Székelys Erotic

The Székelys are Hungarians who have never quite agreed to be only Hungarians. Around half a million of them live in the eastern bend of the Carpathians in Romania, in Harghita and Covasna counties and the eastern part of Mureș, a block of hill country they call Székelyföld, the Székely Land. Here Hungarian is the language of the market, the church and the town hall, and Romanian is the language of the state. They are the largest concentrated Hungarian-speaking population outside Hungary, and they live deep inside Romania, far from the Hungarian border, which shapes everything else about them. Their origin is argued over, but their medieval job is not. The kings of Hungary kept them on the eastern frontier as a hereditary military class: every Székely owed armed service, and in return they held their land as free men rather than as serfs, at least in principle. They ran their own affairs through seats rather than counties, Csík, Gyergyó, Udvarhely, Háromszék, Marosszék and the exclave of Aranyosszék, and from 1437 they counted as one of Transylvania's three privileged nations alongside the Hungarian nobility and the Saxons. That memory of freedom held by right rather than by grant still runs through Székely politics. When the Habsburgs tried to force them into regular border regiments in 1764, the protest at Madéfalva ended in a massacre, and the families who fled over the mountains became the Bukovina Székelys, resettled to Vojvodina in 1941 and then driven on to Tolna and Baranya counties in Hungary, where their descendants remain.

The language is Hungarian, a Uralic tongue with no relatives among its Romance, Slavic and Germanic neighbors, spoken here in a dialect that keeps older words and carries a reputation for dry, deadpan wit that other Hungarians call góbé humor. The Székelys also kept a runic alphabet, the rovás script, once cut into gateposts and church beams and now painted onto village welcome signs as a badge of identity. Religion follows regional lines. The Csík basin is solidly Roman Catholic and hosts the Pentecost pilgrimage at Csíksomlyó, the largest Hungarian Catholic gathering anywhere. Háromszék and Udvarhely lean Reformed, and the region holds a large share of Transylvania's Unitarians, a church born under the 1568 Edict of Torda, one of Europe's earliest legal grants of religious tolerance. Carved wooden Székely gates, tall enough to admit a loaded hay cart, still front farmhouses. Trianon handed the region to Romania in 1920, the Second Vienna Award returned it to Hungary in 1940, and 1947 gave it back to Romania for good. It was briefly a Hungarian Autonomous Region under communism and today runs a persistent, largely peaceful campaign for territorial autonomy under a blue and gold flag bearing a sun and moon, which Romanian courts have repeatedly ordered taken down from public buildings.