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I wonder if Americans know what it’s like to research a historical figure from one’s own history and track their progress across the map and try to figure out to whom certain regions belonged, and why, and why the fuck your historical figure is there, of all places.
This historical character went on a scholarship to Vienna, which made sense, because he was from Transylvania at the end of the 18th c., and Transylvania was part of the Habsburg Empire, which is what I think of as Austro-Hungary, because that’s what it became later (although not in the exact territory), but which is incorrect.
Aaaanyways. Transylvanian dude. In Vienna. Religious scholarship, though he’s not actually Catholic. But because of shenanigans with discrimination and ethnicity in the past, there’s a church that’s Eastern Orthodox in practice and Catholic in the fact that it answers to the Pope, and he was that. He was Greek-Catholic.
MOVING ON.
The seminar had been infused with Enlightenment ideas, so he also studied law and foreign languages, not just theology.
The dude doesn’t want to be a priest, so he avoids that by becoming a German-Romanian translator, and he’s stellar at it, which gets him a job with the empire’s forces and lands him, in 1787, in Lviv. Lviv, current-day Ukraine. Which I could have sworn was Polish at the time, but I was off by a few years, because the region it was in had been annexed by the Habsburgs in 1772 (thank you, Wikipedia).
This still doesn’t answer my question of why the fuck they needed a Romanian (language, not ethnicity) translator in a city that used to be Poland’s, was now under Austrian rule and would eventually end up in the USSR and Ukraine in our times. Why are you there, Budai-Deleanu?
And the answer is, because Bukovina. Bukovina was the northern part of Moldova (one of the regions which will come to form Romania in modern times), which had been sorta under Ottoman rule, more or less, for awhile (not counting Polish conquests). After the Russo-Turkish war of 1768-1774 it was given to the Austrians in thanks for helping the Russians - the Moldovan prince swore that it was stay Austrian over his dead body, so he was murdered.
Now the Austrians wanted to make it fully into an Austrian province and add it to Galicia, which is where Lviv was, and where they needed a translator who knew Romanian, because they would have an influx of Romanians due to the new annexation.
