History

In the Carpathian area, the first ethnographic documentation attests to the existence of a conglomerate of Tracian tribes of which Herodotus, in the 6th century BC, mentions a distinct one, along with that of the Getae, who lived north of the Danube. In the Roman documents, the Getae are called Dacians, and according to geographer Strabo, from the time of Emperor Augustus (27 B.C. - 14 A.D.) “The Dacians and the Getae spoke the same language”. The political centre of the Getae-Dacian civilisation was located in the Orastie Mountains in Sarmizegetusa (the western part of current Romania), this civilisation reaching its peak during the rule of kings Burebista (around 80- 44 B.C.) and Decebalus (87-106 A.D.)

Following two military campaigns in 101-102 and 105-106 AD, Emperor Trajan defeated the Dacians and created the Roman province of Dacia. Until around 270-275 when the Roman Empire decided to withdraw its military and administration from the province, Dacia underwent rapid and dramatic transformations that made it a legitimate part of the Roman world.

For almost 1000 years between the IV th and the XIV th century, the territory of today’s Romania was invaded by a whole series of migrant tribes of Germanic, Iranian, Slavic and Turkish descent. While varying in intensity and presence, they all brought their influence to bear on the local people.

Forms of pre-Romanian civilization were first recorded in Byzantine documents as early as the VII th and the VIII th century, but the first state actually ruled by a Romanian leader was Duke Gelu’s, lying inside the Carpathians’ Arch and attested by the Hungarian kings’ chronicle Gesta Hungarorum in the X th century. The Principality of Transylvania was founded in the early XII th century after the Hungarians, defeated local opposition and occupied the territory north of the Carpathians. The first medieval Romanian states in the south and the east of the Carpathian Mountains, Moldova and Wallachia, would only appear two centuries later, between 1330 and 1350.

Although located in Europe’s hinterland, the Romanian space shared in contemporaneous European values, the most salient of which was Christianity. The preponderance of the Greek Orthodox Church in the Romanian principalities was a mark of the pervasive Byzantine influence in the whole south European region.

Between the XIV th and the XVI th century, Romanian princes like Mircea the Elder, Stephen the Great, Vlad the Impaler and Iancu of Hunedoara in Transylvania, founder of the Hungarian Huniady Dynasty, joined the alliances of the European kings who were trying to stem the rise of the Ottoman Empire.

By the end of the XVI th century the sultans in Istanbul had conquered the whole Balkan region, Asia Minor, Noth Africa, the Middle East and had penetrated into Europe as far as the gates of Vienna. For well over half a millennium the Romanian space was under the influence of the Ottoman cultural model.

The first attempts to escape the Turkish domination and return to European values were made from the XVIIth century onwards under the reign of history-making figures such as Michael the Brave, Serban Cantacuzino, Constantin Brancoveanu and Dimitrie Cantemir. 

In the XVIII th century the political, social and economic crisis of the Ottoman world deepened, and as a consequence turning to the West was seen as increasingly attractive. At the same time the Austrian-Russian alliances, supported by some Romanian princes, began to push the Ottoman Empire back, out of the South-east European space.

In the early XIX th Century, a period which saw the birth of nations across Europe, the Romanian space began to adopt the ideas of Romanticism. The debates over the future of a Romanian state led to the union between Moldova and Wallachia and the creation of the institutions that would make such a state functional.
As a result of the reforms carried out by King Carol I of Hohenzollern-Singmaringen (1866-1914), the second half of the XIXth century proved to be one of the most glorious periods in Romanian history. At the end of World War One in 1918, a number of territories that had previously been part of the Russian and Austro-Hungarian empires, but which were inhabited mostly by Romanians, were united with the Romanian Kingdom and came to form what was then called the Greater Romania.

In the period between the two world wars Romania’s economic and political growth continued under the reigns of King Ferdinand I (1914-1927) and King Carol II (1930-1940). Romanian industry in particular developed especially in the mining, steelworks and engineering sectors. Political stability led to a rise in living standards, due mainly to growing foreign investment. Liberal democracy and private property became the twin engines of a free Romanian society.

But in the XX th century, “the century of extremes”, totalitarianism affected Romania as well. First, it was fascism, which reached its peak in the 1930s and 40s and under Marshal Ion Antonescu’s regime. After the Second World War, it was replaced by the Communist dictatorship with the help of the Soviet armies.
The communist regime led by Gheorghe Gheorghiu-Dej (1947-1965) and Nicolae Ceausescu (1965-1989) led to very strong social mutations, introduced Stalinist practices inspired by the Marxist-Leninist political model, repressed any form of dissidence and took catastrophic measures in terms of economic policies.

The communist crisis reached its peak in the 1980s and ended in 1989 with the toppling of Ceausescu’s communist regime after a revolution that cost some 1,300 Romanians their lives. As of 1989 Romania has gradually returned to democracy and market economy.

(Radio Romania International)