Zagorskii voivodi – o notă despre varianta slavă a numelui Transilvaniei din anul 1408

Authors
Cosmin Popa-Gorjanu
Pages
283-289
Abstract

This paper aims to discuss a unique form of the name of Transylvania recorded in the form of zagorskii v(oi)vodi on a votive inscription from St. George Church in Streisângeorgiu (Hunedoara, Romania), dating from 1408, which remained unnoticed in the historiography so far. Transylvania’s names in Latin (ultrasilva, terraultrasilvana, transsilva, partes ultrasilvanas, partes transsilvanas, terra Transilvana, Septemcastra), German (Siebenbürgen), or Hungarian (Erdély), are known from much earlier sources, but a Slavonic variant did not appear before the fifteenth century. According to the previous analyses of the records, the earliest Slavonic form was recorded in 1444, in a charter issued by John Hunyadi as voivode of Transylvania, in which he used the title “Boe‚o‰aEp‰eÎcÍ ̊.” However, the form found in the inscription from the church of Streisângeorgiu was not only almost three decades earlier, but it was also using a name deriving from the Slavic toponym zagora (beyond the mountain). It seems that starting from mid-fifteenth century onwards, the Slavonic sources from Wallachia tended to adopt forms such as Erdelski / Ardelski, deriving from the Hungarian or Romanian names, which singles out the 1408 form as an older variant which deserves to be integrated in the list of names given to the province along the well-known Latin, Hungarian, and German variants.

Keywords
Transylvania, Streisângeorgiu, Zagora, Transylvanian voivodes.