Visiting Hungary as a teenager, opera singer Katalin Benedekffy used to have to wait up to a whole day at the border at her childhood home, Romania. Now, to her delight, she can cross straightaway.
In the early hours of New Year’s Day, she made the crossing unhindered for the first time, after Romania joined Europe’s border-free travel zone.
“It’s a miracle,” Benedekffy said.
Photo: AFP
“I asked my husband to back up because I wanted to record it,” she said. “It’s an incredible feeling.”
Benedekffy, 47, now lives in Budapest and often travels back and forth to visit relatives in her hometown of Szeklerland in Romania’s Transylvania region. She made her first control-free crossing on her return trip to Hungary.
“It’s like being in the same country as my loved ones, as there are practically no borders anymore,” she said.
For centuries, the region was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in so-called “Greater Hungary” — a notion referred to with nostalgia by the nationalist government in Budapest.
Almost one-fifth of Hungary’s population has relatives in neighboring countries, within the historical boundaries of what was Hungary before it was partitioned in the aftermath of World War I, a 2020 survey showed.
Romania and Bulgaria became full members of Europe’s so-called Schengen zone from Jan. 1, when land border checks ceased.
That ended years of waiting for the countries after they qualified to join Schengen, with political resistance from certain other EU states having delayed the move.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who took credit for the final negotiations on joining Schengen, hailed the expansion as an “important step for national unity” that dismantled barriers “between families.”
About 1 million ethnic Hungarians — Magyars — live in Romania, the largest such community outside of Hungary, with other significant ones in Slovakia, Serbia and Ukraine.
Under the Treaty of Trianon, signed in Versailles in 1920 after the dissolution of the defeated Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hungary had to surrender two-thirds of its territory to neighboring states.
Many Hungarians still resent the territorial and population losses, sometimes described as “Trianon trauma.”
Since Orban’s return to power in 2010, the nationalist leader has regularly irked neighboring countries by focusing on pre-World War I Hungary’s territory.
Following the fall of communism in 1989 — years before Orban’s rise to power — one of Hungary’s main foreign policy goals was to “make surrounding borders irrelevant, without revising them,” said Nandor Bardi, an expert on minority research at the Hungarian Research Network.
Magyars are “relieved it finally happened,” he said.
Benedekffy said she remembers the “humiliating waits” of up to 24 hours at the border that she had endured since she was a girl.
Although waiting times significantly decreased after Hungary and Romania joined the EU — in 2004 and 2007 respectively — lorry drivers and travelers still had to line up for at least an hour at border crossings, police said.
“We used to do calculations, how to avoid delays at the border,” said Zoltan Nagy, 39, a manager at an auto manufacturer in Budapest.
He once celebrated Easter with his family in Transylvania two weeks in advance to avoid the crowds.
Now “the journey has become a lot more predictable — we no longer have to stress about how much time we spend at the border.”
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