Город, который даёт понимание всей Румыния

The name Timisoara comes from the historical region of the Hungarian Kingdom of Temişkoz, on whose territory the Banat of Timisoara was founded in 1718, and the region and county come from the Timis River, which does not flow through the city. Only one river flows through the city - Begej, which means castle in Hungarian. Some local Germans call the city Temesburg, and the Magyarized Germans - Temesvar. About 1900 years ago, on the site of Timisoara there was a Roman military camp Tibiscum, although no records of it have survived. The first information about the city of Temesvar is found by historians in sources from the 13th century, when it was devastated by the Tatar-Mongols. In the 14th century, it was a small fortress in the middle of the swamps. The Hungarian King Charles Robert, who visited the area in 1307, ordered a palace to be built here, and in the 15th century the city served for a time as the residence of the great Janos Hunyadi. Temeswar was the first city in the Kingdom of Hungary to receive its own coat of arms (1365): it depicted a dragon, possibly symbolizing the defeated Bogomil heresy. In 1552, Temeswar was captured by Turkish troops led by Ahmed Pasha. During its 160 years as the center of the Temeswar Eyalet, the city underwent strong Muslim influence, with numerous mosques being built here. After Eugene of Savoy recaptured it from the Turks in 1716, the Habsburgs systematically eradicated traces of Ottoman rule, rebuilding the city center in the Baroque style. When Austria-Hungary collapsed in 1918, there was an attempt to make Timisoara the capital of an independent Banat, and the Serbs also wanted to annex it; in November 1918, the city was occupied by Serbian troops. But in 1919, although more than half of the population of the entire Banat was made up of Slavs, Hungarians and Germans, and only 37% were Romanians, the city received Romanian administration in accordance with the promises made by the Entente when Romania entered World War I. In the late 1930s, the largest Orthodox church in Romania, the Timisoara Cathedral, was built here. In the 1920s and especially in the 1930s, the pro-Nazi Iron Guard began to operate actively in the city. In 1936, its members detonated a bomb in a hall where a Jewish theater troupe was performing; Two people were killed and many were injured. After Ion Antonescu, who was aligned with Nazi Germany and sanctioned the creation of ghettos and mass murder of Jews, became the de facto dictator of Romania in September 1940, the authorities confiscated Jewish-owned businesses and shops, and then the property of the Jewish community (including real estate), liquidated all Jewish organizations in Timisoara (but not in Romania as a whole), mobilized many men into labor battalions, and drove Jews from surrounding areas to Timisoara (as a result of which the city's Jewish population increased to 11,788 by 1942 and to 13,600 by 1947). But on January 19, 1941, when the Iron Guard organized pogroms throughout Romania, there was no pogrom in Timisoara. In August-September 1942, preparations were made for the deportation of the Jewish population of southern Transylvania, including the Jews of Timisoara, to Nazi camps in occupied Poland. But thanks to the bribery of officials, this did not happen, Timisoara became the only city in Romania and Eastern Europe occupied by the Nazis and their allies, where during World War II there were no mass murders and deportations of Jews to extermination camps and even concentration camps. However, Romania had the largest number of Jews surviving in Eastern Europe, since, apart from the Jews of Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina and Transnistria, the rest of the Jews were to be exterminated by 1946, and after the defeat of the Romanian army at Stalingrad, Antonescu tried to use the surviving Jews as hostages in informal separate negotiations with the Western allies through the Joint and Jewish organizations in Romania. During World War II, the city was heavily bombed by the Allies. On December 16, 1989, a revolution began in Timisoara with a popular uprising caused by the communist authorities' decision to evict Pastor László Tőkes. A revolutionary committee was created, the Romanian Democratic Front (FDR), led by Lorin Fortuna and Sorin Oprei, and a declaration on the fall of the dictatorship was published. Even the first secretary of the regional committee of the RCP, Radu Bălan, tried unsuccessfully to join the FDR. A few days later, the regime of Nicolae Ceauşescu was overthrown in Romania.