Romania historical timeline

Origins

Rome conquered Dacia in 106 AD and held it for less than two centuries, but the language stuck: Romanian is a Romance language, the only one in eastern Europe, surrounded by Slavic and Hungarian speakers. Trajan’s Column in Rome is a carved record of the conquest and is treated in Romania as a founding document. The medieval principalities of Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania then developed separately, the first two under Ottoman suzerainty and the third under Hungarian and later Habsburg rule, which is why Transylvania still looks and sounds different.

Turning points

Wallachia and Moldavia united in 1859 and won full independence in 1878; Transylvania joined after the First World War, creating Greater Romania. The Second World War was ruinous in every direction: an alliance with Germany, participation in the Holocaust in which several hundred thousand Jews and Roma were killed, a coup in 1944 that switched sides, and Soviet occupation afterwards. Nicolae Ceaușescu ruled from 1965 and grew steadily more extreme — he banned contraception and abortion to force the birth rate up, filling state orphanages; he demolished a fifth of central Bucharest to build a palace that is still among the heaviest buildings on earth; and he paid off the entire national debt by exporting food the country needed. In December 1989 he was overthrown and shot, the only leader in the bloc to go violently. Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007.

Influential people

Vlad Țepeș, the fifteenth-century Wallachian prince whose reputation was borrowed by a novelist he had nothing to do with. Mihai Eminescu, the national poet. Constantin Brâncuși, who took sculpture apart and rebuilt it. Eugène Ionesco and Emil Cioran, who wrote their major work in French. Nadia Comăneci, the first gymnast to score a perfect ten. And Ceaușescu, whose shadow is still long.

Cultural evolution

The Latin language sits on an Orthodox religious culture, which is an unusual combination and one Romanians point to often. Transylvania carries the architecture of its Saxon and Hungarian populations: fortified churches, walled towns, and villages that still look medieval. The painted monasteries of Bukovina have their frescoes on the outside walls, which should not have survived five centuries of weather and have. And the Carpathians hold the largest populations of brown bear, wolf and lynx anywhere in Europe outside Russia.

Present-day significance

Romania has one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union, with a large technology and outsourcing sector concentrated in Cluj, Bucharest and Timișoara. It has also lost several million people to emigration since 2007, which is the central demographic fact. The Danube Delta, the largest reed bed in the world, is a biosphere reserve, and the country’s position on the Black Sea has made it strategically central since 2022.