Right before I left on vacation, I was in desperate need of a break in routine. The strange thing about traveling, though, is that when you get back you actually crave the routine again. I’m kind of in that stage right now—summers are always a time of flux around the Center for us young folks, as old interns say goodbye, new ones come in, people travel all over the place, and others in our lives starts off on new adventures. On days like today, I long for the stability, structure, and routine of my childhood. Do you ever feel like that?

Anyway, since this is Kelsey’s vacation report week, I should probably get on with it. Once upon a time, not so long ago, I saw Europe as this great utopia—countries that had social guarantees for their citizens, societies that had learned from their earlier colonial excesses and were beacons of civil enlightenment.

My visit to Romania dispelled any such notions about our friends in Europe. Yes, we can learn from them. But they don’t really have the world’s great problems solved any more than we do, particularly when it comes to clashes between racial ethnic groups.

There are two different versions of Romania’s history, all based on who you talk to. The Romanian version tells you that Romanians are descended directly from the Roman colony of Dacia, established in the first years after Christ. Romania, according to this story, consisted of the provinces of Walachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania. Transylvania, with its Dacian (Romanian) population, suffered successively under the occupation of Hungary, the Ottoman Turks, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire before finally being returned to Romania in 1920.

The Hungarian version, on the other hand, asserts that the Dacians moved out of Transylvania following the withdrawl of Roman administration around 271. After several barbarian migrations during the early Middle Ages, the Magyars (Hungarians) conquered the area in the 10th century and have lived there ever since. The region was primarily part of Hungary until the Austro-Hungarian Empire’s loss in World War I, when it was awarded to Romania by the Allies as spoils of war.

I don’t know enough Eastern European history to know who has it right. But, as in so many other places around the world, these competing versions of history justify conflict in the region. The battle was subtle, but you could see it if you knew what to look for. An example: we visited Cluj-Napoca, the capital of Transylvania and a region that used to be largely Hungarian. There, we saw the old Roman Catholic cathedral, with its giant statue of a Hungarian king in the town square. A few blocks down, flanked by more Romanian flags than I saw anywhere else in the country, was the rather new (or perhaps renovated) looking Romanian Orthodox cathedral. It, too, had a statue of some Romanian national hero in front of it. A hundred years ago, the city was overwhemingly Hungarian—today most of its citizens are ethnically Romanian.

Our travels took us through some of the poorest rural regions of Romania, too—places where your car could almost be swallowed up by a pothole in the road, places where many people got around by horse-drawn carts, places where indoor plumbing was a bonus. The poverty seemed more severe in the border regions, further away from the nerve center of Bucharest. These poorer regions also seemed to be some of the last remaining ethnic Hungarian strongholds in the area, places where the population didn’t even speak Romanian.

And yes, we did see some of the Roma people on our travels, also known as the Gypsies. They traveled nomadically in horse-drawn carts, but some had houses on the outskirts of villages—ramshackle little buildings that sheltered several families. In Bucharest, they were many of the beggars we saw. While I had very little interaction with them, it is safe to say that they literally and figuratively live on the absolute margins of both Romanian and Hungarian society. They are disliked by all.

Perhaps when it comes to race relations, the United States is not the only place in need of God’s healing.

“On either side of the river is the tree of life with its twelve kinds of fruit, producing its fruit each month; and the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.” --Revelation 22:2b

Kelsey

PS—Thanks for the correction on my Hungarian… I was spelling phonetically in yesterday’s post.