The decorative inscription of the Sicklefold City Theater – “Teatrul Tamási Áron Színház” – had to be modified after the Civic Society for Dignity in Europe led by Dan Tanasa, referred to in the Hungarian press only as the “professional detective” in Transylvania, filed several lawsuits in The case is against Mayor Arpad Antal.
The final ruling in February required the president to amend the inscription. On Wednesday, employees of the mayor’s office removed the “theatre” suffix from the writing, which was placed under the Roman “teatrul,” Harumzik wrote.
In the first lawsuit filed in 2019, the MP from the Association of the Union of Romanians (AUR) and the association suing several Sicklefold governors complained that the institution’s Romanian and Hungarian names appear at the same level on the bilingual inscription on the front of the theatre. Dan Tanasa argued that since Romanian is the official language, according to the law, the Romanian inscription should be placed above the Hungarian language. The court of first instance ruled in his favor, and after the appeal, in June 2020, a decision was made to change the inscription, he reported on his website.
Because the city administration did not amend the inscription, Dan Tanassa filed another lawsuit, this time to enforce the ruling. The Bucharest Court of First Instance upheld his claim in September last year: for refusing to enforce the final ruling, it ordered Árpad Antal to pay an amount equal to 20 percent of the national average gross salary to the state treasury for each day of delay.
Both the mayor of Sepsiszentgyörgy and the notifying association have appealed the verdict, and the final ruling of the Bucharest Court of Appeal in February states: In addition to the fine to be paid to the state treasury, Árpád Antal must also pay the initiating association one hundred lei per day (7,700 HUF) ) for each day from the date of issuance of the judgment.
Dan Tanassa calculated that Árpad Antal should pay a fine of more than half a million lei (38.5 million forints) to state coffers, 940 days since the verdict on the inscription was announced. Tanasa wrote that the mayor must pay 94,000 lei (7.2 million forints) to the association suing him.
According to Arpad Antal, there is a real “carpet bombing” going on against the municipality, he told the newspaper, referring to the rulings against the city’s flag and the Hungarian inscription. According to the foreman, these assert “that while we build with one hand, we must defend with the other.” “We have had successes, and we also have failures, but we say to the agitators of livelihood that they will not be able to restrict our love for our mother tongue and our symbols by legal means,” the head of the tribunal declared to the trio, referring to court cases. He added that the facade of the building will soon have to be renovated, and they are looking for a solution to the problem of “cool tricks”.
He said about the amount of punishment: he does not see a justification for the ruling, and he hopes that Dan Tanasa did not calculate well, but “everything is possible in Romania.”
According to the mayor, the municipality acted in good faith and according to the law: after the judgment was passed in the case of the inscriptions, a bilingual inscription was marked on the theater building, with a Romanian inscription above and a Hungarian inscription below. But he said the amount was not satisfied with that, and the decorative inscription also had to be changed.
In Sepsiszentgyörgy, the association led by Dan Tanasa filed several lawsuits against the city’s flag. As a result, the Romanian Supreme Court overturned the government’s decision in February, which declared the flag approved by the municipality as the official symbol of the city in 2021. Árpád Antal then announced that the authorization procedure would be restarted.
