American state Kentucky was about to baptised Transylvania

Miercuri, 7 aprilie 2010, 14:45 English

Transylvania was about to become American state. It's not about the Romanian central-west region, spelled Transilvania, but the territory called today Kentucky. The name stuck for almost a year, until the Congress voted against the creation of this state. The American Transylvania would have bordered Tennessee, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana.

This bit of information was detailed on air by the American public radio station NPR, which started with the reference to a book called "Lost states: True Stories of Texlahoma, Transylvania and Other States that have never Made It", by Michael J. Trinklein.  

Transylvania as a name for an America state came up during the third US presidency, that of Thomas Jefferson, who came with a series of ideas for American states' names. But most proposals never came true. The idea of naming a state Transylvania had no connection with Romania whatsoever, but with "Sylvania", very fashionable in those times. It was translates in English as "a pleasant woodsy area".

If the proposal had been successful, Kentucky would have been Transylvania today. "Yes, Transylvania is the name of a place in eastern Europe where Dracula is said to have lived. But that's not what we're talking about", the American journalists write.