Tradition, Culture, and Identity:
Travels with Transylvanian Unitarians
A sermon by Peggy Garrigues-Cortelyou delivered at
First UU Church of Ann Arbor Sermon from August 14, 2005

From July 3-11, Fran Lyman, Gretchen Jackson, Bill Malm, and I traveled to the Transylvania region of Romania in order to visit our partner congregation in Kezdivasarhely, learn more about Unitarianism in Transylvania – which has been around since the mid-1500’s, and to experience the sights and culture of the region. 

While I was there, I asked Maria, minister of our partner church, what was the biggest benefit that she saw for her congregation in our partner relationship. She said they very much appreciated the financial support we have provided, but that two things we offered to them were very significant. First, that as Transylvanians, they are part of the Hungarian-speaking minority in Romania, then as Unitarians, they are a minority among the Transylvanians. So for them it is very significant to know that other people care about them, and are learning about them, and want to have connections and relationships with them. They have felt very alone in their culture in many ways, so it is meaningful to have friends in another part of the world.

The second thing she mentioned that we offer to them, is the sense of optimism about being able to make a difference in the world. Especially with their recent history of communism, there is often a general sense of helplessness about being able to do much that will change their communities, or make a difference along the lines of justice and equality. And as part of a minority, there is an assumption that they will not be listened to much by the government. There was a notable difference in the roads between the Transylvanian, Hungarian-speaking areas, and the Romanian-speaking areas.

It would take another sermon to reflect more on what we can offer them. But I want to focus this morning on learnings about what our partnership in Transylvania can offer to us.

During our time in Transylvania, three themes kept coming up  for me as something to learn – noticing how people were connected to place, to history, and to tradition in ways that are less common in the US. 

In the first three days we did lots of driving. We flew from Detroit, via Amsterdam, into Bucharest, Romania, and then drove into the Carpathian Mountains on our first day. We were greeted with roses by Maria Pap – minister of our partner church, her daughter, Abigel, John Dale – a UU who lives part of the year in the region and coordinates all the trips to partner churches, John’s wife, and Denes – our van driver, and also a minister. We also traveled with a couple from Texas who came along to visit their partner church.

As we drove along in both cities and villages, we saw red tiled roofs, colorful stucco-type houses, and fences everywhere, right along the road. The homes were usually right behind the tall, often wooden fences, and often there were other small buildings right near by, with long, narrow fields and gardens behind. As we drove through small villages, we saw people along the side of the road selling mushrooms or berries that they had just picked. We passed many small fields where a family would be cutting down hay by hand, or raking it into haystacks, or loading it into a horse-drawn wagon. A number of times as we were driving along main roads, we would have to pass the slow-moving hay wagons.

There was a sense that life had been lived this way for a long time, working small fields by hand. Some homes did have cars parked nearby, and there were some satellite dishes, but a sense, that while cared-for, the houses and villages had been there a long time, and there was not a lot of wealth. Very few of the buildings in the small villages looked newer, although especially on the outskirts of the larger cities, there were often new homes going up that were built in the traditional style, but larger, more complex, sometimes more colorful. 

As we drove through the valley region where many of the small villages with Unitarians are, we would often see several villages at once in different directions, with a couple of church steeples sticking up, and lots of red-tiled roofs, surrounded by farmland. Sometimes you could see the village cemetery out in a field away from the village. Maria said the cemeteries were usually located on land that wasn’t as good for farming, so sometimes it would be several kilometers away from the village. She said she did one funeral where they had to walk several kilometers in the middle of a blizzard for the burial service!

People are much more connected locally, especially in the small villages. I stayed with Maria and her family in the small village of Szentivanlaborfalvo. Each morning we got a fresh round loaf of bread and horncakes from a small vendor down the street. Horncakes are a regional specialty – thin strips of a pastry dough wrapped around a metal cylinder, several inches wide, then covered with sugar or honey. So it comes as a large tube of sweet pastry. Maria often had members of her congregation drop by for a cup of coffee and a cigarette. The door was always open. And the village library was in a small building in front of her house, so she would let people in to use the library. One evening she got a phone call that a friend had just gotten some fresh mushrooms of a particular kind that were very good fried and with cheese – but her mother and law hated the smell of them – could she come over to come them at Maria’s house and share them with us?

History was evident in large cities and small towns, as well as the countryside. Churches were evident everywhere, and many of them were very old. We saw many churches from the 1400’s, and some from the 1200’s. Many of the Unitarian, Lutheran, and Calvinist churches had previously been Catholic churches. Paintings or carvings of various saints and their stories had been whitewashed over, or scraped off when the Protestants took over.

The Unitarian churches almost all had distinctive, light blue, flowery paintings on pews and elaborate embroidered cloths in the sanctuaries.

The region of Transylvania has been influenced by many different peoples over the centuries – the Romans, the Goths, the Huns -- under Attila the Hun, the Szekelys – who may have been descendents of the Huns who took on the Hungarian (Magyar) language, Saxons from the region of Germany, Turks, Hungarians, and now is part of Romania. This history of warring groups and various invasions was evident in several of the places we visited – the medieval walled city of Szegesvar, and that two of the Unitarian churches we visited were fortress churches.

Maria grew up in a small village church that had tall, protective walls all around the yard. The Transylvanians seem to identify most with the Szekely part of their history, which was evident in the churchyard – there were small stone monuments in the churchyard that had faces of seven Szekely warriors on them. There were also wooden memorial posts with elaborate carved decorations, called copia fa. The decorations were symmetrical geometric patterns around all four sides of these several-inch wide, 8 or 10-feet tall squared-off posts. We later saw these same type of copia fa out in the mountains, at the site of a battlefield from the mid-1800’s.

There were also many of the homes that had elaborate carved gates – usually a large opening for wagons, or now cars, and a smaller gate for entering by foot. Sometimes these had birdhouses carved into the top. We visited a hillside in Szekelyfurdo where all the Transylvanian Unitarians gather every August – and it was a pilgrimage site with more than a dozen of these double gates marking various historic events and events in Unitarian history, as well as a monument to an anthropologist who had done much research on ethnic and Unitarian history in the region.

Hungarians are the largest minority group in Romania, forming about 8 percent of the population. The Hungarian part of Unitarian and Transylvanian identity is very strong. The cities we stayed in on the first two nights were Romanian speaking cities – the mountain resort town of Busteni, and the old medieval city of Szegesvar. On the third night, we stayed in the city of Szekelyudvarhely, which was a primarily Hungarian speaking city. So it is not that Hungarians are in the minority everywhere, but they are in a minority overall in Romania. Then within the Hungarian population, the Unitarians are a minority.

Maria told me that one of the current issues in the Unitarian church there is that a number of Unitarians are moving into cities in the Romanian speaking areas, and so they use Romanian everyday, and don’t always continue to speak and understand Hungarian. But there are currently no Unitarian churches that offer services in Romanian. Many of the ministers and church leaders feel like it would be losing their tradition and identity if they were to offer services in Romanian. Maria argues that they will lose people as Unitarians if they do not adapt and become willing to translate Unitarian materials into Romanian, and offer services in Romanian. She herself is criticized because she has several subscriptions to Romanian magazines that she regularly reads. She has also translated a couple of brochures with information about Unitarianism into Romanian. But that is really all that is available in Romanian for Unitarians.

The role of tradition in my own life as an active issue. As I went through seminary in the United Methodist tradition, I had to have Methodist history courses, as well as general church history courses. So I learned all about Catholic history, and the split between the Eastern Orthodox churches, and the Western Catholic churches. We also learned about developments of various other Protestant traditions. But the part of that history that I most identified with was the Methodist part. The Methodist tradition started with John Wesley, at Oxford University in England, in the mid-to-late 1700’s. So Methodism is only a bit more than a couple of hundred years old, and from a culture that is much more similar and familiar to us in the United States, and that all the original writings were in English.

So for me it was a moving experience to see the tradition of Unitarianism having roots so far back – to the mid-1500’s, in a completely different part of the world, where English is not a common language. And also to be aware of what it is like to have a tradition that has continued on for so long, and survived through communism. Romania was communist from 1949, until they had free elections won by a non-Communist in 1990. In the 1950’s they were controlled by the Soviet Union, in 1965 Romania became an independent communist country, then in 1989 Nicolae Ceausescu (chow-chess-cu) was overthrown and then executed. If I understand the history correctly, the communist rulers did allow people to practice their religions in Romania, as long as they were not politically active. From 1965 until 1990, when Romania was independent, but still communist, there was at least theoretically freedom of speech and of religion, although the government interpreted the constitution such that they could limit religious freedom in order to maintain their power. There was so much that was new and different, and it really didn’t hit me how recently Romania had been communist, that I didn’t think to ask a lot about how different it was for churches under communism.

Currently, the Orthodox Church is the official church of Romania. So Orthodox churches are built and kept up by the government, and priests paid by the government. Maria has said that in order to appease people of other religions, they also pay a small amount to the other religious traditions. A portion of her salary gets paid by the government, and they have a part-time sexton at her small country church who is paid by the government.

We did visit two Unitarian churches built just within the last few years, both with help from partner congregations in the US. They still had some touches in woodcarving or embroidery that connected them with long-standing traditions, but the architecture looked a lot more like a Protestant church in the US built a few decades ago.

One of the things Maria mentioned a number of times, is that people in that region of the world do not change their religion. Those who were Catholic remained Catholic, those who Orthodox remain Orthodox, those who were Lutheran, or Calvinist, or Unitarian, continued in their faith traditions from generation to generation. So in the US, many UU’s are new to Unitarian Universalism, and have come from other traditions, but Transylvanian Unitarians have been Unitarian for many generations. 

This makes for some interesting conventions, because there are a lot of interfaith marriages. And often in those cases families go different directions on Sunday mornings. The Protestant churches have all reached an agreement in terms of what happens with children – the girls follow the religion of their mother, and the boys follow the religion of their father! Some of the Protestant leaders are trying to negotiate this same type of agreement with the Catholics – currently the Catholics do not require a spouse to convert, but an interfaith couple must agree to raise all the children as Catholic.

As I spoke with Maria and a couple of other ministers from small village churches, I realized that sometimes there may only be 6 to 20 people in church on a Sunday morning. Since people are not moving into the villages, and no one converts, that means if you have a small congregation it will continue to be a small congregation, unless there are lots of children born. It must be very difficult to keep up your hope and energy as part of such a small congregation with very little hope of getting larger.

In conclusion, I don’t really have answers to what we can learn, but questions for reflection:

What are our connections to the land and growing things, and people right around us? How many of us live in places where neighbors just drop in on us, or we drop in on them? How many of us frequent local businesses and farmers’ markets to be eating foods and local products made by neighbors and friends? Is that something we want to do more of? How many of us think of the land we own right on this property, and how we want to celebrate and care for it and the life upon it?

How do we relate to our own traditions? Do many of us as UU’s claim and celebrate the Unitarian history, and think of it as our own? Or do we have more of a tendency to reject religious tradition and history in general, and look mostly towards the future?

What history do we claim as our own? I am one-quarter Ukrainian, but this trip was the closest I have ever come to actually seeing the Ukraine. And I wasn’t old enough to think of asking my great-grandmother what she remembered from growing up there. How do we see ourselves connected to world history and religious history? I am now beginning to adopt this older Unitarian history as part of my own tradition, even when it was not part of what I grew up with. 

What are the traditions we want to keep alive and pass on? Do we identify with traditions from family, from former religious communities? Have we created and blended traditions to make them our own and personal? Are there ways we want to reclaim traditions from further in the past – either ethnic traditions, or religious traditions?

Congregation in Kezdi – meet in Lutheran church, have an apartment for winter services, have up posters from us about US traditions like Halloween, Christmas, Thanksgiving, Fourth of July. Those are very interesting and visible celebrations that we have, but I couldn’t help wondering, what are some of the other traditions that we have and would like to share that may not be as easy to display in a poster. While we were there, we shared the tradition of a flower communion. It was ironic that flower communions began in Czechoslovakia, but we shared that tradition in Transylvania (which was new to them) by way of the US.

I really haven’t shared much this morning specifically about the people we met from our partner congregation, and I didn’t bring pictures along today. So if you want more of that perspective, as well as reflections from others who have been to Transylvania, I invite you to come to the forum that will be held after the second service on Sept. 25.


Copyright 2005, Peggy Garrigues-Cortelyou, All Rights Reserved



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