Toeing The Line – From Fear To Freedom On The Hungary-Romania Border (Lost Lands #155)

I wonder where my fascination with borders began. I would like to say it was in Eastern Europe, but my travels in the region served to solidify a preexisting obsession. The first border I crossed in my life was between the states of North and South Carolina. I remember being excited by this crossing because fireworks could be bought in South Carolina, but not in my home state. This was the first time I realized that the laws might be different beyond an invisible line. I did not cross an international border until many years later while traveling from Montana into Alberta, Canada. This crossing was done to say I had set foot in Canada. Everything looked strangely the same on both sides of the border. Upon further reflection, why would it not?

The next time I tried to enter Canada, a border official decided to make the trip difficult for me. I was denied entry for no other reason than the official could. I did enjoy watching my mother stare daggers at him and question his line of reasoning. Being denied entry gave me an appreciation of how bureaucrats can make a geopolitical line into a no-go zone. This only increased my fascination with borders. Rejection for me was a challenge that I vowed to overcome. I took two more trips to Canada in the next few years. Ever since then I get a strange thrill when I approach a border crossing. This feeling is replicated by the sense of relief when my passport is stamped. Borders have a bipolarity that I find attractive and addictive. This is why I keep finding my way to them as I develop my itinerary for the lost lands beyond Hungary’s borders.

Resented Frontier – Consternation & Conflict

I am a firm believer that we are destined to visit certain places which captured our imagination in?our?youth. If someone had told me when I was growing up in the 1980’s that one day I would make more than a hundred crossings of borders in Eastern Europe, I would have asked what drugs they were taking. The idea of hopping back and forth across the Iron Curtain did not exist. Americans could visit a few of the Eastern Bloc countries, but that was mostly part of school programs or due to family connections. Communist Europe was largely a no-go zone. And yet with the Cold War raging, the Iron Curtain was the first geopolitical boundary to occupy my imagination. A dividing line between east and west, totalitarianism and democracy, communism and capitalism, freedom and tyranny. The bipolarity symbolized by the Iron Curtain became deeply ingrained in my psyche as a kid and stimulated a lifelong fascination with Eastern Europe.

My first trip to the region took me to Berlin so I could see where the most famous part of the Cold War dividing line once stood. That visit led me further astray, as I sought to cross other borders in Eastern Europe. These had softened considerably by the time I arrived at passport control. Hard borders, except for Russia and Belarus, hardly exist now in the region. The Schengen Zone put an end to many of them. A few more borders in the region will open in the years to come. One of them is the Hungary-Romania border. History shows just how far Europe has come. As Patrick Leigh Fermor noted in Between the Woods and the Water, in the 1930’s it was Europe’s most resented frontier. That is saying something considering the issues with post-World War I borders all over the new map of Europe to arise out of that conflict. The Hungary-Romania border did not get any better in the half-century after Fermor made the crossing.

Softening Up - Rite of Passage

During the communist regime of Nicolae Ceausescu, the Hungary-Romania border was notorious among those westerners who traveled behind the Iron Curtain, as being extremely difficult to cross. In one of the most famous books written about the region, Balkan Ghosts, the author Robert Kaplan mentions its reputation. As Ceausescu grew increasingly deranged during the 1980’s crossing the border was close to impossible, except for the outflows of Hungarians and ethnic Germans who had found an exit strategy. Some of those who could not get across through “legal” means were desperate enough to take their chances on foot. Rather than passport stamps at the border, they got shots fired at them instead. After Ceausescu’s execution, the border began to progressively soften, but Romania (along with Bulgaria) has not quite shaken off the shackles of corruption which engendered mistrust among other European nations.

Despite joining the European Union in 2007, Romania was only allowed into the Schengen Zone this year. Soon the checkpoints which can be found at every border crossing between Hungary and Romania will no longer delay travelers. The officiousness will soon be gone. If all goes well, future generations will have very little idea of just how impossible crossing the Hungary-Romania border used to be. ?Passing by abandoned border control facilities has become a rite of passage when crossing Hungary’s other borders except with non-EU members Serbia and Ukraine. Breezing through the border at sixty kilometers per hour is an agreeable substitute to long wait times that have been all too often dependent upon bureaucratic whims. The border between Hungary and Romania may still be prone to checks due to illegal migration, but the days of being Europe’s most resented frontier have faded.

Perpetual Tension – An Enduring Legacy

The difficult history of the Hungary-Romania border is such that it would seem appropriate for me to avoid. Instead, I find myself once again attracted to it. As I have inched ever closer to the border while planning my journey from Arad to Oradea, I find the allure of it impossible to resist. The lost lands beyond Hungary’s borders were created by the Treaty of Trianon, and the treaty’s most enduring legacy is the dividing line between Hungary and the nations which it borders. Of all those nations, it is Hungary’s border with Romania which has loomed largest. Getting as close to that point of perpetual tension is now my goal. That is why my next destination will be the village of Graniceri.