Beautiful and beguiling Romania

‘Beautiful and beguiling Romania’ by Dr Adrian Jones, OAM

Romania was ASA founder Chris Wood’s favourite place, and believe me, he had been to most places! It took an archaeologist, Barry Cunliffe, to articulate the thing that’s overlooked when thinking of Europe… and Romania. Apart from the highlands of New Guinea, Europe is the most culturally, historically and linguistically diverse continent in the world. Isn’t that why we like travelling there? Romania is especially interesting because it is the most diverse region in the most diverse continent.

If you like Europe, you’ll love Romania. Turn a corner there, and you’ll encounter different cultures, histories, faiths, societies, languages. Yet you are always in the lovely fresh air of the Carpathians in east-central Europe, in one country united—now!—by the romance language of its once-oppressed peasants.

This lecture shows you aspects of that diversity:

• the frescoed-in-&-out Renaissance Orthodox churches of Moldavia (oriented by Constantinople, Kiev, Cracow and Moscow);
• the millennium of German history locked in Transylvania in its walled Saxon-settler-colonial cities and villages (oriented to Nuremburg, Wittenburg and Strasbourg);
• the overlapping Romanian heritages of religions and empires run from Rome, Byzantium, Budapest, Vienna and Istanbul; and
• the Balkan orientation of the capital, Bucharest, amidst fertile Oltenia and Wallachia (responding to the Danube, wide-&-ambling now, and to Serbs and Bulgarians).

Dr Adrian Jones, OAM: a retired Associate Professor of History, and a frequent contributeor to ABC local radio, Adrian is a Harvard graduate and expert in Greek and Russian, Ottoman and Balkan history: ancient, medieval, modern. He leads ASA tours of the Balkans, especially both Macedonias and Albania, Romania and Slovenia-Croatia.

Adrian leads the following ASA tours:

• Romania Revealed: Saxon Villages, Transylvanian Cities and Byzantine Monasteries: 22 May – 4 June 2024; 21 May – 3 June 2025
• Slovenia: Villages, Castles, Vineyards, Scenic Valleys and the Julian Alps: 29 August – 15 September 2024
• Along the Via Egnatia: Macedonia, Albania and Corfu: 21 September –  October 2024; 27 September – 14 October 2025