A deconstruction story: Property, memory, and temporality in a Transylvanian village

Abstract

The paper explores how the reconstruction of a Baroque castle in Transylvania became an indirect strategy to speed up its restitution to the former owners. It also analyses the reactions that this reconstruction and the request for its restitution triggered among the inhabitants of the multi-ethnic village where the castle is located. The castle used to belong to a famous Hungarian aristocratic family but became nationalized as state property under the post-1945 communist regime. Drawing on archival and ethnographic research, I argue that the debates around the legal status and cultural value of the Bánffy castle reveal how various actors, ranging from the NGO experts, the lawyers supporting the heir, the state institutions, the local authorities, and the villagers engaged with one another in a struggle about meaning and value that was carried out through a struggle over competing temporalities. All of these actors strategically carved up the past, seeking particular historical periods that would ground and justify their own (legal or symbolical) claims over the castle. In response to the calls of external actors to remember a history that did not exist, such as an idyllic narrative of mutual cooperation between the castle and the village before the communist period, the villagers strategically used the divide between communism and postcommunism. They did so to both justify their past actions, including their alleged participation in the castle’s ruination, as morally sound, and to reject foreign experts’ attempts to idealize the interwar period and deny any value to the communist times.