User:Dianasierb/sandbox/Ioan Bran de Lemeny

Ioan Bran de Lemény et Kozla (1811–1899; leményi és kozlai Bran János), also known as Ioan Bran, was a lawyer, a revolutionary, and Transylvania's first Romanian civil servant. He was one of the organizers of the Romanian Legions (also known as the Iron Guard) and the captain of Fogaras County during the "liberal regime" (1861–1865).

Early life and education
Ioan Bran was born in Imperial Austrian-ruled Transylvania, in a small town, named Zărnești. He was the son of Ioan Bran and Bucura Bran (born as Bucura Aldulea). He was the youngest child and the only boy in the family of four children. He was named like his father, a notary, and grandfather, a priest in Zărnești. By decree no. 25.766 on November 19, 1859, Ioan Bran received authorization to wear the "Lemény" and "Kozla" predicates, elevating to the Hungarian nobility. When Ioan was four years old his father died at the age of 41.

He started his studies in his home village and continued with secondary studies in Blaj and Sibiu. In 1830, his mother wanted to send him to study in Cluj and take the Philosophical courses at the Roman Catholic High School, however she could not get social help that would allow Ioan to receive free food and accommodation. Since Ioan Bran was a young boy and willing to study, he asked for help from his numerous relatives, some of whom were quite wealthy. This allowed him to start studying at law school in Cluj-Napoca. He later did his lawyer practice at the Court of Appeal of Târgu Mureș.

After obtaining the censorship of the attorney (attestation) in 1837, he established his practice in Brașov as "the first Romanian advocate".

Revolutionary activity
On April 13, 1848, a delegation led by Ioan Bran went to the Magistrate session in Brașov, where he held a long speech in Romanian, asking for new elections and for half of the positions in the council to be occupied by Romanians. He was also apart of a delegation of 32 Romanian leaders in the Burzenland, who participated in the Blaj Assembly (May 15-17, 1848), where the national, political, religious and social claims were exposed. The delegation called for the same rights for Romanians as any nation inhabiting Transylvania, the independence of the Romanian nation, and the protest against the unification of Transylvania with Hungary. Then, in July of 1848, Ioan Bran became the epitaph of the St. Nicholas Church in Brașov and began to get involved in revolutionary movements, becoming known as an important local leader.

Due to his intellectual abilities and patriotism he was elected to the national assembly as secretary with nine other Romanians. On October 20, 1848, he signed, along with August Treboniu Laurian, Simion Bărnuțiu, Timotei Cipariu, Nicolae Bălăşescu and Florian Micăş, the manifest to the Romanians. He was also elected to be a member of the Romanian delegation to go to Vienna to present to the Emperor of Austria the wishes of the Romanians in Transylvania. He then continued to militate for the national rights of the Romanians in Transylvania after 1849.

In 1860, he became the supreme captain of Fogaras County, having a decisive role in introducing the Romanian language into administration as an official language. In the autumn of 1860,after issuing the famous diploma of liberation of the Habsburg Empire on October 20th, the Fagaras district was inhabited mostly by the Romanians and began to feel the frenzy of the great political and national affirmations of the Romanian nation, the reference for the whole of Transylvania. As a result of innumerable petitions of local communities, at the beginning of 1861 he, Ioan Bran, was appointed head of a supreme captain of Romanian nationality, the person of the deserving leader of the Revolution of 1848 and an official of the years of absolutism. In the spring of 1861, when everywhere there was a great deal of trouble in the Transylvanian jurisdictional reorganization, the Romanians in Transylvania gave brilliant evidence of their attachment to the national cause, imposing the Romanian language as the official language of the district, and choosing to the greatest of its own officials Romanian nationality, despite the fierce and unfair opposition of local Hungarian minorities. Systematically boycotted by the government authorities in Cluj for more than a year, until the general court resolutions were recognized by the monarch in May 1862, the most Romanian administrative unit in Transylvania, the years of the "liberal" regime, was regarded with suspicion by the Its representatives and further, both because of the national composition of the population and the local leadership, as well as of the neighborhood with the Romanian Principalities, where from 1859 major events occurred, against which Vienna adopted a hostile attitude permanently. Just as the court in Vienna began to orientate clearly towards a compromise with the Hungarian ruling classes, abandoning the political experiment initiated in 1860, by the Imperial Rescript of August 29, 1865 Ioan Puscariu was named the supreme captain of the district of Fagaras, the supreme governor of Tarnava County untill then. Named at the head of the Fagaras district instead of his brother-in-law Ioan Bran de Lemeny, as one who was reckoned by Vienna as his faithful under the conditions of the radical change in his political orientation, Puscariu was to be confronted here with the same opposition of the leaders Local Hungarians concentrated in their entirety in the town of Fagaras, strongly opposed by the new course of events. This was particularly evident during the elections for the new dietary summit convened in Cluj on November 19, 1865, having as a single item on the agenda the "revision" of the article 1 of the aristocratic diet of May 1848 on the Transylvanian union with Hungary; held on November 8-11, 1865, they resulted in the election of the Greek-Catholic vicar of Fagaras, Ioan Antonelli and the Orthodox dean of Zărneşti, Ioan Meţianu, even under an electoral regulation that obviously disadvantaged the Romanians, but the "party" Hungarians, using corruption and other means of this kind, appealing to the government authorities, tried to gain the cassation of the elections15.

Ioan Bran was also a member of an interest group, who's purpose was to act as mediator between the ordinary people and their relationships with the main institutions, whether those were ecclesiastical, political (the Romanian National Party), financial (the Albina bank), or cultural (the "ASTRA" cultural association).

The Brasov publicist, Ioan Bran, was one such Transylvanian who had settled in the Regat at the baginning of the First World War and had volunteered there for the Romanian army. Correspondingly committed to striking a balance between the 'Old Romania' and the 'New Romania', he attempted to characterise the Romanians on the different sides of the Carpathians using 'humoralism'. He, too, recognised barely two years after the formation of the new state that the toughest internal front was the 'cultural, moral and social' differences between the Regat and Transylvania. For him the difference was mainly a question of the 'metheods, tactics and temperament' of the opposing factions; the Transylvanians were less clever, more ponderous and often grumpier than people from Regat. This was due to the 'yoke' endured by the Transylvanian Romanians. At the same time, however, he considered the to be more advanced as a civilisation and living in a 'more solid' enviroment, which had made them tacturn, deliberate, more profound, more prudent, more tenacious and more consistent people.These characteristics pointed to a 'bilious', melancholy temperament-presumably because the Transylvanians had more Dacian blood in them. The joviality and frivolity of the people from the Regat showed that they are more 'sanguine'.

Personal life and career
On September 4, 1838 at 27 years old, Ioan married Maria Oprea Circa, the daughter of a merchant whom he had known during his numerous trials at the Cluj Court of Appeal where he disputed problems with the Transylvanian Saxons. Maria was 16 years old and was educated in a monastery in Sibiu. The couple went on to have 10 children, 7 boys and 3 girls.

His wife had a civic spirit and she founded a Women's Association in December 1850 to raise money to support the Transylvanian Association for Literature and Culture of the Romanian People - ASTRA, founded by Andrei Șaguna.

Shortly after his appointment as perfect, he was named a member of the Romanian National Committee, in the Defense Commission to organize military Transylvanian Romanians. The person who helped him lead his district was the vice prefect, Constantin Săcărean.

Between 1851-1864, Ioan Bran worked as a judge of justice in the civil and military government of Transylvania. After holding this position, he was appointed counselor at the Court of Appeal in Sibiu, during which in November 1859, he received the right to the titles of nobles, "de Lemény" and "et Kozla" from the Magistrate of Brasov.

In 1857, he also became a counselor at the Court of Cassation and Justice of Sibiu together with Vasile Ladislau Pop, the only Romanians.

In 1866, the Cluj authorities dismissed Ioan from the post of prefect of Fogaras County for refusing to reintroduce Hungarian into administration. He was was also retired early so that he could not act in favor of the Romanians when implementing the Austro-Hungarian dualism of 1867. He then moved back to Brașov, however he never stopped watching on every national and cultural moves, contributing whenever his support was invoked, being at the same time an assistant and a matrimonial defender of the Metropolitan Consistory in Sibiu. He died in Brașov in 1899, at 88 years old. He was buried in the family tomb, along with his wife Maria, who had passed 19 years earlier in 1880.

Genealogy
The Pop family of Lemeny et Kozla was founded in the seventeenth century, but the most known is Ioan Bran Pop de Lemeny (1811-1899), the first Romanian lawyer in Brasov, the secretary of the Great Assembly in Blaj, the prefect of the Legion of Birsa and Fagaras. The members of this family have had remarkable activities in politics, administration, education, sports. Maria Victoria (Mitzi), the granddaughter of Ioan and the daughter of lawyer Nicolae, took his doctorate in philosophy in Vienna and was a renowned skater, national champion in 1925, 1928, 1929 and 1931, and in 1936 he represented Romania for the first time at the Olympic Games. Ioan Bran's children also had remarkable activities. Their daughter, Romica, was a skater and a national champion. A cousin of Ioan, Elena, was the mother of the father-in-law Ovid Densuşianu (1873-1938), the son of the poet and literary critic Aron Densuşianu. Doctor Elena Densuşianu-Puscariu was the first female university professor in Romania. Ovid was a philologist, linguist, folklorist, literary historian and poet, member of the Romanian Academy, just like his father. He was the nephew of the Romanian historian Nicolae Densuşianu (1846-1911), the author of the well-known work "Prehistoric Dacia". He married the writer Elena Bacaloglu-Densuşianu.