In March 1988 Nicolae Ceausescu, President of Romania and Secretary General of the Romanian Communist Party made known his plan to revive the program of “systematization”. According to the plan small settlements that were deemed “irrational” – several thousand! – were to be destroyed, their population forcefully resettled in cities or “agrarian complexes”. The plan would have affected Transylvania’s small villages, inhabited by Hungarians, the most severely. 

On June 27, 1988, seventy to eighty thousand people demonstrated on Heroes’ Square in Budapest against Romania’s village demolition plan. From the square the crowd moves on to the Romanian embassy where they attempt to hand in a letter of protest. The doors of the embassy, however, remain closed.