The Puppet Masters of Targu Mures

Posted by on Aug 7, 2014 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized | 2 comments It’s been nearly a quarter century since the fall of the Ceausescu dictatorship in Romania, and still many aspects of what happened in December 1989 and immediately afterwards remain a mystery. Many people in the country hesitate to call what happened around Christmas of that year a “revolution.” They suspect that the collapse of the Communist regime was actually a managed transition...
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Speaking One’s Tongue

Posted by on Jan 8, 2014 in Blog, Eastern Europe, Featured, Uncategorized | 8 comments When I travelled in the Transylvania region of Romania in 1993, relations between ethnic Hungarians and ethnic Romanians were still tense. There had been outright confrontation and violence in 1990, particularly in Targu Mures. By 1993, the conflict had largely migrated to the political realm. In Cluj – the old Hungarian town of Kolosvar – the nationalist politician Gheorghe Funar had taken...
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