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Romania

Cluj-Napoca

One year after he was finally voted out of office, the presence of Cluj’s ‘mad mayor’ Gheorghe Funar continues to haunt the city. His twelve-year term as mayor was marked by the installment of anti-Hungarian sentiment in the city’s parks and open spaces.

János Fadrusz’s statue of Hungarian king Matthias Corvinus, erected in 1902, is perhaps Cluj’s most recognisable landmark. With this sculpture and the Gothic church St. Michael’s behind it, Piața Unirii, the city’s main square, continues to look much as it did before Transylvania was handed over to Romania after World War I.

The city took several steps to erase the Hungarian heritage of this square. It renamed it from Liberation Square to Unification Square, garishly surrounded the statue with Romanian flags, and removed the word Hungarorum (‘of the Hungarians’) from the statue’s inscription Matthias Rex. Later the site was defaced by an archaeological dig, merely a pretext for getting rid of the statue. It found nothing of note and remains a large gaping hole in a once-stately square.

On the eastern boundary of the square, Funar erected an absurd, guillotine-like monument to ‘victims of Hungarian oppression.’

The square in front of the Orthodox cathedral was once a refreshingly open area, but now it is marred by a statue of Avram Iancu, perhaps the city’s ugliest artwork. Glorifying a man whose most noteworthy achievement was killing many Hungarians, the statue is said to have been enormously expensive.

The statue’s placement is surely not an accident, and it is greatly disappointing that the Orthodox Church here, which should be calling all peoples to itself, has instead decided to contribute to ethnic squabbles.

For the last decade, most of the city’s park benches, rubbish bins, and other outdoor installments were painted red, yellow, and blue, the colours of the Romanian flag. On my first visit here in June 2004 (coincidentally the very day that Funar lost his bid for re-election), I was appalled by the jingoism evident in the city’s colours. Under the new mayor Emil Boc, the city has thankfully restored most of the park benches etc. to a neutral green, but the red, yellow, and blue scheme is still visible in much of Cluj.