Sighetu Marmaţiei

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Sighetu Marmaţiei
Coat of Arms of Sighetu Marmaţiei
County Maramureş County
Status Municipality
Mayor Eugenia Godja, Social Democratic Party, since 2000
Population (2002) 44,185
Geographical coordinates 47°55′43″N, 23°53′33″E
Web site http://www.primaria-sighet.ro/

Sighetu Marmaţiei, also spelled Sighetul Marmaţiei (Hungarian: Máramarossziget, Rusyn: Sihota), formerly Sighet, is a city (municipality) in Maramureş County near the Iza River, in north-western Romania.

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[edit] Name

Sziget, pronounced in the same way as Sighet, is Hungarian for "island".

[edit] Geography

Neighboring communities include: Sărăsau, Săpânţa, Câmpulung la Tisa, Ocna Şugatag, Giuleşti, Vadu Izei, Rona de Jos and Bocicoiu Mare communities in Romania, Bila Cerkva community and the Solotvino township in Ukraine (Zakarpattia Oblast).

[edit] Demographics

The city has 44,185 inhabitants.edrc

According to the 1910 census, the city had 21,370 inhabitants; these consisted of 17,542 (82.1%) Magyars, 2,001 (9.4%) Romanians, 1,257 (5.9%) Germans, and 32 (2.5%) Ruthenians.[1] These statistics did not break out the number of Hungarian Jews in Sighet, which was substantial before the Holocaust — according to some accounts, Sighet in 1940 had the highest proportion of Jews of any town in the country.[2]

[edit] History

Inhabited since the Hallstatt period, the urban area was situated on an important route that followed the the Tisza Valley. The first mention of a settlement dates back to the 11th century, and the city as such was first mentioned in 1326. In 1352, it was a free royal town and the capital of Máramaros comitatus of the Kingdom of Hungary.

From 1556, the settlement - like the Castle of Huszt - was a residence of Transylvanian Princes; from 1570 to 1733, the town and the county were part of the Principality of Transylvania. In 1733, King Charles III returned it and Máramaros County to his Hungarian domain.

Sighetu Marmaţiei was one of the Romanian, Rusyn, and Jewish cultural and political centers in the Kingdom of Hungary. The Jewish community was led by the Teitelbaum family — who also led the Satmar Hasidic community.

It became part of the Kingdom of Romania at the end of World War I (see Greater Romania), and was again under Hungarian administration during World War II as a result of the Second Vienna Award. The latter lasted until 1944 and in these years more than 20,000 Jews from Sighet would be sent to Auschwitz (including the Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, born in Sighet) and other Nazi extermination camps. Nowadays there are only about 100 Jews living in Sighetu Marmaţiei.

The Treaty of Paris at the end of World War II voided the Vienna Awards, and Sighetu Marmaţiei returned to Romania.

In the 1950s and 1960s, after the establishment of the Romanian communist regime, the Securitate ran the Sighet prison as a place for political repression of public figures who had been declared "class enemies" — the most prominent of these was the former prime minister Iuliu Maniu (who died there in 1953). The former prison is now a museum, and a "Memorial for the Victims of Communism".

[edit] Natives

[edit] References

  1. ^ Atlas and Gazetteer of Historic Hungary 1914, Talma Kiadó ISBN 9638568348
  2. ^ Museum of Tolerance

[edit] External links

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