Székely

The Székelys are a Hungarian-speaking people of eastern Transylvania. Medieval legend, recorded by the chronicler Simon of Kéza, made them descendants of Attila's Huns left in the Carpathians; scholarship treats them as Magyars settled on the eastern frontier, perhaps as early as the twelfth century, to guard the kingdom.

They held land directly of the crown in seven self-governing seats, where free warrior-farmers paid no taxes in return for military service. As a distinct estate they joined Hungarian nobles and Saxon burghers in the Union of the Three Nations of 1438, which ruled Transylvania through the Ottoman-Habsburg conflict. They kept an old runic script alongside the Latin alphabet.

Habsburg attempts to force them into the Military Frontier ended in the massacre of resisting Székelys at Madéfalva in 1764, after which refugee communities crossed into Bukovina and scattered to Vojvodina and southern Hungary.