The team aims to conduct an applied study of the manner in which the Romanian Churches in Transylvania contributed to the war effort during the first global conflagration. Among the most efficient means of population control and mobilization of the Romanian population used by the Hungarian civil authorities between 1914 and 1918 was the propaganda disseminated through the representatives of the Romanian Orthodox and Greek-Catholic clergy. The messages of the authorities were circulated much more effectively from the pulpit.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the Romanian population continued to live in the rural environment, being dependent on a traditional lifestyle in which the priest and the teacher represented the main sources of authority. Through pastorals, circular, sermons, the message of the civil authorities reached the priests and, through them, the population. We intend to study what the main propaganda messages were, their dissemination channels and how they functioned during the period 1914-1918 and to examine the effects of these mobilizing messages on the population.

We intend to analyze propaganda in terms of the forms it took both on the front and behind it, in the villages where the wives, children and elderly parents of those who had gone to war lived. The effects of the battles marked everyone equally and the families that had been physically separated war were reunited symbolically through the personal contribution of each member of the society to the war effort.

The team aims to construct a documentary database indicating which were the main means of propaganda and the iconographic materials, prayers, brochures, pamphlets, postcards, textbooks, and catechisms for children, which circulated during war, and, on the other hand, the messages that were transmitted through them or the press. Another original result of the project will consist in making a short documentary film, presenting the war propaganda and the manner in which it functioned in Transylvania between 1914 and 1918, a film that will be accessible both to the specialists and to the general public.