The fate of one university in the context of changing borders in Central Europe (Kolozsvár — Cluj — Szeged)

Abstract

An example of how epoch-making historical events in Central Europe affected the fate of an elite educational institution is the history of the second Hungarian university, founded in 1872 in the main city of Transylvania, Kolozsvár. This university was forced to leave Transylvania as a result of its reunification with the Kingdom of Romania in December 1918 following the First World War. Romanian professors from the “Old Kingdom” entered the university buildings built in the era of Austro-Hungarian dualism, located in the same city that changed its name from Kolozsvár, to Cluj. They were tasked by the new authorities to facilitate the integration of the region into Romania. The Hungarian University moves within the new borders of Hungary, to the city of Szeged. The creating of this powerful center of elite Hungarian culture became one of the essential directions of the cultural policy of the conservative regime. Its representatives saw the transformation of Hungary into a bastion of high European culture on the threshold of the Balkans as one of the ways to compensate for the enormous national infringement that the Trianon Peace Treaty of 1920 was for millions of Hungarians. The resettlement to Szeged, however, by no means put an end to the history of the Hungarian University of Transylvania. After the second Vienna arbitration for the transfer of Northern Transylvania to Hungary (August 1940), the Hungarian university in Cluj was restored, and the Romanian one moved within the narrowed borders of Romania. In the post-war Romania, under the left-wing authorities, and later the communist regime, which was not interested in aggravating the Hungarian-Romanian contradictions, both Romanian and Hungarian universities functioned in Cluj for a decade and a half, until in 1959, amid the rise of Romanian nationalism, an independent Hungarian university was closed.