1 - The Beginning of the Road

Summary

Freed from serfdom, the Transylvanian serfs started purchasing small plots of land to patch together their own households and no longer be forced to work on the lands of the grafs and barons, which they had been serving almost as thralls. Sometimes a village or two's worth of people associated to buy a part of their former masters’ land, masters who had lost entire estates overnight in card games. This happened to Baron Wesselenyi in my village, Obreja, close to where the river Târnava flows into the Mureş. At the river crossing you find Mihalţ, where the 1848 revolution broke out, which was also fought over owning land.

Toward the end of the century, however, land purchases by Romanian peasants had increased so much that the House of Magnates deemed it necessary to issue the law of preemption, under which the land holdings of a graf or baron could be sold to Romanians only if the state refused to purchase it. In practice, enforcing this law was not very efficient, since the state back then did not dabble in agriculture, and Hungarian buyers were few and far between. However, the Hungarian grafs and barons who were selling them were many.

In time, the wealthier peasants started here and there to send a child to school to make them not only teachers or priests who would enlighten the community but also doctors or lawyers, to defend their health and justice. It is true that the number of these peasant children sent to school was very small. In my village, for instance, my paternal grandfather's brother went, and he became a priest. In the next generation, two young people went, and they became teachers. Of my generation, I was the only one to go. Today, however, there are almost a hundred of them.

Romanian high schools were also few and far between under Hungarian rule. A high school in Blaj, a second in Braşov, and a third in Năsăud. Then there was a four-year gymnasium in Beiuş, and another in Brad. And now there are a hundred! The difference is too great for its significance to need any commentary. Now rulers in their own country, Romanian peasants toiled not only to own land and set up beautiful households but also to send their children to school to make them “gentlemen.”