THERE'S a city called Cluj in western Romania.
It’s the unofficial capital of Transylvania. Cluj is the Romanian name for it.
Hungarians, who make up about 20 per cent of the 400,000 population, call it Kolozvar. Germans call it Klausenburg.
Why would Germans call it anything? Well, there was a substantial Saxon population in the Middle Ages who were imported to defend the mountain passes against the Mongols.
Cluj was part of the kingdom of Hungary from the tenth century until 1920 when the Treaty of Trianon partitioned Hungary and Transylvania was given to Romania.
Hungarians didn’t think that was a great idea. Since then relations between Romanians and Hungarians in the city and surrounding countryside have been pretty rocky.
Around twenty years ago council workers were in the city’s main square busily digging under a statue of the fifteenth century Hungarian King Matthias Corvinus, a Hungarian folk hero.
Why? Wait for it: to prove that Romanian civilisation predated Hungarian civilisation. The city council wasn’t being ironic about the word civilisation.
This piece of nonsense was part and parcel of an anti-Hungarian campaign by the city mayor, the dreadful Gheorghe Funar, currently Secretary of the Greater Romania Party.
Funar was mayor from 1992-2004. Among his wheezes he had the city’s pavements painted in the colours of the Romanian flag, red, yellow and blue. but not only the pavements, the park benches, bins, anything that didn’t move.
Anything to annoy the local Hungarians. Initially he was a populist hero for the Romanian population of the city until tourists and businesses began to avoid the place and it went into decline.
Nevertheless it took twelve years to boot him out. The voters have learnt their lesson. When he stood in 2008 he got 4 per cent of the vote.
You can see where this is going, can’t you? As a result of the reorganisation of councils here we’re going to have a number of Cluj/Kolozvar/ Klausenburgs.
As you see, it’s not just Derry that has two names. It’s not just councils in parts of Transylvania that are dominated by the shortsighted.
What will be achieved by demolishing a republican monument in Carnlough, a town with an 87 per cent Catholic population?
Very simple: an increase in support for Sinn Féin, a hardening of attitudes, a sharpening of division, retaliation by defacing a war memorial in Larne with its 68 per cent Protestant population, the rebuilding of the original republican monument and so on.
Furthermore the dunderheads in Mid & East Antrim council who are content with unauthorised loyalist memorials never think about the fate of their fellow unionists in republican dominated councils.
Do they imagine their narrow view makes it easy for unionists in Magherafelt to argue that the council shouldn’t ban union jacks from the town centre?
What argument can they make against a memorial to 1916 being erected beside one to the World Wars? I’ll see your monument and raise you two.
How does the tunnel vision in Mid & East Antrim make it easy for any republican to be magnanimous in Tyrone or Fermanagh?
Unfortunately there is no leadership from either Sinn Féin or the DUP instructing their local worthies to behave themselves.
Even if they can’t convince them to behave for honourable motives, at least they might be able to show it only makes things worse for people with their own views where they’re in a minority.
Instead of criticising the behaviour of their local worthies there is silence, broken only by Arlene Foster in a display of pettiness entering the dispute about ‘the north’ versus Norn Irn.
Is there any danger of her telling unionists also to use the correct name instead of ‘Ulster’ or the ‘pravince’?
The notion of diversity enshrined in the Good Friday Agreement obviously passes clear over her head.
The bad news is it took more than a decade for the counter-productive behaviour of the ultra-Romanian mayor of Cluj to register with its Romanian voters.
Having got rid of him the city is prospering again. However, it’s improbable that any Hungarian speaker calls the place anything other than Kolozvar even though it’s been officially Cluj for ninety-six years apart from 1941-5.
For some unionists the concept of live and let live remains eternally beyond their grasp.
