RomaniaRomânia

Before Rome, the lands inside the Carpathian arc belonged to the Dacians, a Thracian people whose kings built mountain fortresses in the Orăștie hills. Emperor Trajan conquered them in two wars that ended in 106 CE, and Trajan's Column in Rome still shows the campaign. Roman rule north of the Danube lasted only about 165 years, but Romanians trace their Latin language to it, and the question of how that language survived a thousand years of migrations — Goths, Huns, Slavs, Avars, Magyars — became a political argument between Romanian and Hungarian historians.

In the Middle Ages the territory split three ways. Transylvania came under the Hungarian crown, which invited German-speaking 'Saxon' settlers in the 12th and 13th centuries to guard the passes; they built Sibiu, Brașov, Sighișoara and hundreds of fortified churches. South and east of the mountains, the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia emerged in the 14th century under Orthodox princes (voievozi). Their best-known rulers — Vlad III of Wallachia, remembered for impaling enemies, and Stephen the Great of Moldavia, who fought the Ottomans for decades — held off conquest, but both principalities ended up paying tribute to Istanbul and keeping their own princes and churches.

For the next three centuries Wallachia and Moldavia were Ottoman vassals, ruled from the 18th century by Greek Phanariot princes appointed by the sultan, while Transylvania passed from a semi-independent principality to the Habsburgs in 1699. Romanian-speaking peasants were the majority in Transylvania but had no political rights alongside the Hungarian nobles, Saxons and Székelys. That imbalance fed a Romanian national movement in the 18th and 19th centuries that looked to Rome and to Paris for its identity.

Wallachia and Moldavia united in 1859 by electing the same prince, Alexandru Ioan Cuza; independence from the Ottomans came in 1878, and a German prince, Carol I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, became king and built Peleș Castle. After the First World War, in which Romania fought on the Allied side, Transylvania, Bucovina and Bessarabia voted to join the kingdom in 1918. 'Greater Romania' doubled in size and gained large Hungarian, German, Jewish and Ukrainian minorities. The interwar years brought Bucharest its boulevards and 'Little Paris' reputation, and also a violent fascist movement, the Iron Guard.

In the Second World War Romania lost territory to the Soviet Union and Hungary, joined Nazi Germany under Marshal Ion Antonescu, and took part in the murder of Jews and Roma in Bessarabia and Transnistria before switching sides in August 1944. The Soviet-backed communists forced King Michael to abdicate in 1947. From 1965 Nicolae Ceaușescu built a personality cult, paid off the foreign debt by rationing food and heat in the 1980s, and bulldozed a fifth of historic Bucharest for his palace. In December 1989 protests in Timișoara spread to Bucharest; about 1,100 people died, and the Ceaușescus were tried and shot on Christmas Day. Romania joined NATO in 2004, the EU in 2007 and the Schengen area in full in 2025.

About 19 million people live in Romania, down from 23 million in 1990, and several million more live abroad — in Italy, Spain, Germany and the UK above all. Emigration since EU entry has emptied villages, lifted wages through remittances, and left some regions with older populations. At home, Bucharest, Cluj, Timișoara and Iași are growing while small towns shrink.

Romanian is the easternmost Romance language, descended from the Latin of Roman Dacia and shaped by Slavic, Hungarian, Turkish and Greek loanwords. It was written in Cyrillic until the 1860s, when the Latin alphabet was adopted as a statement of identity. Speakers of Italian or Spanish recognise many words; the grammar keeps a case system and puts the article at the end of the noun (om = man, omul = the man).

Hungarians make up about 6% of the population, concentrated in the Székely Land (Harghita and Covasna counties), where Hungarian is the everyday language and signs are bilingual, and in cities like Cluj, Oradea and Târgu Mureș. The Transylvanian Saxons, once hundreds of thousands, mostly left for Germany after 1990, though their villages, churches and a German-language school tradition remain; Sibiu elected a Saxon mayor, Klaus Iohannis, who later served two terms as president. Roma are Romania's largest minority after the Hungarians, officially about 3% and probably more, and face deep discrimination.

About 85% of Romanians declare themselves Orthodox, and faith is visible in daily life: people cross themselves when passing a church, new churches rise in suburbs, and fasting periods before Easter and Christmas fill menus with vegan dishes. Easter is the biggest holiday, with a midnight service where candles are lit from the priest's flame. Transylvania adds Catholic, Reformed, Unitarian and Lutheran churches, and Greek-Catholic parishes that follow Orthodox rites under Rome.

Romanian cooking grew out of peasant households: pork from the family pig, cornmeal polenta (mămăligă) since maize arrived in the 17th century, sheep's cheese from the mountain shepherds, and sour soups soured with fermented wheat bran (borș). Ottoman rule added stuffed vegetables, sarmale and sweet pastries; the Habsburgs and Hungarians brought paprika stews and cakes; the Saxons left smoked meats and bread traditions.

The calendar sets the menu. The pig is slaughtered before Christmas, lamb is eaten at Easter, and the Orthodox fasts — about 180 days a year for the devout — require food without meat, dairy or eggs. That is why beans, aubergine salad, zacuscă, mushroom dishes and vegetable sarmale are staples, and why many restaurants mark dishes 'de post'.

Wine has been made here since antiquity, and Romania is one of Europe's larger producers. Native grapes — Fetească Neagră, Fetească Albă, Fetească Regală, Tămâioasă Românească, Grasă de Cotnari — sit beside international varieties in regions from Dealu Mare near Bucharest to Cotnari in Moldavia and the Târnave valley in Transylvania. Fruit brandy is the household spirit: țuică from plums in the south, stronger double-distilled pălincă and horincă in Transylvania and Maramureș, often home-made and offered on arrival.

Romania's best-known art is religious. In Bucovina in the 1530s and 1540s, Moldavian princes and bishops had the outside walls of monasteries painted with Last Judgements, sieges and saints — a Bible for villagers who could not read. Voroneț's deep blue and Sucevița's ladder of virtues are the most famous. In Maramureș, communities barred from building stone churches under Habsburg rule raised tall oak churches with shingled spires; eight are on the UNESCO list. Wallachia developed the Brâncovenesc style around 1700, blending Byzantine, Ottoman and Renaissance ornament, seen at Horezu and at Stavropoleos in Bucharest.

Transylvania looks west: Gothic churches in Brașov and Sibiu, Renaissance and Baroque squares, and hundreds of village churches wrapped in defensive walls against Ottoman and Tatar raids — Biertan, Viscri, Prejmer and Saschiz among them. Castles range from the Gothic Corvin Castle in Hunedoara to the 19th-century royal fantasy of Peleș. Bucharest mixes Orthodox churches, Belle Époque palaces, interwar modernism and the vast communist civic centre.

Modern Romanian culture punches above its weight. Constantin Brâncuși reinvented sculpture from Paris, and his Endless Column stands in Târgu Jiu. George Enescu is the national composer, celebrated in the Enescu Festival. Eugène Ionesco, Emil Cioran and Mircea Eliade wrote in French and shaped European thought. Since the mid-2000s the 'Romanian New Wave' of film — Cristi Puiu, Cristian Mungiu, Corneliu Porumboiu, Radu Jude — has won prizes at Cannes and Berlin with spare, realistic stories of post-communist life.

The Carpathians curve through the middle of Romania like a fishhook, enclosing the Transylvanian plateau and separating it from the plains of Wallachia and Moldavia. The Făgăraș range rises to 2,544 m at Moldoveanu; the Bucegi, Piatra Craiului and Retezat offer some of Europe's wildest hiking, and the Apuseni hold karst caves and ice caves. Old-growth beech forests in several ranges are on the UNESCO list.

Romania has the largest population of brown bears in the European Union — estimates range from about 6,000 to 8,000 — plus wolves, lynx and reintroduced bison. Bears have become a political issue as they wander into towns such as Brașov and Sinaia and kill livestock or, occasionally, people; parliament has raised culling quotas, and conservationists argue that feeding by tourists and waste in towns makes the problem worse.

The Danube forms most of the southern border before turning north and splitting into three arms in the Danube Delta, the largest and best-preserved delta in Europe and a UNESCO biosphere reserve. Pelicans, herons and more than 300 bird species use its reed beds and lakes. Upstream, at the Iron Gates, the river cuts a narrow gorge between Romania and Serbia, now dammed for hydropower. The short Black Sea coast runs from the delta south past Constanța to the Bulgarian border.

Romania has changed fast since 2007. EU funds rebuilt old towns and roads, Bucharest and Cluj became tech and outsourcing hubs, and average incomes have risen toward the EU norm, while rural poverty and weak public services persist. The country is still building its motorway network, and the train system, underfunded for decades, is slower than it was in the 1980s on some lines.

Politics was shaken in late 2024 when the Constitutional Court annulled the first round of the presidential election after evidence of a coordinated online campaign for an outsider candidate, amid allegations of Russian interference. The rerun in May 2025 was won by Nicușor Dan, the pro-EU former mayor of Bucharest. A large budget deficit then forced tax rises and spending cuts, including a VAT increase to 21% in August 2025 — check for later changes.

Romania sits on NATO's eastern edge, sharing a long border with Ukraine, and has hosted allied troops and an expanding air base near Constanța since 2022. Fragments of Russian drones striking Ukrainian Danube ports have fallen on Romanian soil in Tulcea county. For visitors, day-to-day life is calm, and full Schengen membership since 2025 has removed the old border queues with Hungary and Bulgaria; the leu remains the currency, with euro adoption not expected before the end of the decade — check.