Transylvania in Bucharest: The Greek Catholic Presence in the Romanian Kingdom as a Window onto Religion and Nation-Building

The study of Greek Catholics is often limited to the region of Transylvania, the birthplace of Romanian Greek Catholicism. This paper examines several instances of Romanian Greek Catholic presence in public spaces outside Transylvania, specifically in Bucharest, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: the construction of a Greek Catholic church in Bucharest, as well as the four-man delegation that presented the 1918 Union Declaration to King Ferdinand, which included Iuliu Hossu, the Greek Catholic bishop of Gherla. Hossu’s remarks at a banquet with the prime minister lent a sacred, specifically Greek Catholic aura to the celebration of the Union, which was received and welcomed as such by the prime minister. Nevertheless, only a decade later, in 1929, the same Bishop Hossu would have to energetically defend on the floor of the Romanian Parliament the project of a concordat with the Vatican. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND licence: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .