Sfânta Elena
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Sfânta Elena Dunaszentilona Svatá Helena |
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| Basic data | |||||
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| State : |
 Romania
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| Historical region : | Banat | ||||
| Circle : | Caraș-Severin | ||||
| Municipality : | Coronini | ||||
| Coordinates : | 44 ° 41 ′ N , 21 ° 42 ′ E | ||||
| Time zone : | EET ( UTC +2) | ||||
| Height : | 350 m | ||||
| Residents : | 519 (2002) | ||||
| Postal code : | 327161 | ||||
| Telephone code : | (+40) 02 55 | ||||
| License plate : | CS | ||||
| Structure and administration | |||||
| Community type : | Village | ||||
The place Sfânta Elena ( Svatá Helena in Czech , Szenthelena or Dunaszentilona in Hungarian ) in the Caraș-Severin district , Romania is the oldest still inhabited village of the small ethnic minority of the Banat Czechs . The village of Sfânta Elena belongs to the Coronini municipality and was called Sfînta Elena until 1993 .
geography
The village is located a few kilometers north of the Danube in the area of the Iron Gate in the Banat Mountains . The landscape around Sfânta Elena shows many karst features such as sinkholes and caves . The most famous are the Turecká díra cave and the Kulhavá Skála limestone cliffs .
The location in the karst mountains makes it difficult to supply the village with water: There is no spring water pipe and the few deep wells are polluted by seeping faeces, so bottled water and rainwater have to be used. The nearby Svatá Alžběta (Elisabethfeld), founded in 1823 as the first Czech town in the Banat , was abandoned for this reason and can now be visited as a ghost town .
history
Sfânta Elena was founded in 1824 as the second Czech village in the Banat. This was the time of the first wave of immigration from Bohemia into the Banat, which, in contrast to the second, militarily motivated wave, was mainly due to a labor shortage in the timber industry. The immigrants, mainly from Central Bohemia , were sometimes lured into the country with false promises. The Hungarian timber contractor János Magyarly, who named Sfânta Elena after his daughter, was mainly responsible for this. Svatá Alžběta, which has since been abandoned, was named after a daughter of Magyarly, who disappeared without a trace after clearing the forests without keeping his promises.
Sfânta Elena is the only Czech village to have two churches built. The Catholic Church was consecrated in 1879, the Protestant one in 1887, but has since been taken over by Baptists.
Like the other villages of the Banat Czechs, Sfânta Elena has also struggled with strong emigration since the opening of Romania: while 800 people lived here before the fall of the Ceaușescu regime in 1991, in 2000 there were only 540, today the population is increasing estimated at around 400, the majority of whom belong to the Czech ethnic group. In addition to agriculture, the source of income today is mining in nearby Moldova Nouă , which is increasingly coming to a standstill.
Today, Sfânta Elena is the only one of these villages with a weekly bus connection to Prague due to its much more convenient location compared to the other, more isolated Czech villages such as Ravensca and thus plays an important role in connecting the Banat Czechs to the rest of the Czech-speaking area.
map
- Club českých turistů: Turistická Mapa Banát, M 1: 100,000 . Map and guide. 1st edition. Freytag & Berndt, Prague 2001, ISBN 80-85999-88-9 (Czech, Romanian, English).