The Cserehát pattern — Romanian state authorities transferring formerly public or municipal land in majority-Hungarian towns to Romanian Orthodox institutions, without consulting the local community — is not an isolated 1997 incident. It recurred in Nagyszalonta (Salonta), a Bihar county town whose population is roughly 57% Hungarian, in 2004.

A former Romanian army barracks on the edge of Nagyszalonta — a roughly ten-building complex built in the early 20th century, used by Hungarian forces before Trianon and by the Romanian military for decades afterward — was decommissioned in 2002 as part of Romania’s pre-NATO military restructuring (EU/NATO accession rules barred large infantry or artillery units from operating within 50 km of the national border). In 2002, Romania’s Ministry of Public Administration had invited Nagyszalonta’s town council to take over the vacated barracks, and the council formally voted to do so in October 2002.

Instead, in February 2004 — roughly a year and a half after the town’s own vote — the Năstase government issued a series of decrees reassigning the property. The bulk of the complex, over 900,000 square meters of land along with two buildings, was transferred not to the town but to Romania’s Ministry of Culture and Religious Affairs, for use by the Orthodox Monastery of the Holy Cross in Nagyvárad (Oradea) — with the stated intent of establishing an Orthodox monastery on the site of the old Hungarian barracks. The town council received only a single small, still-unfinished apartment block.

Local officials said they were never consulted. “We don’t understand why the buildings and land were assigned to two ministries, when two years earlier, at the Ministry of Public Administration’s own request, we had agreed to take them over ourselves,” said Nagyszalonta mayor Tódor Albert. Deputy mayor László Török, head of the local RMDSZ (Hungarian Democratic Federation in Romania) organization, called the decision a violation of the principle of local self-government: “We cannot allow a monastery to be established on the site of the former barracks, because we don’t know to what extent the plan is aimed at changing the ethnic composition of the town.” He noted that Nagyszalonta’s Romanian residents had not been consulted either, and that the town’s own development plans for the site — a multi-function cultural center, a guesthouse, or an international integration center given the site’s proximity to the Hungarian border and both countries’ approaching EU accession — were never considered.

Even the intended recipients seemed unprepared for the transfer: the mother superior of the Holy Cross monastery in Nagyvárad said she had only asked the Ministry of Religious Affairs for grazing land for the monastery’s cattle, not for the barracks buildings themselves, and that the monastery had no funds to maintain them.

Bihar county deputy Ervin Székely announced he would raise the matter in the Romanian parliament, calling it unacceptable that the town council was never consulted and arguing the property should have been allocated in proportion to the actual size and needs of Nagyszalonta’s religious communities. Local RMDSZ representatives noted that Nagyszalonta’s own concerns were being weighed against the party’s separate political agreement with the ruling coalition and a recent favorable decision on erecting a Liberty statue in the town — leaving them doubtful the decrees would be reversed or amended.

As of this report, the eventual use of the former barracks remained unresolved — but Nagyszalonta’s Hungarian community drew the explicit comparison to Cserehát: an institutional complex on land the town itself had claimed and planned for, redirected instead to an Orthodox religious institution through a closed-door government process that bypassed the elected local council entirely.

Adapted and translated from Rostás Szabolcs, “Cserehát szelleme kísért Nagyszalontán” (“The Ghost of Cserehát Haunts Nagyszalonta”), Krónika.