House Speaker inaugurates hall of residence for ethnic Hungarian students in Romania

Hungarian House Speaker László Kövér on Friday inaugurated a residence hall in Csíkszereda (Miercurea Ciuc) Romania, designed to house 56 Csángó students, members of an ethnic Hungarian group in Romania’s Moldavia region.

At the ceremony opening the residence hall constructed with a grant from the Hungarian government, Kövér said the Csángó minority, a 250,000-strong group of whom some 60,000 are estimated to still speak an archaic form of Hungarian, had been stripped of the “right and opportunity” to study and exercise their faith in their mother tongue.

By restoring that right, “the feeling of national identity and belonging can be raised again into consciousness,” Kövér said.

Hungary and Hungarians in Romania’s Transylvania region have a duty to “help restore the soul of their Csángó brothers,” Kövér said.

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The restoration of mother-tongue education started in the city of Csíkszereda in 1990 as Csángó students were integrated into Hungarian-speaking education there, Kövér said.

The House Speaker said he hoped that the residence hall would become a model institution and serve as inspiration for similar facilities in other cities.

Kövér also delivered five portable ventilators to the Harghita County emergency hospital in Csíkszereda, to be used while transporting coronavirus patients to the hospital.

Kövér called on the Szekler community to accept the vaccine. “There are risks to taking the vaccine, but they dwarf in comparison to the risks of not being vaccinated,” he said.