By Peter Finn, Washington Post Foreign Service, Friday, February 11, 2000.

CHILIENI, Romania — There is a new Romanian Orthodox church in this village, a modest structure with murals painted on its pink-brown exterior. Ordinarily, this would be another sign that freedom of conscience is thriving in a post-Communist society where church property was once controlled by the state and religious expression was barely tolerated.

But Chilieni, a village of 700 people in central Romania, is 96 percent ethnic Hungarian, and the presence of a new Orthodox church for only 30 worshipers, built almost entirely with state funds, is raising eyebrows.

And the church in Chilieni is not the only one being built in the area. In Covasna and Harghita, two counties in Romania’s Transylvania region with 75 percent and 85 percent ethnic Hungarian majorities, the Orthodox Church has embarked on an ambitious construction program. With the state’s financial backing, it has proposed 65 projects in the two counties, even though most ethnic Hungarians are Protestant or Roman Catholic.

The church-building boom has renewed decades-old fears here about attempts by the Romanian government to repress — or expel — the ethnic Hungarian population of Transylvania, and it has raised alarm in Budapest, capital of neighboring Hungary. Romania’s 1.6 million ethnic Hungarians comprise about 7 percent of the country’s population.

“There is a fever of construction of Orthodox churches in almost entirely Hungarian areas,” Joszef Baliant-Pataki, head of the Romania section of the Office for Hungarian Minorities Abroad, said in an interview in Budapest. “Our feeling is that the ultimate goal is to change the ethnic makeup, and this has always been the strategic goal of the Romanian government. I cannot find any other explanation for these churches.”

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán said that while relations between the two countries — historically complicated by ethnic tensions and territorial disputes — are now excellent, the church-building in Covasna and Harghita is a “concern.”

The antagonism does not approach the bilateral animosity of the late 1980s, when the two nominal Communist allies engaged in a bitter public dispute over Romania’s treatment of its Hungarian minority. But those who fear that the church construction program marks a resurgent effort to “Romanianize” the last Hungarian redoubts in Transylvania have plenty of evidence to make their case.

Many areas in which the new buildings are going up already have Orthodox churches with a shortage of parishioners. Meanwhile, Orthodox dioceses in other parts of Romania urgently need new places of worship but are not getting the money to build them.

The Romanian government and the Orthodox Church leadership strongly deny any insidious motive and express astonishment that the construction is an issue. “Come on,” said the Rev. Michael Tita, a church counselor who burst out laughing when informed of the fears of the Hungarian government. “The life of Romanians in those counties is not very easy; they are very isolated, and the church can bring them some comfort. But to suggest that someone is trying to change the ethnic makeup perpetuates the worst kind of mentality.”

Borders and populations have shifted repeatedly in Transylvania, most recently after World War II when the region — much of which had been awarded to Hungary by Nazi Germany in 1940 — was returned to Romania, which had switched from the Axis side to the Allies in 1944. Hungary remained an Axis ally until it was overrun by the Soviet army in late 1944 and early 1945.

Transylvania’s population had been majority Romanian since at least the mid-1600s, but certain areas, including a number of major towns and areas bordering Hungary, remained majority Hungarian. In 1948, the newly empowered Communist government embarked on a policy of forced migration of workers from other parts of the country to Transylvania as part of an industrialization drive. Between 1948 and 1956, a million Romanians were moved into the area, deliberately diluting the ethnic Hungarian enclaves. Today, only Covasna and Harghita counties are firmly ethnic Hungarian.

All of which makes any further changes in the ethnic landscape extremely sensitive. Nicolae Brinzea, the Romanian government’s secretary for religion, insisted that the government disburses money to each of the country’s religious groups on a proportional basis — with 86.8 percent of all funds going to the Orthodox Church, a percentage in line with denominational statistics in the 1992 census.

But Marko Attila, director of legislation in the state department for national minorities, said that the Orthodox Church actually received a disproportionate share of the funds and that this “remained a struggle” for his department, which would like to see an exactly proportional split.

In 1999, Brinzea said, the government provided $85,000 to the Orthodox Church for construction in Covasna and Harghita counties. There was no comparable figure for Catholic and Protestant denominations in the two counties, because disbursements affecting them are paid to dioceses that cover a much larger area. But Brinzea acknowledged that, broken down, the figure was much smaller than that of the Orthodox allocation, even though ethnic Hungarians form the bulk of the population in the two counties.

In Chilieni, which lies just more than a mile south of the city of Sfântu Gheorghe, there is great reluctance among ethnic Hungarians to stir up hostility. But it clearly grates on them that the local Orthodox diocese got more than $20,000 in state funds for repairs and upkeep while the local Catholic and Protestant congregations received nothing. Moreover, there are already two Orthodox churches in Sfântu Gheorghe, and church officials recently sought permission from the city council to build a third.

“I don’t care what they build,” said Francisc Veres, an ethnic Hungarian who represents Chilieni on the greater Sfântu Gheorghe council. “The only thing that bothers me is that the state gives money for a church for 30 people, and our other churches can’t get anything.”

Sfântu Gheorghe Mayor Albert Almos agreed, but he added: “They tried to use churches before, between 1918 and 1940, to build up [the Romanian presence]. This smells of that. And if that’s what they’re doing, it would be a terrible pity.”