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"BUCHAREST the gay has become Bucharest
the grave," says a recent cable message, and both epithets are
admirably chosen. Bucharest, on a stream which joins the Danube, is
a stately city of 350,000 inhabitants, about equal to Washington,
D.C., or to New Orleans. And it has elements of both; with
Washington, its atmosphere of diplomacy, of legislative doings, each
with its marked society; with New Orleans, its aristocratic
tradition, its French affinities, its habit of gayety and large
hospitality. But it is with the gay France of the early Third
Empire, not with the earnest and exalted France of today, that
Bucharest is joined in spirit; or was until the straitening events
of the last few weeks turned it into Bucharest the grave. For there
is at stake nothing less than the future life of the nation, with
the possibility that it may suddenly grow to a far larger life, the
life of the completed Rumanian people. |
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Much of the largest fragment of "unredeemed Rumania" is the part which now belongs to Hungary—the east of Transylvania, a very fertile plateau of the Carpathians and one of the few parts of Europe which produce pay gold; it was broken off the Rumanian Nation in the great tide of Mongol conquest when Huns, Magyars, Tartars successively flooded Eastern and Central Europe in destructive locust flights. In imperial Roman days, Transylvania was so much a part of Rumania that Roman roads—still easily traced—join the two halves across the Carpathians, while the headquarters of the Roman legions was at Apulum—now ridiculously renamed Karlsburg, in Southwestern Transylvania. Only in the eleventh century did this region come definitely under the Hungarian yoke. It is notorious—and not creditable—that the Rumanians subject to Hungary have been much more severely bullied than their brothers in Bukowina, "the Beech land," directly under the Austrian crown. At the very time when, under Louis Kossuth, they were fighting for their own liberty, their own national ideal, the Hungarians planned to disfranchise the Rumanian population of Transylvania. That province was to be represented at Budapest by sixty-nine Deputies, who were, however, to be either Hungarians or Germans, with not a single Rumanian among them, though these were two-thirds of the Transylvanian population, while the Hungarians were but a quarter, with the Germans less than a tenth. The truth is that 10,000,000 Hungarians in Hungary have been trying to hold in serfdom an equal number of "inferior" races, of whom 3,000,000 are Rumanians. The Magyars are just despotic in will and act as are the Habsburgs themselves; and Rumania is eager to remedy that. |
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PRINCESS ELIZABETH OF RUMANIA PRINCESS MARIA AND PRINCE NICHOLAS THE CROWN PRINCE CAROL In peasant costume Playing as peasants in the royal park, Bucharest As an officer of the Royal Guard |
The second fragment of "unredeemed
Rumania" dwells in Bukowina, immediately north of Transylvania. This land of beech
trees among the Carpathian foothills has been far more continuously
a part of the Rumanian realm
than has Transylvania.
Indeed, it was only in 1777
that Austria obtained
from the Sultan of Turkey (the overlord of the Rumanian
principalities) the cession of this, one of the richest regions of
Moldavia, both in resources and in traditions; for it was here, at Sucheava, on a tributary of
the
Sereth, that the old Moldavian Princes had their metropolis, while
in the
ancient convent of Putna their
bones were laid. |
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QUEEN MARIA in a costume worn at a court function before the ascension of her husband to the throne. |
QUEEN MARIA OF RUMANIA, with Crown Prince Carol and Nicholas, all in national costume. |
QUEEN MARIA, as shown in her most recent photograph, wearing the uniform of the Rumanian Red Cross. |
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There remain detached Rumanian colonies, south
of the Danube, in Bulgaria, Serbia, Macedonia the so-called Vlaks
or Wallachs—for the most part shepherds on the uplands of the
mountains; but it is difficult to see how anything
short of wholesale migration can bring them into the Rumanian fold.
And, indeed, finally to tranquilize the Balkans, a wholesale
exchange system is needed. |