Changing Identities in Northwest Romania

Anne Nagrant, Sighetu Marmatiei

Romania recognizes twenty national minorities, which coexist with the Romanian majority, according to a brochure published in 2003 by the Resource Center for Ethnocultural Diversity. The list includes – besides Hungarians and Roma, Germans and Lipovens, Turks and Albanians – both Rusyns and Ukrainians.

Rusyns account for 0.29% of Romania's current population. This is roughly the same as the number of Ukrainians (60,000). The brochure doesn't mention that the distinction between the two groups can be a source of disagreement.

Political boundaries imperfectly follow ethnic settlement patterns, and this is especially true in borderlands where several groups have intermingled. The historical Maramures cultural zone currently lies partly in Western Ukraine and partly in Northwestern Romania. The political divide was made regardless of who lived where, and Rusyns inhabit this region on both sides of the border.

Before World War Two, I'm told, the people who lived in the part of the region that's currently in Romania were predominantly Rusyn rather than Ukrainian. As will happen anywhere, the language spoken in one village – its “dialect,” if you will – varied slightly from the next, even if both villages were Rusyn. For example, Craciunesti-Rusyn was not identical to Ruscova-Rusyn. But since these groups of people all lived in the same general region, they were mutually understood.

Communism began in Romania in 1948. The ties between Romania and the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, were strong. It was common enough for people from Maramures to go study in Kiev or elsewhere. In those Ukrainian universities, they learned the literary Ukrainian language. As can be expected, it was a little different from the Rusyn dialect they had spoken at home. No matter what dialect their families spoke, the literary language was the same for all.

The literary Ukrainian language was also taught at certain schools within Romania itself. The government allowed populous minorities to hold classes in state schools that were taught in the native language. For example, the town of Sighetu Marmatiei (former capital of Maramures, also known as Sighet) hosted classes taught in Romanian, Hungarian, and Ukrainian. The Ukrainian community in Sighet even had an instructor who had been brought in directly from Kiev to teach there.

The Romanian Communist government severely limited television. Programming ran only one or two hours a day, and the program was only about the dictator Ceaucescu and his party. People who lived along the Romanian borders, however, could often pick up television signals sent from the neighboring countries, such as Hungary to the west and Bulgaria to the south. In the northern region of Maramures, it was Ukrainian television which was received, enjoyed and watched even more so than Romanian television. This allowed even “uneducated” people access to the Ukrainian language.

In this way, for forty years there were at least two entire generations of people who had been formally schooled in the Ukrainian language, history, and culture. They came to call themselves Ukrainians, and probably viewed their own village's language and culture as mere variations on the larger Ukrainian theme.

After the Revolution of 1989, enter the Americans. These were people whose families had lived in Maramures but had emigrated. The Rusyn identity, as we are aware, had been maintained in the United States and Canada. Armed with both information and financial backing – two things that Maramures lacked – they returned to Europe and started their work. The Rusyn-Americans visited villages and identified Rusyn family names and Rusyn-specific vocabularies. The Ukrainian-Romanians saw that their village traditions largely matched those the Americans were describing as being authentically Rusyn.

Some of the Ukrainian-Romanians accept this news of their heritage, and some do not. Forty years is a long time to think of oneself as something and then be asked to change. Some Romanians wonder how it is possible to distinguish a Rusyn nation at all, when Rusyns cannot even agree on their language. I cannot really blame those who rejected “Rusynification”, since cultural identity is such a fundamental and sensitive issue. The choice to call oneself Rusyn instead of Ukrainian is a personal decision indeed.

As someone who as been living in Sighet for nine months, I have started uncovering a lot of the confusion and divisions surrounding the two cultural groups. Generally I tell locals that my great-grandparents “were” Rusyn, before I suggest that I “am” Rusyn. A sticking point with many is that I do not know the Rusyn language, beyond the few words and phrases my family uses around the house.

I have had many discussions with one man who is a prominent member of the Ukrainian community in this region. His parents and grandparents were all Rusyn, he told me unflinchingly, but he is himself Ukrainian because there is no Rusyn country on the European map.

In his view, Rusyns are a people of the past, who ceased existing a hundred years ago. But in my view, the Rusyns in Romania are a people who are being reborn after being “lost” during the decades of Communism and who have an important contribution to make to the country of their birth – Romania.