ABSTRACT

ROMANIAN COMMUNITY IN ZĂBALA, COVASNA COUNTY

SOCIO-ETHNOGRAPHIC MICRO-RESEARCH, JULY 2024

Covasna County is an area with a particular ethnic composition, in which Romanians, who are in the majority at national level, are a minority here, numerically speaking. Over time, the majority-minority ratio has evolved in contradictory ways, influenced by territorial and political changes. In many rural localities in the county, the number of Romanians has fallen substantially, while in others Romanians have practically disappeared. The situation is quite different in ethnically-mixed settlements where Romanians were engaged in shepherding.

One of these is the commune of Zăbala, geographically situated at the foot of the Curvature Carpathians, between Covasna and Brețcu, the two important centers of transhumant shepherding in the past centuries. The following paper reproduces the results of a socio-ethnographic field micro-survey conducted in July 2024. It is structured in two parts: in the first part, a non-exhaustive presentation of the traditional shepherding in Zăbala. The second part contains ethno-demographic aspects of the Covasna area, from a historical point of view, and statistical data on the population of neighboring localities, where the percentages of Romanian and Hungarian populations have evolved differently over time. If we look at the situation in the localities of Covasna County, in which the number of Romanians has not drastically decreased, we see that these are precisely those in which the autochthonous population has been engaged in shepherding.

Keywords: Zăbala, sheep herding, transhumance, Romanianism.

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