Hungary–Romania border

Trianon

The treaties that ended the First World War gave Romania Transylvania and the adjoining districts with Romanian majorities. Through the lowland of eastern Hungary the line was drawn by allocating individual villages to each state. The area ceded to Romania was about 54 percent Romanian, 32 percent Hungarian and 10 percent German, and Hungarians held majorities in a band about 20 miles wide just east of the new line, in the cities, and in eastern Transylvania, cut off from Hungary by Romanian countryside; the study judged an equitable ethnic boundary virtually impossible.^[1]

Hungary pressed for revision between the wars. On 30 August 1940 Germany and Italy returned Northern Transylvania to Hungary by the Vienna Award: some 16,350 square miles and 2.86 million people. The 1945 armistice declared the award void, and the peace treaty of 10 February 1947 restored the frontier as it stood on 1 January 1938.^[1]

“To draw an equitable ethnic boundary was virtually impossible.”^[1]

No more checks

About one million ethnic Hungarians live in Transylvania, a legacy of the partition of Hungary after the First World War. When Romania fully joined the Schengen area at midnight on 1 January 2025, Hungary’s national police chief and the chief inspector of Romania’s border police marked the end of checks at a crossing between the two countries.^[2]