adopted them sloppily in their own practice, after all, reluctant to upset their habits. Repainting the onomastic facade was cheap but showy; cheap especially in so far as it met the requirements of governmentality – in other words, when it replaced unorganized, disorderly practices with consistent rules and standards. Both Bánffy and the Coalition Government resorted to it partly as a popular substitute for more substantive, but much costlier measures, and also as a saving grace – Bánffy for his contested victory at the questionable 1896 elections and his dictatorial style of government, while the Coalition against the dilution of its initial platform, which would have turned the empire into a personal union. Apart from budgetary constraints, various other factors militated against implementing Magyarizing policies with all the stringency that hardliners wished to see. One of these, the multilingual character of the army, has already been briefly outlined in the Introduction. Here should be recalled the not too evident role that the military played as the foremost land surveying authority, which also published high-resolution maps. In Austria-Hungary, the emperor-king treated the Common Army as his personal preserve, and minimal Hungarian leverage with it cut short the EKE’s ambitious plan to rewrite the place-name cover with old Hungarian names culled from historical documents. Dependence on Vienna, which circumscribed the power of Hungarian governments in some spheres, applied to a higher degree to other, less autonomous national elites of the empire, including Austrian Germans. Church autonomy, by contrast, was a matter that politicians throughout the empire had learned to handle with kid gloves. Hungarian governments, for instance, were unable to exercise direct control over the names of their citizenry until they had seized control of the civil registry, but then this cost them a protracted culture war with the Catholic Church. Institutionalized, semi-autonomous knowledge regimes, especially national historiography and philology, continually supplied raw material for lay historical visions with the data they collected, and the interpretations and etymologies they produced. But expert knowledge could also mitigate the effects of symbolic Magyarization, to the extent that the central government tapped into its resources. To get a glimpse of this influence, one only needs to compare suggestions by lay nationalists in and outside of state administration with the final decisions that the bodies entrusted with codification made. Experts from the National Archives set bounds to arbitrary place renaming, imposed basic rules of historicity and frowned at commemorative settlement names. With his thoroughly considered decision to declare some Latinate first names untranslatable into Hungarian and to establish very close Hungarian equivalents for others, the academician György

272  |   Empty Signs, Historical Imaginaries

Joannovics inadvertently created a niche where Romanians could maintain their names across languages. This, in turn, may have bolstered the popularity of Latinate names, clearly against the grain of the Budapest government. The Magyar political elite’s aristocratic, hierarchical reflexes could also undercut their Magyarizing verve. I have presented at least two examples where the iron fist of the state stopped short of meting out the same treatment and hitting the socially comfortable; people in higher civil service positions remained clear of at least some of the pressure to Magyarize their family names, which was the case for regular staff officers, and figuring in the predicate of a noble family could save villages from renaming much more reliably than the unanimous protest of locals. Finally, abruptly parting company with what counted as real for their subjects was something Hungarian governments did at their peril. As tourist associations could not stretch tampering with mountain nomenclature too far beyond the knowledge of the locals whom tourists could ask for directions, so it went counter to administrative expediency for the state to impose tags on its citizens so far removed from their mother-tongue names that it hindered their identification. I also pointed out that a state that wanted itself to be seen as liberal could not afford to interfere with the choices, preferences and divergent traditions of its minority citizens in questions of baby naming. If it imposed an official first-name regime based upon a system of equivalences, it merely displaced the difference. My case study of Romanians and Transylvanian Saxons should not be generalized for the entire Dualist Hungary, however. It would be a mistake to argue that the same Magyarizing name policies turned out to be self-defeating across the board. At least four factors created different impacts on the various ethnonational minorities. For a start, ethnic minority politics was relatively influential in the East of the polity. Relying upon an electorate that was not only the most powerful in comparative terms but also cast the most disciplined ethnic vote, Transylvanian Saxon politicians successfully navigated the political waters and were able to spare their co-ethnics the brunt of coercive measures. For the same reason, the law on settlement names triggered the most violent wave of protests from the Saxon elite. In comparison to the Slovak, for instance, even the Romanian national movement was well organized, although a combination of narrow franchise, patronage politics and electoral malpractice stalled its visibility in the political arena. The mass support it was able to muster, however, together with a boisterous irredenta in Romania, secured the role of bogeymen for Romanians in Magyar politics; according to many a county official it was an existential threat that had to be fought off by intimidation and harsh pre-emptive measures. Another factor modifying the impact was the religious distance to Magyars. Cultural differences were also relevant here: by virtue of the Byzantine liturgical traditions, the Romanian corpus of given names was a harder nut to crack for the Hungarian state than German or Slovak names. More to the point, since there was little overlap in church membership between Magyars on the one hand and

Conclusions  |  273

Romanians and Transylvanian Saxons on the other, partisans of Magyarization had more limited access to Romanian let alone Transylvanian Saxon parishioners than to Roman Catholic Swabians or Slovaks. This brings me to the third point, the attraction of the broader Magyarizing agenda for the middle classes as an avenue of social mobility. With some ups and downs, official Hungary encouraged the Magyarization of family names, but more people with Romanian background made that step of their own will than Transylvanian Saxons, far more Slovaks and Catholic Germans than Romanians, and more Jews than any other group. Finally, the prestige of the German standard set it apart from all other minority languages. In Hungarian documents, its implicit recognition allowed the spelling of German family names in German, but Romanian names continued to be spelt in Hungarian. Although their closest known parallels can be found in the Eastern half of the continent, in particular in Prussia and Greece, Hungarian name policies were ultimately indebted to the renaming furore of the Jacobins in revolutionary France. What lent urgency to such policies in Dualist Hungary compared to other European states was at least partly a structural shortcoming, the linguistic and cultural diversity of its citizenry, which made it an unlikely candidate for a nation-state. Similar, explicit and implicit policies from contemporary Europe are much understudied, but the renaming of Hungary’s localities, if not its less conspicuous counterparts in other domains, was certainly unique for its time on account of its comprehensive reach and elaboration. This is, however, no good reason to regard either Dualist Hungary’s Magyarizing policies in general or its renaming spree in particular as a Sonderweg in modern Europe. After the First World War, similar policies became the order of the day in all new and newly enlarged European states, including another rewriting of the same map, this time by the successor states. In general lines, wholesale place renaming  – as it was brought to perfection in Israel or Turkey, for instance  – has been pushed for plainly ideological motives, like fairy dust sprinkled out to amend history, whereas interferences into minority personal names also had administrative rationality behind them, itself dependent on a more banal layer of nationalism. But as a general feature, the politicians who commissioned and introduced these changes tacitly acknowledged the gap between reality and their dominant historical narratives, and did their best to obscure this knowledge for future generations.

Notes 1. J. Słomka, From Serfdom to Self-Government: Memoirs of a Village Mayor, 1842–1927, trans. W.J. Rose (London: Minerva, 1941), 171. 2. ANR Mureș, Colecția de manuscrise 253.

Appendix A

Tables

d Table A.1  Divergent standardized vs local endonyms. in Romanian Agadici Bârza Berzasca Bica Română Biertan Birchiș Cacova Cămărzana Corbi Damiș Deta Jidovin Lugoj Mehadica Moroda Naidaș Obad Orșova Panticeu Petrilova Petroșani Reșița Satu Mic Teiuș Zlatna

Ghădișu Bârsa Bârzasca Bodica Ghiertan Pirciș Cacovița Cărmăzana Corgi Dameș Ghedu Jâdovin Logoj Megica Moruda Nadăș Obăd Râșava Panciteu Petrila Petroșeni Recița Satu Michii Teuș Zlagna

Appendix A   |  275

in Hungarian Csíkménaság Datk Dellőapáti Magyarókereke Zilah

Menaság Dakk Déllőapáti Monyorókereke Zilaj

in German Engenthal Fogarasch Marienburg Mediasch Tschippendorf Wallendorf

Ängenduel Fugresch Märrembirg Medwisch (mesolectal)/Medwesch (basilectal) Tsepan Wualdraf

Note: OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A; Petrovici, Material onomastic, 163–94; Pătruț, 83; Mező, Adatok, 142–43; I. Mușlea, ‘Cercetări folklorice în țara Oașului’ [Folklore research in the Oaș/Avas], Anuarul Arhivei de Folklor 1 (1932), 122; Al. Moisi, Monografia Clisurei [Monograph of the Clisura] (Oravița: Librăria Românească, 1938), 276; D. Florescu, Birchiș: schiță monografică [Birchiș: a monographic sketch] (Arad: Mirador, 2008), 17; Bălan, Numiri de localități, 84; Brînzeu, Memoriile, 17; and H. Drotloff, ‘Der Name der Stadt’, in H. Drotloff and G.E. Schuster (eds), Mediasch: Ein historischer Streifzug durch die siebenbürgisch-sächsische Stadt an der Kokel (Sibiu: Schiller, 2014), 314.

Table A.2  Unrelated high and low endonyms. in Romanian Cușma Fiscut Geoagiu de Sus Mânăstire Moldova Nouă Nepos Rodna Nouă Romuli Sâniosif Șopotu Nou Topolovățu Mic

Baloșa Nadeș Sovaș Pârneaura Boșneag Vărarea Șanț Strâmba Poiana Buciava Sămăiuda

in Hungarian Nagyág Zimándköz

Szekerem(b) Bánkút

in German Altsanktanna Deutschsanktmichael Segenthau

Komlosch Zillasch Dreispitz

276  |  Appendix A

Note: OSzK Manuscript Collection FM1 3,814/A; Retegan, Satele năsăudene; P. Grapini, Monografia comunei mari Rodna-nouă, din fostul district al Năsăudului (azi comitatul BistrițaNăsăud) impreună cu Note istorice despre valea Rodnei [Monograph of Rodna Nouă large commune from the former District of Năsăud (today, Beszterce-Naszód County), together with Historical notes on the Rodna Valley] (Bistrița: Baciu, 1903), 71; I.M. Almăjan (ed.), Țara Almăjului: cercetări monografice realizate de echipa Institutului Social Banat-Crișana în anul 1939 [The Almăj region: monographic research conducted by the team of the Banat-Crișana Institute in 1939] (Timișoara: Mirton, 2003); A. Kovács, ‘Szekerembánya’ [Săcărâmb/Sekerembe], Nemzeti Társalkodó 3 (1832), 268; E. Acs, Deutschsanktmichael: Chronik einer deutschen Binnensiedlung im Banat (Düsseldorf: self-published, 1992); J. Hübner, Monographie der Großgemeinde Sanktanna (n.p.: Heimatortsgemeinschaft Sanktanna, n.d. [1984]); and N. Kopf, Segenthau: Heimatchronik einer deutschen Gemeinde im rumänischen Banat (Munich: Kulturreferat der Landmannschaft der Banater Schwaben, 1978), 26.

Table A.3  A selection from Nem-magyar keresztnevek jegyzéke [List of non-Hungarian first names]: Romanian names and their Hungarian equivalents, by categories. I indicate the forms given in the publication, but I have changed their spelling into modern Romanian. The asterisked forms appear for the first time in the second edition.

Cognates with long-established usage as counterparts

Romanian name

Hungarian equivalent

Alexa Alexandru Andrei Antonie Avram Catarina Dan (Dănilă, Daniil) Dionisie Dumitru (Mitru) Elena (Ileana) Filip Gavril (Găvrilă) Gligor Ieremie Ilie Ioan (Iuon etc.) Matei Mihai (Mihu) Moise Niculae (Nicoară etc.) Oana Paul (Pavel) Petru Rafila Raveca

Elek Sándor András Antal Ábrahám Katalin Dániel Dénes Dömötöra Ilona Fülöp Gábor Gergely Jeremiás Illés János Máté* Mihály Mózes Miklós Johanna Pál Péter Ráchel Rebeka

Appendix A   |  277

Simeon Ștefan Toma Cognates without a tradition of translatability Sava Sânziana Tănase Toader Vlad Cognates, Hungarian name archaic Chira Crăciun Pascu Pantaleon (Pinte) Precup Vasile Visarion False cognates Claudiu Iordache Correspondence based on similar sounding Radu Nineteenth-century Hungarian coinages, Aurelia matching based on meaning Bucur Constantin (Costa) Cristea Florea Macarie Apocopic Hungarian forms, freshly coined or Axentie not borne by Magyars Eustachie [recte Eustatie] Ghenadie Leonte Nichasie Tiberiu ‘Magyarization’ through (re-) Latinization Anghel Artemie Blânda Carp Crăciun Gherasim Longin Macarie Macavei Maxim Mândra Nicodin Sofronie Șerban Terenție Tit

Simon István Tamás Sebők Johanna Athanáz Tivadarb László Cirjék Karácson Paszkál Pentele Prokóp Vászoly* Beszárion Kolosc Jordánd Rudolf/Rezsőe Aranka Vidor Szilárd Keresztély Virág Bódog Auxent Euszták Genád Leont Nikáz Tibér Angelus* Artemius Placida Carpus Gratianus Geratimus Longinus Makarius* Makabéus Maximus Pulcheria Nikodémus Szofronius Servianus Terentius Titus

278  |  Appendix A

(Almost) purely orthographic Magyarization

Barbu Dămăschin Dragan Neagoe Roman Sabin Traian Zamfira

Bárbu Damaszkin Dragán Nyagoe Román* Szabin Traján Zámfira

Notes a In earlier practice, usually translated as Demeter or Döme. b Tivadar being a freshly resurrected given name, Teodor or Tódor had been more frequently used in actual practice for translating Toader. c Contrary to contemporary belief, Kolos, a Romantic resurrection of a medieval name, originally stood for Nicolaus and not for Claudius. d According to Constantinescu, Iordache and its related forms go back to Gheorghie. e Although Rezső had once been formed on the basis of Rogerius, it was later equated with Rudolf; Szily, Vol. 2, 172.

Appendix B

Place-Name Index

d The figures after the names indicate the linguistic make-up of the place. R stands for native Romanian, M for Hungarian and G for German-speakers. Aciuța (Rom), Acsuca, later Ácsfalva (Hun) 465 R in 1880 Agârbiciu (Rom), Arbegen (Ger), Egerbegy, later Szászegerbegy (Hun) 643 R and 562 G in 1880 Agnetheln (Ger), Agnita (Rom), Szentágota (Hun) 2,216 G, 529 R and 49 M in 1880 Agrij (Rom), Felegregy, later Felsőegregy (Hun) 678 R and 83 M in 1880 Alba Iulia. See Gyulafehérvár Alioș (Rom), Aliosch (Ger), Allios, later Temesillésd (Hun) 1,630 R, 105 G and 39 M in 1880 Alsó-Fehér (Hun), Alba de Jos (Rom), Unterweißenburg (Ger) (county) 135,439 R, 25,818 M and 6,972 G in 1880; 171,483 R, 39,107 M and 7,269 G in 1910 Apuseni (Munții) (Rom), Erdélyi-szigethegység (Hun) (mountain range) Arad (county) 185,241 R, 67,613 M, 30,931 G, 2,938 Slovaks, 2,219 Roma and 1,966 Serbs in 1880; 239,755 R, 124,215 M, 38,695 G, 5,451 Slovaks, 2,615 Roma and 2,138 Serbs in 1910 Arad (city) 19,896 M, 6,439 R, 5,448 G and 1,690 Serbs in 1880; 46,085 M, 10,279 R, 4,365 G and 1,816 Serbs in 1910 Aranyos (Hun), Arieș (Rom) (river) Archiud (Rom), Szászerked, later Mezőerked (Hun) 645 R and 253 M in 1880 Avrig (Rom), Freck (Ger), Felek (Hun) 2,275 R and 344 G in 1880 Babșa (Rom), Babsa (Hun), Babscha (Ger) 822 R and 11 G in 1880; 914 R, 371 M and 53 G in 1910

280  |  Appendix B

Bacova. See Bakowa Baia (Rom), Baja, later Kisbaja (Hun) 468 R in 1880 Baia Mare. See Nagybánya Băiuț. See Oláhláposbánya Baia Sprie. See Felsőbánya Baja. See Baia Bajj. See Boiu Bakowa (Ger), Bachóvár, later Bakóvár (Hun), Bacova (Rom) 1,552 G, 59 M and 22 R in 1880 Bănia (Rom), Bánya (Hun) 2,308 R in 1880 Bega (Rom, Ger, Hun), Begej (Srp) (river) Beiuș. See Belényes Békés. See Bichiș Bela Crkva. See Ungarisch-Weißkirchen Belényes (Hun), Beiuș (Rom) 1,310 M and 1,049 R in 1880; 2,134 M and 1,974 R in 1910 Beszterce-Naszód (Hun), Bistrița-Năsăud (Rom), Bistritz-Nassod (Ger) (county) 62,048 R, 23,113 G and 3,540 M in 1880; 87,564 R, 25,609 G and 10,737 M in 1910 Betfia 267 R in 1880 Bichiș (Rom), Békés, later Kisbékés (Hun) 716 R in 1880 Bihar (Hun), Bihor (Rom) (county) 233,135 M, 186,264 R, 4,554 Slovaks and 4,305 G in 1880; 365,642 M, 265,098 R, 8,457 Slovaks and 3,599 G in 1910 Bihor (rom), Bihar (Hun) (mountain range) Bistritz (Ger), Bistrița (Rom), Beszterce (Hun) 4,954 G, 2,064 R and 561 M in 1880; 5,835 G, 4,470 R and 2,824 M in 1910 Bistrița Aurie (Rom), Goldene Bistritza (Ger), Aranyos-Beszterce (Hun) (river) Blaj (Rom), Balázsfalva (Hun), Blasendorf (Ger) 774 R, 169 M and 90 G in 1880 Bocșița (Rom), Magyarbaksa (Hun) 245 R and 37 M in 1880 Bodo. See Nagybodófalva Bogata Ungurească, today Bogata de Sus (Rom), Magyarbogáta, later Felsőbogáta (Hun) 315 R in 1880 Boiu (Rom), Bajj, later Mezőbaj (Hun) 1,044 R and 93 M in 1880 Borza (Rom), Borzova, later Egregyborzova (Hun) 241 R in 1880 Borzova. See Borza Brad (Rom), Brád (Hun) 1,984 R, 219 M and 36 G in 1880 Brănișca (Rom), Branyicska (Hun) 537 R and 29 M in 1880 Brassó (Hun), Brașov (Rom), Kronstädter (Ger) (county) 29,250 R, 26,579 G and 23,948 M in 1880; 35,372 M, 35,091 R and 29,542 G in 1910 Brassó (Hun), Brașov (Rom), Kronstadt (Ger) (city) 9,599 G, 9,508 M and 9,079 R in 1880; 17,831 M, 11,786 R and 10,841 G in 1910

Appendix B   |  281

Buda Veche, today Vechea (Rom), Bodonkút, earlier Burjánosoláhbuda (Hun) 406 R and 199 M in 1880 Buduș (Rom), Budesdorf (Ger), Kisbudak, later Alsóbudak (Hun) 677 R, 74 G and 10 M in 1880 Burzenland (Ger), Bârsa (Rom), Barcaság (Hun) (region) Câmpie or Câmpia Transilvaniei (Rom), Mezőség (Hun), Heide (Ger) (region) Caransebeș (Rom), Karánsebes (Hun), Karansebesch (Ger) 2,538 R, 1,552 G and 302 M in 1880; 3,916 R, 2,419 M and 1,413 G in 1910 Carei. See Nagykároly Cârlibaba Nouă. See Ludwigsdorf Ceica (Rom), Magyarcséke (Hun) 454 R, 145 M and 41 Slovaks in 1880 Cergău Mare (Rom), Nagycserged, later Magyarcserged (Hun) 952 R in 1880 Ciacova. See Tschakowa Cicir (Rom), Csicsér, later Maroscsicsér (Hun) 896 R and 17 G in 1880 Clocotici. See Klokotič Cluj (town). See Kolozsvár Corbu (Rom), Gyergyóholló (Hun) 778 R and 319 M in 1880 Cornea (Rom), Kornya, later Somfa (Hun) 1,468 R in 1880 Coșbuc. See Hordou Cuptoare Secu, (Rom), Kuptore-Sekul (Ger), Kuptoreszékul, later Kemenceszék (Hun) today Cuptoare and Secu 505 R, 313 G, 82 Slovaks and 64 M in 1880 Csicsér. See Cicir Csík (Hun), Ciuc (Rom) (county) 92,802 M and 12,836 R in 1880; 125,888 M and 18,032 R in 1910 Cuzdrioara (Rom), Kozárvár (Hun) 929 R and 239 M in 1880 Dés (Hun), Dej (Rom), Dezh (Yid), Desch (Ger) 4,217 M, 1,528 R and 211 G in 1880; 7,991 M, 2,911 R and 445 G in 1910 Deutschtekes (Ger), Ticușu Vechi (Rom), Szásztyukos (Hun) 824 G and 251 R in 1880 Déva (Hun), Deva (Rom), Diemrich (Ger) 1,794 R, 1,442 M and 451 G in 1880; 5,827 M, 2,417 R and 276 G in 1910 Dobârlău (Rom), Dobolló (Hun) 992 R and 69 M in 1880 Domoszló. See Dumuslău Dragomirești (Rom), Dragomirest, later Dragomér (Hun) 478 R and 25 M in 1880 Dumbrava. See Igazfalva Dumuslău (Rom), Domoszló, later Szilágydomoszló (Hun) 223 R in 1880 Enciu (Rom), Szászencs (Hun), Entsch (Ger) 399 R in 1880 Entrádám (Hun), Inter Adam (Yid), Tradam, later Jidovița (Rom) today part of Năsăud 231 G and 28 M in 1880; 228 M and 56 G in 1910 Eremitu. See Köszvényesremete

282  |  Appendix B

Ernea Săsească, today Ernea (Rom), Szászernye, later Ernye (Hun), Ehrgang (Ger) 565 R and 47 M in 1880 Erzsébetbánya. See Oláhláposbánya Făgăraș (Munții) (Rom), Fogarasi-havasok (Hun), Fogarascher Gebirge (Ger) (mountain range) Făgăraș. See Fogaras Felsőbánya (Hun), Baia Sprie (Rom) 3,735 M and 1,641 R in 1880; 4,149 M and 230 R in 1910 Feneșu Săsesc, today Florești (Rom), Szászfenes (Hun) 1,068 R and 770 M in 1880 Florești. See Feneșu Săsesc Fogaras (Hun), Făgăraș (Rom), Fogarasch (Ger) (county) 75,050 R, 3,850 G and 2,694 M in 1880; 84,436 R, 6,466 M and 3,236 G in 1910 Fogaras (Hun), Făgăraș (Rom), Fogarasch (Ger) (town) 1,732 R, 1,666 M and 1,559 G in 1880; 3,357 M, 2,174 R and 1,003 G in 1910 Gaura, today Valea Chioarului (Rom), Gaura, later Kővárgara (Hun) 611 R and 19 M in 1880 Glăjărie. See Görgényüvegcsűr Glogoveț (Rom), Glogovéc, later Kisgalgóc (Hun) 385 R in 1880 Görgényszentimre (Hun), Gurghiu (Rom) 861 M and 507 R in 1880 Görgényüvegcsűr (Hun), Glăjărie (Rom) 683 M and 101 R in 1880 Groși, today Groșeni (Rom), Gross, later Tönköd (Hun) 877 R in 1880 Gurghiu. See Görgényszentimre Gyulafehérvár, earlier Károlyfehérvár (Hun), Alba Iulia or Bălgrad (Rom), Karlsburg (Ger) 3,112 R, 2,520 M and 1,229 G in 1880; 5,226 M, 5,170 R and 792 G in 1910 Háromszék (Hun), Treiscaune (Rom) (county) 104,607 M and 15,448 R in 1880; 123,518 M and 22,963 R in 1910 Hațeg (Rom), Hátszeg (Hun), Hötzing (Ger) 1,224 R, 281 M and 198 G in 1880; 1,514 R, 1,438 M and 136 G in 1910 Hermannstadt (Ger), Sibiu (Rom), Nagyszeben (Hun) 14,001 G, 2,746 R and 2,018 M in 1880; 16,832 G, 8,824 M and 7,252 R in 1910 Hordou, today Coșbuc (Rom), Hordó (Hun) 649 R in 1880 Hundorf, today Viișoara (Rom), Hohendorf (Ger), Hundorf, later Csatófalva (Hun) 465 R and 221 G in 1880 Hunyad (Hun), Hunedoara (Rom) (county) 217,414 R, 12,278 M and 6,968 G in 1880; 271,675 R, 52,720 M and 8,101 G in 1910 Iclănzel (Rom), Kisikland (Hun) 534 R in 1880 Igazfalva (Hun), Dumbrava (Rom) 1,925 M in 1910 Ilișua (Rom), Alsóilosva (Hun) 380 R and 187 M in 1880 Izvorul Crișului. See Körösfő Jebucu. See Zsobok

Appendix B   |  283

Jeledinți. See Lozsád Jelna. See Senndorf Jiu (Rom), Zsil (Hun), Schiel (Ger) (river) Kalotaszeg (Hun), Țara Călatei (Rom) (region) Kerelőszentpál (Hun), Sânpaul (Rom) 305 M, c. 282 Roma and 211 R in 1880 Kis-Küküllő (Hun), Târnava Mică (Rom), Klein-Kokler (Ger) (county) 44,372 R, 21,604 M and 16,976 G in 1880; 55,585 R, 34,902 M and 20,272 G in 1910 Kleinschemlak (Ger), Kissemlak, later Vársomlyó (Hun), Șemlacu Mic (Rom) 432 G in 1880 Klokotič (Srp), Clocotici (Rom), Klokotics, later Krassócsörgő (Hun) 1,052 Karaševci in 1880 Kolozs (Hun), Cojocnei (Rom), Klausenburger (Ger) (county) 112,627 R, 63,005 M and 7,667 G; 161,279 R, 111,439 M and 8,386 G in 1910 Kolozsvár (Hun), Cluj, today Cluj-Napoca (Rom), Klausenburg (Ger) 22,761 M, 3,855 R and 1,423 G in 1880; 50,704 M, 7,562 R and 1,676 G in 1910 Königsgnad or Tirol (Ger), Tilori (Srp), Königsgnade, later Királykegye (Hun), Tirol (Rom) 1,035 G, 129 Slovaks and 20 M in 1880 Kornya. See Cornea Körösfő (Hun), Crișeu, today Izvorul Crișului (Rom) 702 M and 11 R in 1880 Körösszakál. See Săcal Köszvényesremete, today Nyárádremete (Hun), Chișiniș-Remetea, today Eremitu (Rom) 1,272 M and 121 R in 1880 Krassó. See Caraș Krassó-Szörény (Hun), Caraș-Severin (Rom), Karasch-Sewerin (Ger) (county) 289,849 R, 37,833 G, 12,237 Serbs, 7,201 M,