Word: rumania
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...pastor of the Hungarian Reformed Church in the Transylvanian city of & Timisoara, the Rev. Laszlo Tokes seemed an unlikely figure to spark a revolution. But Tokes, 37, possessed a sharp tongue at a time when that attribute was rare in Rumania. Not only did he lash out against the tyrannical regime in Bucharest, but he even accused Hungarian Reformed Church leaders of collaborating with communist authorities...
...cause aroused Tokes's wrath more than the plight of his fellow 1.7 million ethnic Hungarians, who make up 8% of the Rumanian population and are concentrated in Transylvania, the country's westernmost region. Long a center of ethnic turbulence, Transylvania passed from Hungary to Rumania in 1918, after World War I. The region reverted to Hungary in 1940, and was ceded back to Rumania in 1944. Ethnic Hungarian leaders charge Bucharest with attempting "cultural genocide" by shutting ethnic schools, dissolving Hungarian communities and seizing historical archives. Some 18,000 ethnic Hungarians fled Rumania last year...
Threats of violence were just part of Tokes's troubles. Church officials tried to transfer him to a less volatile parish in southern Rumania. When < Tokes refused, Bishop Laszlo Papp accused the pastor of "violating the laws of both church and state" and obtained a court order for his eviction. But hundreds of supporters formed a human chain around Tokes's building to protect him, thus triggering the crackdown that helped inspire the nationwide demonstrations that toppled Nicolae Ceausescu...
...long part of the permanent order of things, was peacefully deconstructing before the world's eyes. After years of numb changelessness, the communist world has come alive with an energy and turmoil that have taken on a bracing, potentially anarchic life of their own. Not even Stalinist Rumania was immune...
Rezzori was the son of a minor aristocratic family living on the outer fringes of the Austro-Hungarian Empire near Czernowitz in the Bukovina, which became part of Rumania in 1919 when Rezzori was five, and was later swallowed by the Soviet Union. Rezzori's tale is not a continuous narrative but a group of character studies of five people who presided over his childhood and youth -- pillars of the writer's adult imagination around whose base the boy's life was lived...