Székelys in the context of "Transylvanian Diet"

The "Villages with Fortified Churches in Transylvania" UNESCO World Heritage Site consists of seven villages (six Saxon and one Székely) chosen from among over 150 such structures surviving in the Transylvania region of Romania. They are dominated by fortified churches and characterized by a specific settlement pattern that has been preserved since the Late Middle Ages.

Transylvania has one of the highest concentrations of fortified churches that survive from the 13th to 16th centuries. Of the original 300, more than 150 well preserved fortified churches are surviving until today, displaying a great variety of architectural styles. Seven from among them, representing various types, have been selected by the World Heritage Committee and listed as a World Heritage Site.

The Székely Land or Szeklerland (Hungarian: Székelyföld, pronounced [ˈseːkɛjføld], Székely runes: 𐲥𐳋𐳓𐳉𐳗𐳌𐳞𐳖𐳇; Romanian: Ținutul Secuiesc and sometimes Secuimea; German: Szeklerland; Latin: Terra Siculorum) is a historic and ethnographic area in present-day Romania, inhabited mainly by Székelys, a subgroup of Hungarians. Its cultural centre is the city of Târgu Mureș (Marosvásárhely), the largest settlement in the region.

Székelys (or Szeklers) live in the valleys and hills of the Eastern Carpathian Mountains, corresponding mostly to the present-day Harghita, Covasna, and parts of Mureș counties in Romania.

The Middle Ages in Romania began shortly after the withdrawal of the Roman legions from the former Roman province of Dacia in the late 3rd century and with the start of the Early Middle Ages and the Migration Period that followed afterwards respectively. It subsequently came to an end with the reign of Domn Michael the Brave (1593–1601) who managed, for a short time between 1599 and 1600, to rule Wallachia, Moldavia, and Transylvania together, the three principalities whose territories were to be united some three centuries later to form modern and contemporary Romania.

Over most of this period, Banat, Crișana, Maramureș, and Transylvania – now regions in Romania to the west of the Carpathian Mountains – were part of the Kingdom of Hungary. They were divided into several types of administrative units, such as "counties" and "seats". The heads of the Transylvanian counties or "counts" were subordinated to a special royal official called voivode, but the province was seldom treated as a single unit, since the Székely and Saxon seats were administered separately. In the kingdom, Romanian peasants, being Orthodox, were exempt from the tithe, an ecclesiastical tax payable by all Roman Catholic commoners. However, Romanian noblemen slowly lost the ability to participate in political life, as the 14th-century monarchs pursued a zealous pro-Catholic policy. Their position became even worse after 1437 when the so-called "Union of Three Nations", an alliance of the Hungarian noblemen, the Székelys, and the Saxons, was formed in order to crush the Bobâlna peasant uprising.

The Voivode of Transylvania (German: Vojwode von Siebenbürgen; Hungarian: erdélyi vajda; Latin: voivoda Transsylvaniae; Romanian: voievodul Transilvaniei) was the highest-ranking official in Transylvania within the Kingdom of Hungary from the 12th century to the 16th century. Appointed by the monarchs, the voivodes – themselves also the heads or ispáns of Fehér County – were the superiors of the ispáns of all the other counties in the province.

They had wide-ranging administrative, military and judicial powers, but their jurisdiction never covered the whole province. The Saxon and Székely communities – organized into their own districts or "seats" from the 13th century – were independent of the voivodes. The kings also exempted some Transylvanian towns and villages from their authority over the centuries. Even so, the Voivodeship of Transylvania "was the largest single administrative entity" in the entire kingdom in the 15th century. Voivodes enjoyed income from the royal estates attached to their office, but the right to "grant lands, collect taxes and tolls, or coin money" was reserved for the monarchs. Although Roland Borsa, Ladislaus Kán and some other voivodes rebelled against the sovereign, most remained faithful royal officials.

György Dózsa (or György Székely, Romanian: Gheorghe Doja; c. 1470 – 20 July 1514) was a Székely man-at-arms from Transylvania, Kingdom of Hungary, who led a peasants' revolt against the kingdom's landed nobility during the reign of King Vladislaus II of Hungary. The rebellion was suppressed, and Dózsa captured, tortured, and executed by being seated on a throne (itself smouldering according to legend), crowned with red-hot iron, devoured alive by his followers under duress, and then quartered.

About 9.3% of Romania's population is represented by minorities (the rest of 77.7% being Romanians), and 13% unknown or undisclosed according to 2021 census. The principal minorities in Romania are Romani people, and Hungarians (Szeklers, Csangos, and Magyars; especially in Harghita, Covasna, and Mureș counties), with a declining German population (in Timiș, Sibiu, Brașov, or Suceava) and smaller numbers of Poles in Bukovina (Austria-Hungary attracted Polish miners, who settled there from the Kraków region in contemporary Poland during the 19th century), Serbs, Croats, Slovaks and Banat Bulgarians (in Banat), Ukrainians (in Maramureș and Bukovina), Greeks (Brăila, Constanța), Jews (Wallachia, Bucharest), Turks and Tatars (in Constanța), Armenians, Russians (Lipovans, in Tulcea), Afro-Romanians, and others.

To this day, minority populations are greatest in Transylvania and the Banat, historical regions situated in the north and west of the country which were former territorial possessions of either the Kingdom of Hungary, the Habsburgs, or the Austrian Empire (since 1867 the dual monarchy of Austria-Hungary until World War I).

János Czetz (June 8, 1822 – September 6, 1904) was a prominent Hungarian freedom fighter of Armenian and Hungarian-Székely origin, a military commander during the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, and the organizer of Argentina's first national military academy.

After the defeat, he emigrated to Germany and England. From there, he went to Spain, where he met Prudencio Rosas. Upon his return to England, he visited Juan Manuel de Rosas and married Basilia Ortiz de Rozas, daughter of Prudencio Rosas, in Seville. These connections convinced him that his future would lie in Argentina.

Romanian Catholics, like Catholics elsewhere, are members of the Catholic Church under the spiritual leadership of the Pope in Rome. The administration for the local Latin Church is centered in Bucharest, and comprises two archdioceses and four other dioceses. It is the second largest Romanian denomination after the Romanian Orthodox Church, and one of the 18 state-recognized religions. The 2022 census indicated that there were 741,504 Romanian citizens adhering to the Latin Church (3.89% of the population). Of these, the largest groups were Hungarians (54.7% or 405,212, including Székely and Csángó), Romanians (38.2% or 283,092), Germans (1.7% or 12,495) and Slovaks (0.9% or 6,853).

Most Romanian Latin Catholics inhabit the region of Transylvania and Bacău County in Moldavia. Smaller Latin Catholic communities exist among Banat Bulgarians, Italian-Romanians, Polish-Romanians, Croat-Romanians and Krashovani, Czech-Romanians and the local Romani people.