Instrumentalizing Szeklerland Autonomy Through Szekler Memory Sites and Rites in post-1989 Romania

In post-communist Romania, Szekler political and intellectual elites have taken advantage of a long discursive tradition on Szekler autonomy, which developed throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries within the nationalizing states (Brubaker 1996) of Hungary and Romania. As part of the interwar ideology of Transylvanianism, a particular Szekler identity-construction mechanism was developed, buttressed by a rhetoric on geographical remoteness in relation to the centers of power of Budapest and Bucharest. More precisely, the Szekler-ization of geography was enabled by imagining and cultivating sites and rites of memory in the Szeklerland – from pilgrimages to the funerary monuments of Szekler cultural elites and the sanctifying of Hungarian and Szekler flags in public squares. Drawing on this context, my paper explores the post-1989 revival of Szekler commemoration narratives that have attempted to construct a Szekler life-world within Romania by linking memory to territory. Since minority rituals of memory, parallel to the official state ones, are no longer silenced in Szekler public spaces after the fall of communism, interwar realms of memory have been reframed and popularized. On the line suggested by Katherine Verdery in The Political Lives of Dead Bodies (1999), this analysis also looks at how funeral ceremonies shape the relationship between the Szekler community and “its” territory with the Romanian Other. In this respect, this study focuses on the attempt to rebury the Szekler pro-Nazi writer József Nyirő on Szekler (yet Romanian) soil. Apart from triggering a huge diplomatic incident between Hungary and Romania in the summer of 2012, it also pinpoints the reformulation of Szekler identity discourse within the Romanian post-communist context. In short, I will address questions regarding the practices of memory production permitted in present, the aims of Szekler elites in popularizing such practices and the way these aims shape the Szekler-Romanian relationship in the public arena.