Romania Revealed: A Historical Introduction

Romania has a diverse cultural heritage stemming in large part from the fact that since 1920 Greater Romania has been made up of three quite distinct regions, Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania, separated by the high, densely forested Carpathian Mountains Range that curves through the centre of the country. To the south of this range is the Wallachian plain whose southern border is the lower Danube. To the northeast of the Carpathians is the Moldavian plateau, linked geographically to Moldova and the Ukraine. To the northwest is the Transylvanian plateau, which opens in the northwest onto the Danubian basin and Hungary. Each of these regions’ borders is more porous than those they share with each other across the Carpathians and therefore, before unification, the history of each was heavily influenced by the diverse territories it abutted.

Romania’s History: From Foreign Influences to Independence

Although in antiquity the Romans had dominated and unified the territory of the ancient Dacians, a province roughly similar to that of the modern Romanian nation state, after Rome’s withdrawal and during the chaos of the ensuing millennium Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania went their own ways; only for a few years around 1600, were they united under Mihai Bravu (Michael the Brave).

Wallachia’s fortunes were influenced by Byzantium, two medieval Bulgarian Empires and by the Ottoman Empire. Forces from the east and the north, such as steppe nomads like the Huns and Mongols as well as medieval Russia and Poland – Lithuania, influenced Moldavia. Transylvania, on the other hand, was absorbed into the territory of the Hungarian crown, and although it managed to preserve some autonomy during the Ottoman hegemony in Hungary, the Habsburg Empire later controlled it. Transylvania, with its geographical links to the west, gained a large Hungarian population, and also an influx of German migrants (11th century). These migrants founded Saxon cities like Sibiu, Sighisoara and Brasov, and built Transylvania’s magnificent fortified churches. Both Hungarians and Germans were Roman Catholic until the reformation, when the Germans became Lutheran. The Moldavians and Wallachians, on the other hand, have remained Eastern Orthodox throughout history.

While Transylvania with its Saxon towns struggled under Hungarian, Ottoman, and later Habsburg domination, Moldavia and Wallachia emerged as semi-independent principalities. Their rulers maintained autonomy by carefully balancing relations with more powerful neighbours. Princes such as Alexander the Good, Stefan cel Mare (Stephen the Great), and Petru Rares acknowledged Ottoman suzerainty but managed to maintain a high degree of independence.

This arrangement lasted until the early 18th century, when increasing Russian influence and local resistance to Ottoman authority prompted the Ottomans to replace native rulers with Greek Phanariot princes from the Phanar quarter of Istanbul. At the same time, the principalities began to lose territory to neighbouring empires: Bukovina (Northern Moldavia) was annexed by the Habsburg Monarchy in 1775, while Bessarabia (Eastern Moldavia) was annexed by the Russian Empire in 1812. Oltenia (Western Wallachia) was temporarily occupied by the Habsburgs between 1718 and 1739, then returned to Wallachia.

Throughout the first half of the 19th century, Wallachian and Moldavian aristocrats and intellectuals promoted the idea of Romanian independence. As the Ottoman Empire grew steadily weaker, Moldavia and Wallachia came to be united in the person of Alexander Ioan Cuza, who was elected Prince of Moldavia and then, in 1859, Prince of Wallachia. After Cuza’s fall in 1866, Prince Karl of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen became King Carol I of Romania (ie Wallachia and Moldavia).

After the First World War, the defeated Austria-Hungary was required by the Treaty of Trianon to cede Transylvania, whose population was predominantly Romanian, to Romania. At the same time, the collapse of the Russian Empire allowed Romania to incorporate Bessarabia and Bukovina. During the Second World War, however, the Soviet Union reoccupied and annexed Bessarabia. Most of this territory later became the independent state of Moldova following the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, while northern and southern parts of Bessarabia remained within Ukraine.

Language, Religion, Art and Architecture of Romania

The independent political development of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania, combined with influences of foreign powers, has left its mark on the language, religion, art and architecture of Romania. The grand Gothic edifices of cities like Transylvania’s Sibiu, Brasov and Cluj, contrast with the extraordinary blend of Byzantine, Serbian, Ottoman and even Persian decoration in Wallachian churches like Curtea de Arges and Cozia, and the stunningly beautiful painted monasteries of Bucovina. We visit small Saxon, Hungarian and Romanian villages and pass those of the enigmatic Székelys, whose origins are debated.

The revival of historic styles in the beautiful Brancovan National Style of the 19th century, and the amalgamation of Wallachian and Moldavian territories in the first Romanian state, with Bucharest as its capital, led to an extraordinary explosion of creative energy in literature, architecture, art, and music; Yehudi Menuhin, a pupil of the famous Romanian composer and violinist George Enescu, claimed that Romanians were the most musical people in the world. During this extremely fertile period, Bucharest, the most important city in the Balkans area, was called ‘Little Paris’. The creation of Greater Romania in 1920 led to a second period of vitality. It produced world leaders in the arts, such as the sculptor Constantin Brâncusi, the Dada poet Tristan Tzara, the Dada artist and modernist architect Marcel Iancu (Marcel Janco), the absurdist playwright Eugène Ionesco, and the great philosopher Mircea Eliade.

The search for national identity led to another extraordinarily rich field of endeavour. One great contrast in Romania is between the country’s sophisticated, cosmopolitan cities and the countryside, where even now centuries-old agricultural practices abound. Despite the growth of its cities, Romania remained one of Europe’s most agrarian societies well into the 20th century, with roughly 80–90% of the population living in rural communities experiencing significant poverty. The Romanian peasantry had kept alive rituals and practices, and especially stories, that elsewhere in Europe had been compromised by industrialism and the Enlightenment. When nationalist intellectuals came to search for Romania’s deep past, many found it in this rich heritage of stories, that preserved many medieval elements.

Church of the Presentation of the Virgin in the Temple in Bârsana, Romania, part of the UNESCO World Heritage wooden churches of Maramureş. Left: Photo by C. Wood; right : photo by jackmac34 on PIxabay

Romania’s rich folkloric tradition is preserved in its agricultural landscapes with elements that have long been superseded by industrialism elsewhere. In the isolated valleys of Maramures. lovely old villages boast the world’s richest patrimonies of old wooden churches, some of them more than 500 years old. Only Russia and Norway can compete with this corpus, but whereas in those two countries ancient wooden buildings are now preserved in uninhabited open-air museums, Romania’s wooden churches are still functioning centres of communities. Of local practices that have survived eons, one eccentricity alone may be noted : as you travel through Maramures you may see in the front gardens of some houses dead trees set up with enamel pots and pans hanging from their branches. This is used to signify that the house in question has available a marriageable daughter.

The rich cultural complexity of Romania was brought about in part by the separate political development of its three major regions. We should not, however, take this to mean that these regions and their sub-regions were completely isolated from each other. Trade and migration played their part and have further enriched Romanian culture. For example, Romania has by far the largest gypsy population in Europe, and you will see something of this people’s contribution to Romanian culture, especially in the field of music. Armenians and Italians used Romania as a major conduit for goods from Italian colonies on the Black Sea and from the Near East to Europe. One of the most fascinating aspects of this trade was the passage of vast numbers of Turkish carpets to Northern and Western Europe. Armenian merchants donated many of these carpets to Romanian churches like the Black Church in Brasov, so that arguably Romania has the greatest corpus of rare old Turkish carpets of any country in the world.

With its fascinating historic environment, and its cultural development since 1989, and the unleashing of energy that this has brought, Romania artistically now rivals its past periods of vitality, in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Travel to Romania to discover an extraordinary rich mosaic of diverse cultures set against steep, heavily forested mountains, within deep valleys and across verdant, undulating farmlands on our tour Romania Revealed: Saxon Villages, Transylvanian Cities and Byzantine Monasteries.