Romania Culture & Language

Romanian culture sits at a junction — Latin language, Orthodox faith, Balkan and Ottoman inheritance, Habsburg influence in Transylvania — and the combination is unlike anywhere else.

The painted monasteries

In Bucovina, sixteenth-century monastery churches were frescoed on their exterior walls with biblical cycles and a famous Last Judgement, in pigments that have survived five hundred winters. Voronet’s particular blue has never been fully reproduced. They are UNESCO-listed and still working monasteries.

Wood

The wooden churches of Maramures, with shingled walls and spires far taller than their footprint suggests, are built entirely without nails. The carved gates of the region are a distinct art, and the Merry Cemetery at Sapanta marks each grave with a painted blue cross bearing a rhymed and frequently blunt account of the person beneath.

Art and letters

Constantin Brancusi reshaped modern sculpture and left the Endless Column at Targu Jiu; George Enescu is the national composer; Mircea Eliade, Emil Cioran and Eugene Ionesco all came out of interwar Bucharest. Herta Muller, writing in German from the Banat, won the Nobel in 2009.

Music and dance

Doina, a form of lament, is UNESCO-listed, and the panpipe tradition and Roma lautari bands are the living folk music.

The Dracula problem

Bram Stoker never visited Romania and set his novel in a Transylvania assembled from library books. Vlad Tepes, the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince the name was borrowed from, was a real and violently effective ruler who is remembered here as a defender against the Ottomans rather than as a monster, and he had almost nothing to do with Bran Castle. Romanians are used to the question and mostly find it funny; the castle sells the story anyway.

Food

Sarmale cabbage rolls, mamaliga polenta, ciorba soured soups, mici grilled meat rolls, and tuica plum brandy offered on arrival.

Romanian is a Romance language, the descendant of the Latin spoken in Roman Dacia, with Slavic, Hungarian and Turkish borrowings layered on. Speakers of Italian, Spanish or French will recognise a great deal of it in writing.

English is widely spoken by younger Romanians and in the cities and tourism, and the standard is high — foreign television is subtitled rather than dubbed, which has made a real difference. In villages and among older people it is much less common.

Hungarian is the first language of a large minority in Transylvania, particularly in Harghita and Covasna. German is still spoken by a small Saxon remnant and taught in Transylvanian schools. French was the prestige second language before 1945 and older people often have it.

Useful: buna ziua for hello, multumesc for thank you, va rog for please, noroc as a toast, da and nu.