It happened in the beginning of the nineties in Washington D.C. On a sunny morning my wife and I were standing patiently in some line, waiting to be let in – and we were talking in Hungarian.

I noticed that the man in front of us – I guessed he was Spanish-American – was explaining something to his partner and turned back pretty often. Since I could not think that our Hungarian talk offended anybody in this linguistically and antropologically mixed crowd, I answered calmly the question in English of the man, preceeded by many turnings back. I told to this middle-aged Spaniard where we actually were from: Transylvania. As I suspected, I only puzzled him more. After a couple minutes he turned to us again asking very politely where this Transylvania was after all. And I, already wanting to tease him, answered laconically that it lies between Romania and Hungary. The conversation ended at this point, obviously without any result.

The humor of the story, even without my historical and political inaccuracy, could be understood only by those familiar with the history and present of Eastern Europe. Since Transylvania as an autonomous entity (state) has never lied between Hungary and Romania. When she was relatively independent with her own prince, and a population dominated by Hungarians, Romanians and Germans (mid XVI – end XVII century), there was no Romania, but only Romanian principalities (Muntenia and Moldova). Before she belonged to Hungary and later to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and now, since 1918 has been part of Romania without any particular territorial autonomy. (Another question is who considers what as their own heritage of the provable or not provable past, as their legal continuity based on ancient rights.)

All this might be unknown for the rest of the world, especially for the New World (America), or for the even Newer World (Australia and Africa. Or Asia.) And even less might know the English-tongued (or Spanish or French) readers that in this Romanian Transylvania there has existed for seventy years a Hungarian magazine trying to elevate its couple thousand readers from historical dreamworlds and neverdying illusions, and to connect them instead to the often unconfortable reality. These attempts may stay hidden from the English, French and Spanish citizens, although 1996 was loud from the political experiments to create peace and security in this region, not the least the signing of the Hungarian-Romanian Treaty as precondition to join NATO and the European Union. KORUNK claims integration in the world-circuit instead of periphery, acknowledges and claims a tradition more than thousand years old with intercultural communication, which might be the basis for a viable, modern society, above the present poverty limit, equipped with market economy and updated technique.

This volume addresses all the English-reading public in all the places in the world. It wants to show something of this experiment, offering a selection from the KORUNK-texts after the Romanian political turn of December 1989. We would like to show our face to the world to make our viewers understand us better. The citizenship and ethnicity of our authors are of all sort and of course, their points of view and decisions differ, but all of them are looking for answers to the same questions. This is our face, we do not want to alter its effect with makeups.

There is another characteristic of the feature of KORUNK (which appears in Kolozsvár, once Transylvania's capital, a college city with almost four-hundred-thousand inhabitants – Hungarians and Romanians): the magazine reflects the face of the world. This is only hinted by the indexes and contents at the end of the volume. But how the "world" outside us is, our English readers must know better. We thank for their precious support those who helped our enterprise come true.