Twentieth Century
After World War I, Cluj became part of the Kingdom of Romania, along with the rest of Transylvania. The Romanian authorities took over the University of Cluj, transforming it into a Romanian institution. On May 12, 1919, the Romanian University of Cluj was set up, with King Ferdinand proclaiming the University open on February 1, 1920.
In 1940 Cluj was returned to Hungary through the Second Vienna Award, but Hungarian forces in the city were defeated by the Soviet and Romanian armies in October 1944. Cluj was restored to Romania by the Treaty of Paris in 1947. The Northern Transylvania People's Tribunal was set up in Cluj by the post-World War II government of Romania, overseen by the Allied Control Commission, to try suspected war criminals. The Cluj Tribunal passed a total of 100 death sentences, 163 sentences of life imprisonment, and a range of other sentences.
Cluj had 16,763 inhabitants of Jewish ancestry in 1941. After Hungary's German occupation in March 1944, the city's Jews were forced into ghettos under conditions of intense overcrowding and practically no facilities. Liquidation of the ghetto occurred through six deportations to Auschwitz between May and June 1944. Despite facing severe sanctions from the Horthy administration, many Jews escaped across the border to Romania with the assistance of Romanian peasants of neighboring villages. They were then able to flee Europe from the Romanian Black Sea port of Constanţa. Other Jews originating from East European countries were helped to escape from Europe by an Anti-Nazi group led by the Jewish Joint and Romanian politicians in Cluj and Bucharest. The leader of this network, between 1943 and 1944, was Raoul Şorban.
After World War II, the Romanian university (which had moved to Sibiu and Timişoara in the aftermath of the Second Vienna Award) returned to Cluj and took the name "Babeş", after the scientist Victor Babeş. Parts of the Hungarian university moved to Szeged and were later named University of Szeged, which became one of the most distinguished universities in Hungary and in Central Europe. The remaining parts formed the Hungarian University of Cluj and took the name "Bolyai", after the mathematician János Bolyai. The two universities, the Romanian Babeş University and the Hungarian Bolyai University, merged in 1959 forming the Babeş-Bolyai University, with teaching in both Romanian and Hungarian. Nowadays, this is the largest university in Romania.
Hungarians remained the majority of the city's population until the 1960s, when for the first time in its long history, Romanians outnumbered Hungarians. According to the 1966 census, the city's population of 185,663 was composed of 56% Romanians and 41% Hungarians. Until 1974 the official Romanian name of the city was Cluj. It was renamed to Cluj-Napoca by the Communist government to recognize it as the site of the Roman colony Napoca.
Read more about this topic: History Of Cluj-Napoca
Famous quotes related to twentieth century:
“Predatory capitalism created a complex industrial system and an advanced technology; it permitted a considerable extension of democratic practice and fostered certain liberal values, but within limits that are now being pressed and must be overcome. It is not a fit system for the mid- twentieth century.”
—Noam Chomsky (b. 1928)
“A writer is in danger of allowing his talent to dull who lets more than a year go past without finding himself in his rightful place of composition, the small single unluxurious ‘retreat’ of the twentieth century, the hotel bedroom.”
—Cyril Connolly (1903–1974)
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we’ve developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.”
—Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990)
“In the middle of the next century, when the literary establishment will reflect the multicultural makeup of this country and not be dominated by assimiliationists with similar tastes, from similar backgrounds, and of similar pretensions, Langston Hughes will be to the twentieth century what Walt Whitman was to the nineteenth.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)