One Version of Romania's History

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Den | Romania | History | Introduction | Adam & Eve

Romanian Adam & Eve

Topics covered in this section:

Introduction

This section might also be titled "The Search for Romania's National Ancestor."

It sure would be convenient for the historians if only one ethnic group had settled in Romania. Then they could point to this group and say, "These are the true Romanians, and they have lived here forever!"

But it seems that life, and certainly life in eastern Europe, didn't work out that way. That's not how it developed for any of the countries in eastern Europe and, most certainly, not for Romania.

Unfortunately — or perhaps fortunately — fate didn't place just one distinct ethnic group in this geographic region. There's no nice, neat, and tidy ethnic package here. Quite the contrary.

Instead, we see an extremely vital, complex, polyethnic mixture of cultures who settled in the region over a long span of time. The Romanian people of today are the result of a diverse gene pool.

Nationalist Historians

Still "nationalist" historians continue, desperately at times, to try to place their ancestors into nice, neat ethnic boxes. Sometimes they approach this impossible quest with an almost religious zeal. They very badly hope to verify their claim to the land based on a national mythology instead of a national history.

The Romanian historians chant their mantra, as if their ancestors were a single ethnic group who had always lived there. The Hungarian nationalists, among others, claim that's a bold-faced lie.

During the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, historians favored different claims. Some said Romanians were purebred Romans. Some said Romanians were purebred Dacians. Some said they were a mixture, naming them Daco-Romans. But each of these has been shown by recent scholarship to be little more than wishful thinking.

Meanwhile, equally biased western journalists and historians expected eastern European history to follow the same patterns as those seen in the West. But the West was ruled by monarchs or other rulerships. Romania, on the other hand, witnessed large chunks of its history where there were no ruling Romanians at the helm. Other ethnic groups ruled the various territories within modern-day Romanian lands.

Ethnic Diversity

Well, who am I to take sides in this hot debate? Rather than try to prove a single ethnic nationality had always lived on Romanian soil, I'll instead celebrate the diversity of the ethnic ancestors who make up the current Romanian people. Along the way we'll discover that modern geopolitical boundaries have little in common with the real distribution of the ethnic makeup of the region.

The ethnic diversity of Romania's past is not bad news, but good news. The Romanians are not monochrome, cookie-cutter clones of some single mythical gene pool, but instead, are a wonderful melting pot of ethnic diversity.

Possible ancestors of the Romanian people include, but are not limited to, the following ethnic groups:

• Stone Age wanderers from the Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic periods
• Bronze Age and Iron Age farming and shepherdic settlements
• Thracian merchants and villagers
• Scythian warriors
• Celts (Gauls)
• Getians and Dacians
• Greeks and other Mediterranean peoples
• Roman and Germanic settlers
• Goths, Slavs, and Magyars
• Mongols, Tatars, Avar, and dozens of other migratory tribes
• Austrians, Hungarians, Poles, and others
• Russians and nomads pushed westward from the Eurasian steppes
• Ottoman Turks and other Near Eastern immigrants
• And the list goes on and on...

As it turns out, it's futile to search for the pure, unmistakable Romanian ancestor. And I suspect that if anyone ever tested the DNA of the Romanian people, they'd find a goodly mixture of ethnic bloodlines.