OUR TRANSYLVANIA ROOTS

Transylvania Unitarians

Rev. Dr. Fred Howard

Board Member, Project Harvest Hope

Minister, Unitarian Universalist Church of Valdosta

Who are the Transylvanian Unitarians and why should we care about them? Morris just gave you the background on Francis David, the founder of Unitarianism in Transylvania.  The religious community he founded is the first sustained Unitarian community in the world, and it is to this day the second largest body of Unitarians in the world.  Realize that this religious community has been in existence for 440 years now.  This makes our own Unitarian movement in this country a mere fledgling in comparison.  In the next few minutes, I want to try to facilitate a little better understanding of these fellow religionists of ours halfway around the globe, the threats they continue to face, and what efforts we are making to ensure their survival, and how you can become involved in this ongoing effort.

To really grasp who the Unitarians in Transylvania are, you need to understand a bit of history and geography.   Transylvania is relatively isolated from the rest of the world, being surrounded almost entirely by the Carpathian Mountains.  Medieval travelers going from eastern to western Europe, or from the Mediterranean countries to northern Europe had to cross this area, and that’s where it got its name – Trans (across) Sylvania (forest).  Because it was and still is so isolated geographically, and because it mostly remained under a feudal system until World War I, visitors are still privy to what life was like in medieval Europe, or at least there are still many vestiges of it.  And then there was the iron curtain.  Transylvania was taken from Hungary after World War I, and has been a part of Romania ever since.  Hungarians living there, which virtually all the Unitarians are, are now an oppressed minority due to dictators, forced relocations, and the ravages of war.  They are at home and yet they are in a strange land, experiencing themselves as displaced.  One way to think of this is their situation is that they are somewhat comparable to the Tibetans within China.  

Up until 1989 Romania’s government had been mostly fascist and communist dictators, the most notorious of which was the last one, Ceausescu.   Ceausescu tried to systematically destroy the culture of the ethnic minorities living in Romania, such as the Hungarians.  He would raze whole villages, imprison the ministers or force them into hard labor, and send the people off to soulless concrete block apartment buildings in the cities.  These architectural monstrosities still line the roads in most all Transylvanian cities and serve as bleak reminders of Ceausescu’s reign of terror, which lasted an entire generation.

Unitarianism owed much of its survival through the past four centuries to its isolation in the countryside and the relative lack of political pressures in the hinterlands for people to abandon their faith.  Unitarianism is very much a rural phenomenon in Transylvania.  But even the isolation did not protect them from Ceausescu however, with his systematic plan to plow under the villages, establish large farm cooperatives, and disperse and resettle the inhabitants.  He began this plan in earnest and, had he not fallen from power in 1989, would have likely wiped the Unitarian church off the face of Romania.  Though he ultimately failed, the residual damage to these communities is still very much in evidence – both physically and psychologically.  The people in the villages are still suspicious of the government acting in their interest, and the prejudices fostered by 70 years of war and dictatorship still disadvantage the Unitarians, who are an ethnic minority, when it comes to training, jobs, and grants.  Further, many of the skills for traditional farming methods were lost during the era of state cooperatives.

So the future of Unitarianism in Transylvania is inextricably linked to the villages.  Over ninety percent of the 120 Unitarian congregations in Transylvania today are in the villages.  And village life there is threatened at this point in history as never before because of continued political and economic fallout of Ceausescu’s totalitarian regime.

After Ceausescu’s fall in 1989, our churches rediscovered our brothers and sisters in faith in Transylvania and the partner church program began.  Project Harvest Hope started from one of those Partner Church relationships – that is, the one between the UU Church in Oakland California and Okland, Transylvania.  The mutual trust and cooperation between these congregations grew to the point where they could intentionally engage around economic development, and so they launched a joint project to build a mill so that farmers could mill their grains locally.  Next a bakery was established so that they would have a product to sell, provide bread, and create jobs to attract and keep the youth in the area.  With the success of these two endeavors, PHH took on a more ambitious project – that of a dairy barn.  This became PHH’s flagship project and many of you may associate PHH with cows.  The dairy project was started with many goals in mind – keeping pasture and farmland in local hands, renew the aging stock of the locals, and again provide jobs and economic opportunity for young people.  I want to recognize someone who is here today who helped facilitate the initial community discussions with the local partners in Transylvania that helped make these projects a reality.  Beverly Smrha is a member of the board of PHH.

After the dairy became relatively self sustaining, PHH expanded beyond the Okland area with an initiative involving eight different Unitarian villages.  PHH partnered with the non- governmental organization CIVITAS to train community organizers in these eight villages.  These community organizers, called Local Development Agents, worked in conjunction with the local Unitarian ministers and congregations and began start up projects.  These eight villages now have projects completed - projects like the milk collection facility in the village of Firtosvaralja.  This village faced economic disaster when Romania joined the European Union because of the stringent requirements for milk collection.  Milk is the economic lifeblood of the Firtosvaralja, and without the proper collection facility, the village would no longer have a market for its product.  The community organizer there, trained by CIVITAS with funding provided by PHH, worked with the villagers and their minister to acquire the required equipment, and today this village is again economically thriving.

PHH’s mission has been and will continue to be one of engaged listening.  For our efforts to be successful, we work in conjunction with the villagers as they identify their own needs and develop their own sense of agency.   Today there are at least 15 other villages with specific needs and visions for a better life for their citizens that would like to join our program.  We are identifying other programs within the European Union that are likely sources of grants and matching funds so that these villages can become attractive places of economic opportunity as well.

PHH is also moving forward with an initiative called Adopt a Project where individual congregations can provide funding for specific projects and work in conjunction with a particular congregation in Transylvania to see the project come to fruition.  In contrast to the partner church program, these would be short term obligations, say one or two years, but certainly may provide the relationship base and trust that could lead to more partner church associations.  We certainly hope so and pilot projects are already underway.

Another mission of PHH is providing opportunities of North American UUs t go on pilgrimage to Transylvania, the place where our faith movement first established itself.  This is the Holy Land of the Unitarain branch of our faith.  My real passion for the work of PHH came as a result of a pilgrimage I made to Transylvania in 2005.  12 of us from UUCA made the trip to Szekelyudvarhely.  I haven’t looked at the world the same since that experience. 

The idea behind a pilgrimage is that some places are especially holy, or sacred.  People of all religious faiths have been journeying to the tombs of saints and the sights of miracles for thousands of years.  To be on a pilgrimage is to be in a time and a place of liminality.  The pilgrim is someone who has taken a break from the expectations and demands of everyday life.  She or he is voluntarily entering an unknown and mysterious place that takes us away from our normal patterns of activity and habitual ways of thinking. 

For pilgrims of any historical time, community becomes a crucial aspect in making the experience transformative of our spirit.  Long ago pilgrims often banded together for safety like those in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales.  They would tell each other stories along the way, and this becomes a part of the experience.  Those of us on the journey through Transylvania told many stories and in the process of pilgrimage we became a part of many more stories.  This all seems to be a part of what it means to learn to actually open oneself up and become a pilgrim, which is a necessary part of any pilgrimage.  Through the sharing of the journey and the communal striving toward a common destination 12 extremely diverse people can manage to become an intimate community and learn deep respect for each other’s patience, gifts and graces.

As I said, my pilgrimage of 2005 colored the way I looked at everything and everybody for weeks and weeks afterwards.  It still affects the way I look at our culture and our way of life.  As someone put it to me before I left, the Transylvanian people are so poor, and yet they are so rich.  Because of the oppression and the hardships they have endured, they have a deep sense of family, heritage and community that I was deeply impressed by and I am still trying to get my head around.  I guess that has a lot to do with why I cannot wait to go back.  I believe that pilgrimage may not actually be about a journey to a sacred place.  Perhaps is really more of a journey, any journey, that opens you up to experience the sacred in whatever place you happen to be.  Please consider the opportunity to make your own pilgrimage as I will be co-facilitating a PHH pilgrimage to Transylvania next July and I would love to have you join us.