The Folk Music of the Moldavian Hungarians

extract, István Pávai (Budapest)

In Moldavia, beyond the borders of the historical Hungary, the most eastern Hungarian ethnic group of Catholic faith has been living for centuries. Their origin has long been a subject of speculation. According to the theory that searches the furthest back into the past, they are pre-conquest residue Hungarians from Etelköz (the migrating Hungarians’ ninth-century settlement area to the North of the Black Sea). The most ‘short-sighted’ theory, on the other hand, considers them Romanians who, while living in Hungarian-controlled Transylvania, were converted to Catholicism by force and compelled to use the Hungarian language. Subsequently, they fled to their “brothers and sisters” living beyond the mountains, and have preserved the knowledge of the “foreign” Hungarian language up to this day “out of fear.” Another extremist Romanian theory rejects this idea and claims that all Romanians had been baptized in perfect accordance with the Roman rite in the past, but later those living in the South converted to the Byzantine observance, and thus in Moldavia it is the “ancient” religion of the Romanians that has been preserved. The views of Hungarian historians and ethnographers concerning the date of and reason for the settlement are not uniform either. Nevertheless, from the data that has been collected in support of these theories we can clearly conclude that the earliest settlements of Moldavian Hungarians are at least 750 years old, and that over the centuries their demographic losses, due to wars and to an ongoing process of Romanianization, were balanced by several waves of Transylvanian emigration. Since the Middle Ages, the main settlements of the Moldavian Hungarians have been situated in small groups alongside the busiest roads and river valleys of the province. Such a placement of settlements suggests that we are dealing with a community that had migrated into the area relatively early on. Considering the fact that the majority of Moldavian place names are of Hungarian origin, we can suppose that the size of the Hungarian population was already considerable in the Middle Ages.

Flute-player (Ploscuµeni/Ploszkucén, 1996). Photo: István Pávai.