Editorial Preface

Today’s world is a world of minorities. The nation states founded in the twentieth century have only very rarely been based on ethnically homogeneous territories. Besides the dominant ethnic groups, there have always been one or more ethnic minorities sharing the territory of a given state. This was already the situation in medieval Hungary, but after the Treaty of Trianon at the end of the First World War (1920), it became a more prominent issue, because the small nation states founded in the Carpathian Basin inherited large groups of ethnic minorities.

Since the official foundation of the modern Romanian state, there have been about one to one and a half million Hungarians living in Romanian territory, most of them in Transylvania, with a smaller ethnic group, called the Csángós, in Moldavia. The latter group, living outside the Carpathian Mountains, has been surrounded by Romanians, and thus exposed to foreign linguistic and cultural influences, since the twelfth or thirteenth century. In spite of that fact, to this day they have managed to preserve their essentially Hungarian culture, several ancient elements of Hungarian folklore, as well as an unusually archaic dialect of the Hungarian language.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, a Finnish linguist, Yrjö Wichman, studied the language of the Csángós and classified it as a dialect of Hungarian. In 2000 it was a Finnish politician who spoke up for the Csángós who, unlike the neighboring Romanians, have preserved their Catholic faith. “By now only 250,000 of them have survived. Although the mother tongue of about 60,000–70,000 persons is Csángó, which is close to Hungarian, to this day they cannot get a native-language education. Unless the rights of the nation are improved to a considerable degree, there is a danger that they will be assimilated into the predominant culture” (Tytti Isohookana-Asunmaa’s speech held at the 9th International Congress of Finno-Ugric Studies, Tartu, 2000).*

She also noted that the Council of Europe had been dealing with minority language issues since 1992. “Cultural and educational cooperation has been one of the most important fields of activity at the Council of Europe since the very beginning. The aim of the cooperation is to support the survival of various cultures. Thus, the attention has been focused on language as the most important manifestation of identity. Mother tongue competence plays the central role in the protection and development of the identity. Each nation is entitled to learn its own mother tongue. In 1992 the Council of Europe passed a charter that deals with regional and minority languages—the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The charter of the Council of Europe that deals with the minority and regional languages is the first binding international document that tries to improve the condition of the minority languages. The treaty protects those languages that are not the official languages of the country and that have been traditionally used by representatives of national minorities that inhabit the territory of this country. According to the treaty, the state has to guarantee secondary and vocational education in a regional or minority language” (ibid. pp. 190–191).

Even more recently (in 2001) the member states of UNESCO committed themselves to taking appropriate steps to achieve the following objectives of an action plan for the implementation of the UNESCO Declaration on Cultural Diversity: “Safeguarding the linguistic heritage of humanity and giving support to expression, creation and dissemination in the greatest possible number of languages; encouraging linguistic diversity—while respecting the mother tongue—at all levels of education, wherever possible, and fostering the learning of several languages from the youngest age; promoting through education an awareness of the positive value of cultural diversity and improving to this end both curriculum design and teacher education; incorporating, where appropriate, traditional pedagogies into the education process with a view to preserving and making full use of culturally appropriate methods of communication and transmission of knowledge” (from a draft resolution).

The European Folklore Institute, which has been established partly by UNESCO, also holds itself responsible, as much as possible, for the wide dissemination of the resolutions of UNESCO.

The present volume of Hungarian Heritage can be considered a special issue dedicated to the Csángós. The articles here presented provide an overview of the history, ethnography, scholarly study, and lifestyle of the Csángós living in Moldavia, also called the Moldavian Hungarians. They describe the unique traditional culture that this small minority group has managed to transmit from the late twentieth to the twenty-first century, by having preserved much of their archaic linguistic and folklore traditions. Through the authors of these essays and the European Folklore Institute, the community of ethnographers in Hungary wishes to pay respect to this ethnic minority group by the publication of this English-language volume. Our aim is, of course, to introduce the Csángós and their culture to English-language readers. Living on the edge of multi-cultural Europe, they have preserved their native traditions in spite of the pressure to assimilate that is concomitant with their minority status, and thus they have contributed to the future development of Europe into a colorful mosaic of minority cultures, instead of a monochrome and homogenized super-state.

* Isohookana-Asunmaa, Tytti. “How can the Finno-Ugric peoples benefit from the European organizations?” In A. Nurk, et al., eds. Congressus Nonus Internationalis Fenno-Ugristarum, Pars I. Orationes plenariales. Tartu, 2000. 189–196.

Budapest, May, 2002
Mihály Hoppál