Romanian authorities busted a hole in the wall of a monastery building in Nagyvárad (Ordea), Romania in the early morning hours of Wednesday, 27 May to enforce an eviction notice against the Hungarian Abbot Rudolf Anzelm Fejes and his order.
The Abbot was woken up by the sound of the wall of the church being destroyed. He alerted the local police, who informed him that this is a legal operation ordered by the Mayor’s office. Abbot Fejes, who is from the Premonstratensian order, broadcast the unnerving incident live on the monastery’s Facebook page.
‘At 5 am in the morning, Cristian Popescu’s men broke into the monastery,’ he later posted on the same social media page. Cristian Popescu is the Deputy Director of the Property Management Department in Nagyvárad’s municipal government.
The legal battle over the ownership of the monastery’s building has been ongoing for months.
The Mihai Eminescu High School also operates in the same building complex. The municipality of Nagyvárad claims that parts of the building are currently occupied by Abbot Fejes and the local Premonstratensian order are also the property of the state-run high school.
In January, the local court sided with the municipality at the trial court level. Thus, an eviction notice was served. However, when authorities originally came to enforce the eviction on 14 May, ethnic Hungarians living in the city formed a human chain around the building to stop the process.
The police decided not to escalate the situation at the time and retreated. However, when they came back to the scene about two weeks later in another attempt at enforcement, they deliberately did so at dawn and without prior notice to avoid a similar protest by the locals.
László Toroczkai, an MP for the far-right Our Homeland Movement Party in the Hungarian parliament, also commented on the unfortunate developments in Nagyvárad on his X page.
‘The last time enforcement officers attempted to carry out the eviction (when I was there again), they backed off in the face of resistance from the Hungarian congregation in Nagyvárad. This time, however, Romanian authorities arrived at dawn without warning, broke through the wall, and forcibly entered the historic building…The Hungarian community in Nagyvárad can’t even hold Mass in their iconic 300-year-old church anymore, now that the sacristy has been seized,’ he wrote.
He also shared that it has been 11 days since he published an open letter addressed to Minister of Foreign Affairs Anita Orbán of Hungary in the new Tisza government about the plight of the Premonstratensians in Nagyvárad, asking her to summon the Romanian Ambassador to Hungary to discuss the matter. However, according to Toroczkai, he has heard no response.
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