Between Two Worlds

Europe's Christian culture of the Middle Ages had two fountainheads, Rome and Byzantium, and the formal schism in 1054 made their divergence irrevocable. In Hungary, the Roman and Greek churches had always coexisted. The former predominated and occasionally made vigorous attempts to proselytize, but the latter survived and even increased its flock. Its growth was facilitated by the ongoing process of immigration from the northeast and southeast, and by the official settlement policy, which dictated an expedient and reluctant religious tolerance.

Transylvania lay at the meeting point — and thus at the periphery — of the two Christian worlds. Ethnic Hungarians and Germans adhered to the Roman rite, Romanians and Ruthenians to the Byzantine. These Christian cultures were superimposed over at least four pre-Christian belief systems, vestiges of which remain present in contemporary folklore. One must say at least four, because the pre-Christian traditions of Transylvania's peoples came from multiple sources: Finno-Ugrian and Turkic elements in the case of the Hungarians, ancient Balkanic, Roman, and Slavic elements in the case of the Romanians, Celtic, Roman, and Teutonic in the case of the Germans, and probably several, untraceable elements in the case of Transylvania's Slavs, whose cultural identity had become submerged by the end of the Middle Ages.

The peripheral situation is significant, for due to the distance from their respective centres, the two cultures were subject to each {1-525.} other's influence and evolved in a distinctive fashion. Western cultural influences extended to Transylvania's eastern limits, and were carried even farther, into Wallachia and Moldavia, by Hungarian and Saxon settlers. The Orthodox Church spread as far as the western mountains of Transylvania and no further than the upper reaches of the rivers that watered the Hungarian Plain. As the multi-ethnic population of Transylvania became progressively integrated thanks to the spread of an agrarian economy, the two religious cultures became similarly intertwined. Long before the Reformation, villages in which the two faiths each had their own church could be found throughout the country. People of different faiths lived and worshipped in close proximity to each other, and came to share some of their distinctive traditional and religious values; the outcome was a composite popular culture unique to Transylvania.

In the field of East European folklore, a common research objective has been the original belief-system and distinctive cultural features of specific ethnic groups. In the case of Transylvania's Hungarians (including the Székelys), Romanians, and Saxons, such attempts are bound to fail, for the magical myths and rites in their folklore long antedate the emergence of modern ethnicity and only differ outwardly. Spells that bind or liberate, heal or harm, fertilize or lay waste are part of the folklore of all Transylvanian — and, indeed, Eurasian — peoples. The differences are superficial, lying mainly in the language and gestures employed to conjure up the magic powers and figures. Thus the Hungarian word boszorkány (of Turkic origin), the Romanian vrăjitoară (of Slavic origin), and the Saxon Häch (from the German Hexe) all denote the same imaginary figure, a witch; the image of a dragon is evoked by the Hungarian sárkány (of Turkic origin), the Romanian balaur (of ancient Balkanic origin), and the Saxon-German Drache. Rooted in prehistory, such mythical beliefs were embroidered, then shared with other groups, and so far, it has not proven possible to differentiate with any precision the belief-systems of the three Transylvanian peoples prior to their cohabitation.

{1-526.} Nevertheless, a few cultural threads can be traced back to the distant past, producing a rough outline of each group's distinctive features. Thus the Indo-European world-outlook of Romanians and Saxons can be readily differentiated from the Hungarian (and Székely) heritage of shamanism. According to the latter, ancestors' spirits resided in the tree of life; the shaman conjured them up by climbing up the tree, by chanting in a trance, or by engaging in ritual combat with other shamans who, like him, were disguised as animals. Shamanism considered the nether world to be a mirror-image of reality and prescribed appropriate funeral rites, e.g. girding the sword on the right side of the body. These customs and beliefs can be traced in archaeological finds dating from the Hungarian conquest as well as in surviving folk traditions of the Hungarians (Székelys) in Transylvania and Moldavia. This ancient heritage was transmitted orally in dirges and heroic ballads, with tunes on the Finno-Ugrian tritonic and tetratonic or the Turkic pentatonic scale, which were only rediscovered and recorded in the 20th century. The oral tradition was once linked to an embryonic literacy, a runic script of Turkic origin which survived mainly among Székelys; sounds unknown in the Turkic tongue were subsequently noted in Glagolitic letters, either by the Székelys, who gave up bilingualism for Hungarian monolingualism, or by the Hungarians in general — if the hypothesis is valid that runic writing belonged to the Hungarians' common cultural heritage. Formed when the Székelys were a pastoral people who kept herds of large animals, their social structure was subsequently adapted to an agro-pastoral, village-based existence. The survival of this archaic society of free peasant-warriors, with its distinctive customary law, was both cause and effect of the Székelys' settlement on the country's periphery. In other respects, the Székelys' value-system and their culture — as revealed in tales, ballads, music, dance, shapes, and colours — constitute simply a regional variant of the popular culture of Hungary.

{1-527.} The homogeneity of Hungarian popular culture is illustrated by the fact that certain ancient beliefs found in Transylvania also appear on the Great Hungarian Plain, e.g. identification of the weasel with a malevolent 'beautiful lady' who hates spinning and could therefore be driven off by the display of a spinning wheel. Bishop Thietmar recorded that his contemporary Sarolt — daughter of Transylvania's gyula and wife of Prince Géza — behaved like a man, and did not shrink from slaying people, instead of sticking to her spinning wheel like a good wife and mother. Since the name Sarolt means 'weasel' in Old Turkic, she was obviously one and the same as the beleknegini — 'beautiful lady' — mentioned by Thietmar. Thus Sarolt became a mythical figure in popular lore, giving rise to so many folk tales that in the late 1600s, the Calvinist bishop in the region east of the Tisza, István Diószegi Kis, would include 'tying spinning wheels to weasels' in his list of superstitious customs.

The homogeneity of Hungarian culture in the Middle Ages is best illustrated by popular ballads. The latter incorporated Hungarian and other East European motifs, but they were principally derived from French — or, according to an alternative hypothesis, Greek-Byzantine — roots. Out of the eighty-three Hungarian ballads that have been identified so far as being of medieval origin, sixty-nine were also known in Transylvania; indeed, many of the latter also appeared in Moldavia, and twenty had Romanian variants. Thus Hungarian folk poetry in Transylvania mediated between Hungary's general popular culture and that of the Romanians, transmitting such masterpieces as Kelemen Kőműves' — in the Romanian variant, of Master Manole's — ballad, which was of Balkan-Greek origin.

Romanian popular culture in Transylvania incorporated and preserved a magical world-view that had been nurtured in the successively Hellenic, Roman, and Christian Balkans, and which combined the festive aspects of mysticism and Orthodoxy. The celebration {1-528.} of feast-days with processions, often in costume and mask, and by singing and dancing, was also adopted by the Balkan Slavs. The Hungarian custom of singing 'kolindas' (kolindálás) derives from this source, as do some characteristic features of Romanian tales and narrative poems, the personification of natural forces and celestial bodies and the attribution of speech to animals. In the most beautiful of all Romanian ballads, the 'Miorica', a lamb that is able to communicate with humans warns his shepherd of a deadly peril.

Romanian folklore, like the Hungarian, depicts an ethnic culture that was formed in a given historical period and environment and is remarkably uniform throughout the area of settlement. The Romanian culture's defining figure is the mountain shepherd, and although it also reflects agrarian influences, its customary law (the 'Vlach law', or Oláh jog) — which appeared all along the Carpathians, as far as Moravia — was typical of pastoral societies; the earliest references to this law are found in Serbian royal charters of the 12th century.

The popular culture of the Transylvanian Saxons was generally of an agrarian-peasant nature, but even in the Middle Ages it reflected urban influences. The Saxons shared the Germanic world's superstitious beliefs in a multitude of variegated monsters from marshes and forests, of giants, goblins, imps, and articulate animals. They took over other mythical figures from Romanian folklore, such as a monster, known also to Hungarians, called the prikulics. Transylvania's Saxons, like the Hungarians and Romanians, enjoyed local autonomy under their customary laws, and thus they were able to preserve their ethnic identity and culture. Although the Saxons lived in a comparatively closed society and maintained strong links with the German homeland, they had significant cultural interaction with the Hungarians and Romanians. At the same time, their culture preserved its distinctiveness and did not absorb, for instance, the medieval legends nurtured in Hungarian folk tales or the moralistic Byzantine stories so characteristic of Romanian folklore.

{1-529.} Despite their differences, the popular cultures of the three groups had common roots in superstition and were more open to each others' influence than the two principal religious cultures. However, it was the latter that played the more decisive role in defining the cultural profile and interaction of Transylvania's peoples. It is therefore essential to assess the impact on Transylvania of the Roman and Byzantine religious cultures.