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Last update:
2003, March 14

Situated at a crossroads of civilizations, graced with a harmoniously distributed relief, Romania brought an original touch in the concert of universal history and culture, attesting to a tormented but not less glorious past. The history of the Romanians is, undoubtedly, part of the European history, perhabs one of the most eventful. Born, like the other Romanic people, in A.D. 1st millennium, the Romanian people has continuously inhabited the selfsame geographical place from the old times to this day, a space where its forefathers belonging to the Thracian king had arrived as early as the 2nd millennium B.C.

Today the Romanians are the sole descendants of the Eastern Roman world, and their language, along with Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, is one of the major of-spring of Latin. They are the sole people who by their name - roman (deriving from the Latin romanus) have preserved to this day the memory of the Seal of Rome, a memory to be perpetuted later in the name adopted by the nation State Romania. It is a Romanic isle that has endured in a sea of Slavic and Finno-Ugric neighbours, in a region that had been devastated for more than a millennium by all the migratory waves known by Europe.

Christians of Orthodox rite, the Romanians lived from the Middle Ages to the modern times in three neighbouring self-dependent principalities: Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania - which for their location at the crossroads of big expansionistic empires the Ottoman Empire, Czarist Russia and the Hapsburg Empire-, managed to preserve their state entity, faith and civilization, at the time when neighbouring kingdoms like Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary or Poland had been wiped off the map of Europe.

Later on, in spite of the hostility and open opposition of the same great and powerful neighbours, they managed to achieve national unity in 1859, a process eventually completed in 1918. At the end of World War I, the centuries-old dream of reunification of all the Romanians within the boundaries of one single nation-state came true, paid with the sacrifice of over 800,000 lives. The ensuring two decades of economic, political and cultural advance are cut short soon after the outbreak of World War II, in 1940, when one third of the country's area and population is amputated. In 1945, after 4 years of war which left another 700,000 people dead, the nearly one-century long democratic traditions (with all the inherent imperfections) are cut short by Soviet troops and the forcible imposition of the communist regime.

The hopes awakened by the distance taken from the Soviet model over 1960-1968 are soon dispelled by the advent to power of most oppressive and absurd totalitarian regime - that of Nicolae Ceausescu. That devastating dictatorial rule is brought to an end by the people's revolt of December 1989, which closes the historical gap Romania lived in for 45 years and opened a new page in Romania's contemporary history. Conditions were created for a final breakaway from the communist regime and paved the way for the restoration of democracy based on the multi-party system and a market economy. The adoption of the new Constitution on 21 November 1991, the free parliamentary and presidential elections of May 1990 and September 1992 were as many steps on the path to the irreversible breakaway from the totalitarian past.

Rulers from Wallachia and Moldavia till 1859 and Romania's Heads of State.

More information on the History Server.