Ciumani: The Sport Takes the Community to the Mountains

Abstract

The second chapter presents the natural history of football gatherings in a typical Szekler community in Eastern-Transylvania where the dissident football consumption developed into a mass phenomenon. This took place in several successive steps as follows: in the first period of spontaneous pattern consumption the local elite in Cluj assimilated the way in which forbidden football could be consumed; then the local spectators commuted back to Cluj and nearby cities closer to the Hungarian border to watch the televised matches. During the third period, the era of local mass football gatherings, these gatherings became a large local phenomenon and communitarian institution due to the technical expertise, which made it possible to watch the beautiful game at the sites. At the end of the eighties the football gatherings reached their peak, evolving into regional and mega mass level. The chapter exemplifies that the local sports movement greatly contributed to the strengthening of the collective local-ethnic identity of the community, because by making use of the sports opportunities of the seventies and eighties, it employed them for the benefit of its own identity and the strengthening of its community capital and co-operation patterns. The Ciumani ethnographic description illustrates that football-gathering practices were organically built on the organisational infrastructure of the ice hockey movement, becoming some kind of a freer extension and replacement for it in the late eighties. The chapter concludes that the examined phenomenon grew into a social institution of a penetrating force, in which the protest character was also expressed.