Paper short abstract:

The present paper will investigate the ways different actors can be actively engaged in the social dynamics of meaning production related to an ethnic folk festival, the annually organized "The Day of the Thousand Szekler Girls" in Transylvania

Paper long abstract:

"The Day of the Thousand Szekler Girls" (Ezer székely leány napja) is known as the largest festival of the Szekler folk costumes and folk dances and as one of the strongest ethnic and cultural display/demonstration of the Szekler/Hungarian community in Transylvania. The event started in the 1930s, the most tensed transitional period following the Treaty of Trianon marked by complex processes of making and becoming a minority in Romania. In 1931 the Hungarian elite of Transylvania organized the event in the "purest" Hungarian and Catholic region (Csík) and in a very important pilgrimage centre (Csíksomlyó) with its miraculous late-gothic wooden statue of the Virgin Mary. The festival's original goal was to support Szekler women in their homeland and to save them from white slave trade by offering them gainful economic activities, promoting home industry and holding them together under the flag of the Catholic Church. Young Szekler women from more villages were invited to be present, dressed in folk costumes, praying, dancing and singing together. Analyzing the cultural and social role of the folk costumes, the symbol of Virgin Mary, the emotions connected to the event and the figure of the minority women, my paper will examine the very different ways this complex social-religious and cultural event had been interpreted in the last century: from the 1930s to 1940, when the event was part of a welcome party for Miklós Horthy, the Governor of Hungary and his wife, and after 1989, the collapse of the communist regime.