Learning about the place you live in...

Today I had to make this little big project for school so I needed to research a bit regarding the geography and demography of my hometown, Oradea. So wikipedia and google were once again besides me in this moments of despair. I was shocked how many things I never knew about my town. A few weeks ago, actually I was walking around downtown and while looking all over the place I realized that I know nothing about the buildings, the history or the culture of the city. I was ashamed, so I told a few friends that we should do a sightseeing one weekend to learn more about this, indeed beautiful place. That didn't happen yet, but today I am even more determined to do thing. I found out today that during medieval times the 0 meridian was considered to pass right through the heart of this town, so all the maps in that era were mentioning this. Nowadays just some maritime maps still recognize this place as the center of the world.

Now I can say that I was born in the center of the world, just that I missed it by a few centuries. :)

There are a lot of unique things about this place. It has also quite a long history as the first documents mentioning its name dated since the year 1113. I know you'll say it's bad luck. Well it didn't have actually lots of luck as it suffered many damages during the pass of times as many people have tried to conquer this place and sometimes they have obviously succeeded. I don't see this as a bad thing though. Through this the culture and population of this place has ben enriched and developed so there's a good side of it. I was impressed to read about the evolution of the population. Check this out:

year 1910: 69.000 (Romanian: 5.6%, Hungarian: 91.10%)
year 1920: 72.000 (Romanian: 5%, Hungarian: 92%)
year 1930: 90.000 (Romanian: 25%, Hungarian: 67%)
year 1941: 98.621 (Romanian: 5,17%, Hungarian: 92,08%)
year 1966: 122.634 (Romanian: 46%, Hungarian: 52%)
year 1977: 170.531 (Romanian: 53%, Hungarian: 45%)
year 1992: 222.741 (Romanian: 64%, Hungarian: 34%)

year 2002: 220.732 (Romanian: 70.4%, Hungarian: 27.5%)

Obviously there are also other ethnic groups but much smaller. The next in the rank would be the gypsies (Rrom) which have 1.2% of the population. I wouldn't say that this is good, but we gotta accept them too. We are very culturally open, right? :P

I would love to write more about this but now I gotta get back to study as the time passes too fast. I will return with more info and eventually pictures of my lovely hometown. Meanwhile, in case you want to visit, let me know. I believe it's worth it.

Cheers!