Nation-Building and Contested Identities: Romanian & Hungarian ...

National Prejudices, Mass Media and History TextbooksMichael the Brave and Vlad the Impaler. For the current understandingof glorious Romanian past, the fact that only one sentence was consecratedto Michael the Brave, who unified Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvaniathree centuries before the Great Union, is unpardonable. 9 On thesame page, Vlad the Impaler is referred to as a figure, whohappened to gain international fame and became the most popular figureof Romanian medieval history under the name of Dracula. Contemporarymovies present him as a vampire reborn in modern times. Hisfame, which generated many legends, originated from the cruelty withwhich he was punishing the outlaws or adversaries. 10To accentuate the derisory place allotted by Mitu to these heroic figures,many commentators made a parallel between this page and the section oncontemporary history where some TV stars were presented. Titles such as“Andreea Esca overshadows Michael the Brave” made it to the first pageof journals. 11Why these two figures of Romanian history are important for thepresent identity of Romanians? It is because they personify two themes ofthe national history. One is the “millenary dream of Romanians” aboutunifying the historical provinces into a national state (see the case ofMichael the Brave), the other is that Romanians happened to be in a backwardposition precisely because rulers like Vlad the Impaler foughtagainst the Ottomans instead of polishing Romanian civilization. Consequently,Europe owes much to the Romanians:Had Romanians been defeated and obliged to join the Sultan’s army, likeSerbians, the way to Rome would have been just a promenade over theinsignificant troops of Italian condottieri and the fate of Moorish Spainor the Balkans would have reached the Italian peninsula as well. ThenMichelangelo, Leonardo, and Raphael would haven been Janissaries,and Bramante would have built mosques, as in Cordoba! This essentialmoment of Romanian history and of Southeast Europe, the momentwhen Islam ... was stopped at the Danube, you will never find in any ofthe five textbooks. 12E. If the medieval rulers were badly treated, the second chapter,concerning the modern history of Romania, is probably even more repulsivefor a respectable nationalist. “The ‘invention’ of the modern nation”is the title of the fifth section in the chapter. The textbook states that:97