Tamas Frei and "Dosszie" visited Magyarfalu in 2004.
"Mikor Csíkból elindultam,
Színyem se volt úgy búsultam.
A lábam megporosodott,
Üdöm nem volt, hogy lepalljam.
Idegen földre siettem,
Mert hazámban nem élhettem.
Idegen főd, idegen főd
Mind megetted a lelkemet."
Tamás Frei:
Today the Csangos are at risk of disappearing. In Romania the Csango children are not allowed to study in their mother tongue, that is Hungarian, they are not allowed to listen to the mass in Hungarian in their churches because Romanian pastors are sent to each Csango settlement. Even at Christmas they cannot sing in their native language.
Many fight against this, mostly the European Council, putting pressure on Romania. And a Finnish woman, whose name is Tytti Isokohama Asunmaa.
Lady Tytti lives up north, 600 km from Helsinki, in the college town called Oulu. She is a historian, working on the past of finno-ugrian at the moment, but she was also a minister in Finnland for 4 years and member of the European Parliament for 8 years.
At the end of the 1990's she was contacted by Hungarian emigrants living in Switzerland and Sweden asking her to help the Csangos doomed for assimilation in Romania by using her prestige. They got bigger publicity about their situation in the Finnish papers than in the Hungarian ones.
It seems as if Romanians did not want to acknowledge that Csangos were a separate people with their own language, they think Csangos are Romanians, only they were made to be Hungarians. Their ancestors were the Szekelys and they started to flee from the years of 1300. At least 60 thousand Csangos live in Moldva, Romania, speaking Hungarian, in deep poverty, forgotten. When our crew was there it seemed like we had been time travelling. They still live the way our ancestors lived many centuries ago, day-laborers and very poor.
That is the reason why many youngsters come over to Hungary – to try their luck, pretending to be Transylvanian, probably it is easier that way. They speak the ancient form of Hungarian, which makes their way of speech quite interesting and archaic.
15.11.2004. TV2, "Dosszie" by Frei
