Iconic documents of the Great Union

The union of Transylvania with Romania on December 1, 1918, Romania's National Day, has been committed to memory in multiple types of documents and sources

Steliu Lambru, 07.12.2024, 14:15

The union of Transylvania with Romania on December 1, 1918, Romania’s National Day, has been committed to memory in multiple types of documents and sources. Some of them have become, in the over 100 years that have passed since then, standard points of reference for that great moment.

One of the most famous images of the assembly that proclaimed the union of Transylvania with Romania is a must-see on the National Day celebration. It is displayed in all history textbooks, it is featured in documentary films on the event, and it is displayed in museums and public places throughout Romania. It is a photograph that depicts a crowd of people in the area known as “Horea’s Field”. They are mostly peasants, but a few military uniforms can also be seen. In the centre of the image, an elderly man in a peasant costume is holding a red-yellow-blue flag in his left hand, and his right hand is raised at 45 degrees. Around this character, five or six other people are also seen holding the national flag in their hands, with the colours arranged horizontally.

The recurrence of this photograph is explained by the effort of the communist regime before 1989 to show the peasantry as the main decisive factor of the union. The photograph from Câmpul lui Horea overshadowed another photograph featuring the prominent figure of the Greek Catholic bishop Iuliu Hossu, a political prisoner and the one who read the proclamation of the union.

A second image, just as much presented to the public as the one mentioned above, is a photograph of a group of approximately 50 women and men, peasants from the village of Galtiu, Sântimbru commune, Alba County. Several trees stand in the background, and on the left side we can see a man from the group dressed in black and white national costumes holding the national flag. In the middle, above all of them, there is a banner with the text “Galtiu. Long live the union and Greater Romania”.

The author of the two iconic photographs is Samoilă Mârza, nicknamed “the photographer of the Union”. Romanians owe their only photographs of the Great Union events to Mârza, the two mentioned, but also eight lesser-known ones. Born in 1886, in Galtiu, Mârza graduated from high school in Alba Iulia, and was trained by a photographer in Sibiu. He participated in World War I and was assigned to the topographic and photographic service of the Austrian-Hungarian Army.

At the end of the war, Mârza took three photographs that capture the consecration of the first three-colour flag of the Romanian National Military Council, on November 14, 1918. Four days before the meeting in Alba Iulia, Mârza arrived in his native village, took three photos with his fellow citizens before leaving for Alba Iulia. He carried the bellows camera, the tripod and the glass plates on a bicycle. Due to the weight of the devices and the cloudy weather, Samoilă Mârza took five photos of the meeting, three with the crowd and two with the official stands where the union act was read. In early 1919, Samoilă Mârza published his photographs in an album entitled “The great assembly in Alba Iulia in faces”.

While not equally iconic, the audio documents related to that day are no less important. In 1918, the Greek-Catholic priest Gherasim Căpâlna was 24 years old, and in a 1970 interview preserved in the archives of the Oral History Centre of the Romanian Radio Broadcasting Corporation, he remembered the organisation of the departure to Alba Iulia from the bishopric where he worked:

Gherasim Căpâlna: “The news spread by word of mouth, from village to village, by priests and teachers. It was decided that the meeting should be held on Archangels’ Day, November 8. But the date was changed, and the decision was made, in Arad, that we should go to Alba Iulia on the first day of December. But there, in Alba Iulia, there were so many people that you couldn’t cross to the other side. First, the leaders got organised, and Gheorghe Pop de Băsești was appointed as president of the Assembly. He was the oldest, so he gave orders to every centre, in every county. Vaida-Voevod was the leader for our area, this is where he took shelter. And there was also doctor Theodor Mihali, a Deputy. The main engine, those who organised the assembly, were the priests and the teachers, without them nothing could have been done. They did it, and they did it at the risk of their lives. A special list was put together with the people who wanted to go to Alba Iulia, and we asked for the list so that we could get a train pass for them. The Railways Authority provided us with carriages, we left on Thursday and the meeting was on Sunday. On Friday we were on the road, on Saturday we arrived in Alba Iulia with no less than 100 people. Most of them had nowhere to sleep. They walked around the city and slept leaning against the walls of Alba Iulia.”

The iconic documents of the historic assembly in Alba Iulia on December 1, 1918 also have their own little history, and today we integrate them into the bigger historical picture in order to understand it better. (AMP, LS)