Place:Reghin, Mureș, Romania

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Reghin (; , or ; ) is a city in Mureș County, Transylvania, Romania, on the Mureș River. As of 2011 it has a population of 33,281.

History

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Reghin was first mentioned in 1228 in a charter of Hungarian King Andrew II as Regun – however, evidence of its strategic location and defence system suggests that the town might have been considerably older, possibly founded by Ladislaus I.

Despite the devastations of the city during the Mongol invasion (1241) and during the Tatar and Cuman incursions (1285), the town developed rapidly: already in the second half of the 13th century the city was the residence and power centre of the families Tomaj and Kacsik, to whom the nearby lands were awarded by the Hungarian Crown. Reghin became a minor ecclesiastical centre in 1330, with the building of the Gothic church (Roman Catholic at the time, it now serves the Protestant community) in the German part of the city; it is still the largest church in the area, and hosts the oldest Medieval Latin inscription of any church in Transylvania. The Hungarian part of the city has an even older church, initially built in the Romanesque style.

At the beginning of the 15th century the settlement gained city rights, and, from 1427, the right to hold fairs. In the 16th and 17th century Reghin was devastated by Habsburg and Ottoman troops on several occasions. It burned to the ground in 1848. In 1850 the town had 4,227 inhabitants, of which 2,964 were Germans, 644 Romanians, 556 Hungarians, 40 Jews and 3 Roma. In 1910, the population of the city included 7,310 inhabitants, of which 2,994 were Germans, 2,947 Hungarians, and 1,311 Romanians.^[1]

After the collapse of Austria-Hungary at the end of World War I and the declaration of the Union of Transylvania with Romania, the Romanian Army took control of the area in December 1918, during the Hungarian–Romanian War. The city officially became part of the Kingdom of Romania in June 1920 under the terms of the Treaty of Trianon, under which Hungary relinquished all of Transylvania. In August 1940, the Second Vienna Award, arbitrated by Germany and Italy, reassigned the territory of Northern Transylvania (which included Reghin) from Romania to Hungary. Almost 30% of the inhabitants were Jews at that time. In May 1944, the Jews were gathered in the Reghin ghetto and on 4 June 1944 were deported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Towards the end of World War II, Romanian and Soviet armies entered the city in October 1944. The territory of Northern Transylvania remained under Soviet military administration until March 9, 1945, after the appointment of Petru Groza as Prime Minister, when the city again became part of Romania.

After the war, Reghin lost some of its former Transylvanian Saxon character — as many Germans left for West Germany during the later stages of Communist Romania — and ethnic Romanians and Hungarians were settled in their place. The data of the 1992 census showed a population of 24,601 Romanians, 12,471 Hungarian, 1,790 Romani, and 346 Germans. In 1994, Reghin was declared a city.

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