One Version of Romania's History

Romania - Myth - Legend - Cultures - Genealogy - Misfits - And More

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History: Introduction

Topics covered in this section:

Why Romania?

Why am I interested in Romanian history?

Well, perhaps the most important reason is because many of my friends are from Romania. And talking to them got me interested. So I started reading everything I could find about the country and its history. The more I read, the more fascinated I became.

Lack of English Texts

Unfortunately, there's not a lot of information about Romania and its history available in English. I guess it's not very high on the list of interesting reading for British or American readers.

But even if no one else finds this subject interesting, I decided to gather whatever information I had found, along with some of my own thoughts, and put them together in these web pages. If nothing else, I can reread it occasionally to refresh my memory.

Historic Roadblocks

There were a lot of roadblocks that cropped up when I began writing about Romania's history, as you'll find out in reading through the documents in the Romania Burrow's History Department. In addition to all the other difficulties of writing her history, the following problems stand out.

Young Country

Romania is a very young country by European standards. In fact, its almost 100 years younger than the United States of America.

As we'll discover, the country, Romania, did not exist until 1859 when Prince Cuza united two of the major regions or principalities (Wallachia and Moldavia) into a single state. And even then, the name of the country was spelled Rumania (or variations on this name), only receiving its present name some time later in order to more closely associate the people with their nationalistic ancestors, the Romans.

Furthermore, Romania's "official" borders — as well as those of nearly every other central and east European country — were established only recently (20th century) in their current locations. The borders were decided upon, not by the people who lived there, but by the "Great Powers" of the World War period.

Of course, the "Romanian people" had always lived within the current borders (and elsewhere as well), but this fact was seldom acknowledged.

Before the Great Powers arbitrarily divided up the land, there was no Romania or Yugoslavia or Czechoslovakia or Bosnia or any of a dozen other Balkan countries. This means that the Romanians, as well as the citizens of other central and east European countries, didn't always live within the boundaries of their current countries.

Multiple Versions of History

The second stumbling block I ran into was that there are many, often conflicting, versions of Romania's history. In fact, reading about her history is often akin to reading the blank margins of a textbook, completely ignoring the text portion. Historians often had ulterior motives for what was included or excluded from their accounts. Finding the "true" history is difficult, if not impossible.

But these web pages represent my attempt to read between the lines, and sometimes in the "margins," to unravel the mystery. I hope I have managed to uncover some of the mystery without falling into the traps left by historians who falsified and mythologized the history. Chief among the falsifiers were, of course, the communist propagandists who ruled over the entire East European region for many decades.

If history didn't suit their communist propaganda purposes, they had no qualms about simply revising it until it did.

Mysterious Enigma

As several other writers have acknowledged, the history of the Romanian people is an enigma. That the Romanian people even exist is a mystery.

Chief among the mysteries is the fact that I can't really use the term "Romanian people" without an explanation. Who are the "people" and where did they come from? As it turns out, there were no "people" who identified themselves as Romanians until quite recently. The "Romanian people" are a recent invention. The ancients didn't call themselves Romanians. But I'm getting ahead of the story.

I hope you find Romania's history as interesting as I do. It's not something I learned in my American schools. And before embarking on this adventure, I would have been hard pressed to quickly locate the country on a map.