Transylvania by Bicycle

This is the eighth part in a series about riding night trains across Europe and the Near East to Armenia — to spend some time in worlds beyond the pathological obsessions of President-elect Donald Trump. (This week the president-elect is thrashing around in New York courtrooms, trying to stay his sentencing on 34 felonies owing to his manipulations in the 2016 election, and making the case that Trumplebensraum extends to Greenland.)

Although I do not have a personal connection to the fate of Romania’s Jews in the Holocaust, I was interested to follow a brochure from the tourist office and track down what remains of the Jewish community in Cluj, which was swept away during the Second World War. 

On one of the main city streets there is what is called the Memorial Temple, the old Neolog synagogue that was built in 1887. A nearby plaque notes that it “summarizes the architecture of the Jewish tradition and oriental elements of Moorish design,” and that it was first destroyed in 1927 and then bombed in June 1944, when many Cluj Jews were deported, most to Auschwitz.

Only in 2020 was the building restored as a Temple of the Deported, although it was hard for me to tell how it is used today, as my brochure said the Jewish population in Cluj is now “a few dozen”. 

With my bicycle I was able to track down some other buildings that were once prominent in the Jewish community—as synagogues or schools—but which now have been converted into offices, apartment blocks, or senior living centers in which the outlines are historic but the functions are modern. 

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I looked for other Jewish traces in the city’s history museum, but most of the panels and expositions seemed to be dedicated to proving that Cluj-Napoca was part of the Roman province of Dacia, and thus now belongs to the modern state of Romania. I did, however, take a picture of a painting that shows the 1887 imperial visit to Cluj (then Kolozsvár) by the Emperor Franz-Josef. 

The picture shows the emperor making his way in a parade around the main square (where I had rattled my bicycle across numerous cobblestones), which was covered with bunting, flags, and a respectful crowd cheering the imperial progress. 

Two years later (1889), Hungarians mourned the death of Crown Prince Rudolph at Mayerling. In his Transylvania: A Short History, István Lázár writes: “Rudolph liked the Hungarians and, had he lived, might have become a more progressive ruler than Joseph II. He particularly liked Transylvania.”

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In many ways, the 1889 suicidal events at Mayerling were harder on Hungary than they were on Austria, which may have felt that with one bullet it had dodged others—had Rudolph one day ascended the throne with the self-imposed mission of tearing it apart. 

Hungary had to endure the nationalism of the decaying empire, which sought to weaken the dual monarchy (well, Hungary’s part of the partnership) by promoting Slavic power and using it as a way of diminishing the importance of Budapest in the far-flung empire. 

With discussions ongoing about whether to convert Austro-Hungary into a triple monarchy, with the Czechs, Croats, and Serbs given a voice equal to that of the Hungarians, there began a crisis of identity in Hungary that has yet to pass. 

Also prominent in the city museum was an elegant bronze bust of Empress Elisabeth of Austria (known also as Sisi). Omitted from the accompanying description is her reaction when her son Rudolph asked to marry Princess Stéphanie of Belgium, a daughter of King Leopold II. 

Sisi exclaimed: “Nothing good can come out of Belgium. Hasn’t Charlotte been experience enough for us?” 

Charlotte, sometimes called Carlota, was married to Sisi’s brother-in-law, Maximilian, who was shot in 1867 after a few troubled years on the throne of Mexico. Escaping such a fate, Carlota herself went mad.

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To visit the Bánffy Castle in Bontida (also spelled Bonchida), I had to ride back to the main railway station and catch a two-car local train that was heading north toward the regional city of Des Calatori. 

The conductor explained to me that Bontida would be the fourth stop and that I would have to unload my bicycle down steep stairs. I liked the small rural station, as there it was easy for me to imagine Count Bánffy being met by a horse-drawn carriage. 

This part of Transylvania is less mountainous than the region of the Carpathians to the north and east; Bontida is in the dish of a valley. Even though there were hills on all of its horizons, the immediate area was a broad plain of agricultural fields that, I am guessing, turns to dust in summer.

The castle was about two miles from the station, but after setting off on my bicycle I discovered that the bridge over a small river was under reconstruction and blocked to traffic. I had no choice but to pick my way through the job site and cross the river on a makeshift bridge farther downstream. (The roads of Eastern Europe are one endless construction project.) Then I pedaled on dirt roads into the village, where the castle looms on the edge of the small town. 

I was frustrated to find that it was closed for renovation. The grounds were open and in some corners it had signs indicating the importance of the Bánffy family and things that tourists could do in Bontida (the answer is, “Not much”). 

Had the castle been open, I obviously would have toured through it, but in the end, after a look around the grounds, I decided to race back toward the station and catch the next train to Cluj. Otherwise, I would have been stranded in Bontida for another two hours.

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For more lasting impressions of Count Bánffy and his family, I had his memoirs, The Phoenix Land, which was published in 1932 as From My Memories. Later the book was paired with his Twenty-Five Years, which came out in 1945, and those two books were translated into English by Patrick Thursfield, and they became The Phoenix Land. 

One reason that the obscure memoirs of a post-World War I Hungarian foreign minister remain in print in 2025 is because, in addition to The Phoenix Land, Bánffy also wrote his celebrated Transylvanian Trilogy, which in English consists of: They Were Counted, They Were Founding Wanting, and They Were Divided. 

Like the memoirs, the novels are a lament about the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian empire and with it the loss of Transylvania to Romania (if not to the rapacious modern world). 

Bánffy writes in The Phoenix Land: “Terrible is the situation of a small country that stands alone.” He was describing Hungary, separated from Austria and with its borders truncated, but he also could have been describing Transylvania or really anywhere in postwar Eastern Europe.

The memoir opens with the 1916 death of Franz-Joseph and his state funeral, which might well have been that of his empire. It still had two more years to struggle along, but by the end of World War I, its treasury, army, and granaries were depleted. 

With the 1918 Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, which ended the fighting on the vast Eastern front (largely between Austria and Russia), there was the glimmer of hope that the wheat fields of Ukraine might replenish Austro-Hungarian larders, but when the German spring offensive on the Western Front failed, the German occupation of Ukraine ended, and the Allies began to roll up the Axis powers on the Macedonian front. Come November 1918, Austria-Hungary was in liquidation. 

With his novelist’s eye, Bánffy writes of the emperor’s fading cortege: “Later in the evening the rain turned to snow and for a brief moment the white flakes lay on the pavements and glistened in the light of the street lamps. Then all turned to mud and slush, and everything returned to an all-enveloping greyness. Already, on the very same evening of the coronation [of the last emperor, Karl I], the pageantry and colour seemed no more real than a half-forgotten dream.”

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Writing in the 1920s, with the Austro-Hungarian empire in ruin, Bánffy could cast his mind back in time and recall earlier greatness, although for the most part what he remembered were inklings that the royal center might not hold.

Around the turn of the 20th century, for example, as a young diplomat in Europe, Bánffy was in Berlin for a ceremony presided over by Kaiser Wilhelm II, who as much as anyone pushed Austria-Hungary into war with Serbia in 1914. Bánffy described the scene:

The emperor’s corrosive voice was unforgettable, as he declaimed his speech with disagreeable attempts at pathos and far too many words. Disagreeable, too, were all those run-of-the-mill Lohengrin costumes, silver armour, gilded helmet, box-leather thigh-boots, marshal’s baton and, indeed, anything else which had a martial air. Standing there, with a belligerent expression on his face and festooned with the ribbons and chains of countless orders, he gave the impression of having borrowed it all to conceal the peace-loving middle-class soul he really was. At every parade I ever saw him attend I had the impression that, standing there in front of the soldiers of the most renowned and virile army and bodyguard in the world, he was the only one whose face did not fit.

In many ways, Bánffy might well be describing Vladimir Putin’s tsarist restoration or Donald Trump’s gilded, beachside monarchy lusting for the annexation of the Panama Canal.

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The death knell of the Hungarian nation was the Treaty of Trianon, another treaty—Versailles was the most famous—of the 1919 Peace of Paris that redrew the borders of Europe according to the dictates of President Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points. 

Point ten reads: “The people of Austria-Hungary, whose place among the nations we wish to see safeguarded and assured, should be accorded the freest opportunity of autonomous development.”

The war had been fought—ostensibly—to prevent Austria from overrunning Serbia. Without so much as a plebiscite among the affected populations, the victorious powers in Paris awarded much of Austria-Hungary (especially Hungary) to Czechoslovakia, Poland, Yugoslavia, and Romania. To Hungarians especially, Trianon was a dictated peace. Bánffy writes:

From a political point of view Hungary had been obliged to choose between two opposing attitudes. The first was that of acceptance, both officially and publicly, of the treaty’s terms: the second, which is what soon became generally adopted, was to look upon the document as something only signed under duress, to deny its validity and to demand its revision. This amounted to a hard-line ‘No! No! Never!’

In the introduction to Book Two of the memoirs, Bánffy continues: “It is just twenty years since Hungary was forced to sign the Treaty of Trianon. In this treaty the Hungarians had been branded as war criminals even though none of us had wanted war until we were dragged into it by foreign powers who forced us into battle and the death and annihilation of our country. It was to be the same twenty years later.” 

What was particularly galling to someone such as Bánffy, who viewed Hungary as distinct from Austria, was that the Hungarian side of the dual monarchy was most opposed to war in August 1914. He writes:

This was exacted from us at a time when Austria was as much a vanquished nation as we were and, what is more, vanquished in a war into which we had been drawn only because of our connection with Austria, a war that was wanted by no one in Hungary and which had started because an Austrian archduke had been murdered. The ultimatum to Serbia had come from Vienna, and in the royal council that had ordered it the only dissenting voice had been that of István Tisza, prime minister of Hungary.

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Because Greater Hungary was more polyglot than Austria, when it came time (in 1919-1920) to divide up the fallen empire, most of the lands taken away from the Axis powers came from the Hungarian side of the ledger. 

Bánffy laments: “But for those events now about to confront us in the summer of 1921 this sudden recrudescence of legitimist feeling did fatal and irreparable damage, for this was the moment when we had to face the cruellest condition imposed upon us by the Treaty of Trianon: namely the surrender to Austria, our former ally and comrade in arms, of part of our sovereign territory.” 

The result has been more than one hundred years of Hungary lurching between left-wing and right-wing governments. 

After World War I, for example, there was a communist revolution and then a fascist government. Come World War II, Hungary threw it its lot with the Nazis, hoping finally to pick the winning wide and recover Transylvania. 

When that didn’t happen, after World War II Hungary was swept behind the Iron Curtain and made to endure Stalin’s collectivization. 

Since liberation in 1989, Hungary has had governments of all persuasions, including Viktor Orbán’s present-day Putinist collaborations—all tilting at the same windmill, which is the wish to restore Hungary to its pre-Trianon glory, in which Cluj-Napoca was at the center of Hungarian Transylvania.