Peter Jordan · 2004
Peter Jordan interprets the 1996 Romania: Historical-Geographical Atlas as a post-Communist update and supplement to the Romanian Academy’s 1970 atlas that largely reasserts traditional national narratives. He highlights its extensive historical section, which traces Romanian origins to Roman Dacia and intermarriage between Dacians and Roman soldiers. He criticizes the map of ethnic composition based on the 1992 census for assigning nearly identical colours to Romanians and the 1.6 million Hungarians, making the Hungarian population’s distribution difficult to discern. Jordan reads this design as evidence of the nation-state ideology prevailing when the atlas was prepared and published.
