Transylvania: A Short History by Istvan Lazar

Transylvania: A Short History Reviews

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  Dimitri

  It is hard to say something positive about this read. The translation from Hungarian is dry and factual, like a textbook catering to foreign interest about the land of the vampires. Yet the coherence of Transylvanian history is weak prior to Early Modern times, with few words spared for Vlad Dracul. There is a solid academic foundation, the bibliography of which has sadly been omitted from the original version. I wonder how much weight titles in Romanian or German carry in it. There are definitely moments of nationalistic bias against the loss of this borderland to the Romania Mare , alltough in all fairness mr. Lazar knows its limits : this theory was developped and propagated as the completely erroneous Hungarian answer and as a spiteful reaction to the equally fantastic Romanian hypothesis of the Daco-Roman continuity. . He also points out the restraint by the Hungarian half of the Habsburg Empire in its foreign policy towards Romania prior and during WWI, a restraint apparently respected until the perfect opportunity presented itself in summer 1916. This, the existence and effect of interbellum nationalisation policies and Hungary in WWII are parts of the story that inevitably are handled too swiftly to satisfy my appetite.
  
  
• 
  Sjonni

  A fair book, as objective as one can hope for considering Transylvania constitutes the largest of all Hungarian traumas caused by the Paris peace accords of 1919 when the country was forcibly reduced by a third. Difficult to follow for people unfamiliar with the big names of Hungarian history.