Official name The official name of Romania was mentioned for the first time in 1849 when the leaders of the Revolution for National Liberation from under the Habsburg yoke agreed to form a common army with the participation of military units from Hungary, Serbia and Romania, the last being represented by the joint armies of Transylvania, Banat, Wallachia and Moldavia. In 1859, after the union of Wallachia and Moldavia, Romania is to be found again under the name of the United Romanian Principalities. The present name of Romania becomes official and enters the vocabulary of the international community in 1862. The name Romania, which means “New Rome” in Latin, was given by Roman colonists after Emperor Trajan (c. 53 – 117 A.D.) and his legions crossed the Danube River and conquered Dacia (an ancient province located in present day Transylvania and the Carpathian Mountain Region) in 106 A.D.
Geography Romania is located South East of Central Europe, North of the Balkan Peninsula, in the Lower Danube basin, bordering the Black Sea. It is bounded on the north and east by Ukraine, on the east by the Republic of Moldova and the Black Sea, on the south by Bulgaria, on the south-west and west by Serbia and on the west by Hungary.
- Area: 238,391 sq. km (aprox. 92,000 sq. miles), thus positioned 12th in size in Europe.
- Border length: 3,190.3 km (aprox. 2,000 miles).
- Relief: characterized by a great variety of harmoniously arranged forms: the mountains hold 31% of its area, the hills and plateaus 36% and the plains 33%.
- Hidrography: The river Danube in the South of the country, length 1,075 km (out of the total 2,850 km from its source to its flowing into the Black Sea). Other rivers: Mures, Olt, Prut, Siret, Ialomita, Somes, Arges, Jiu, Buzau, Bistrita, Crisul Repede, etc. Lakes: approximately 2,300 lakes and over 1,150 ponds (2,650 sq, km). The best known are Razelm (415 sq. km), Sinoe (171 sq. km), Brates (21 sq. km), Tasaul (20 sq. km), Techirghiol (12 sq. km), and Snagov (5.8 sq. km).
- Climate: Temperate continental, with oceanic influences from the West, Mediteranean from the South-West, excessive continental from the North-East. Mean annual temperatures: ranging between 8oC in the North and 11oC in the South. Average annual rainfall does not exceed 700 mm.
- Population: On January 1st 2001, Romania’s population was of 22,438,000 inhabitants, in a slight regress in comparison with the previous year, of whom 11,461,000 women and 10,977,000 men. Romania shelters 0.40% of the world population, thus ranking the 30th among the world nations. According to the latest census, 89.7% are Romanians, 7.2% Hungarians, 1.8% Germans, 0.3% Jews and other ethnic groups which represent 1%.
CapitalBucharest municipality (1,521 sq. km divided into six administrative districts and the Ilfov Agricultural Sector) with a population of 2,066,723, lies in the South-Eastern part of the country, in the Romanian plain (altitude 85 m). It dates back to the 14th century and is recorded in writing for the first time in 1459 as residence of Prince Vlad the Impaler. Capital of Wallachia in the 17th to 19th centuries and then of Romania since 1862, Bucharest is the most important political, economic, cultural and scientific centre of the country. It is crossed by the Dambovita river and is bordered by the picturesque lakes of the valley of Colentina.
Bucharest is a city featuring a rich vegetation, wide parks, which has inspired the name of “garden-city”. It is a living city, with monumental buildings, with outstanding architectural values, big and interesting museums, theatres, opera hall, exhibition halls, memorial houses, universities, central public and administrative offices. The Palace of Parliament, for instance, is the second building in the world in point of size, after the Pentagon. The capital is also the largest industrial centre of Romania, with numerous factories and plants of all kinds (iron-and-steel, engineering, fine mechanics, tanning yards, food industry, etc.).
Administrative Division41 counties and Bucharest municipality (with a county status), 260 towns (of which 57 municipalities), 2,688 communes (with about 13,000 villages).
Counties: Alba, Arad, Arges, Bacau, Bihor, Bistrita-Nasaud, Botosani, Brasov, Braila, Buzau, Caras-Severin, Calarasi, Cluj, Constanta, Covasna, Dambovita, Dolj, Galati, Giurgiu, Gorj, Harghita, Hunedoara, Ialomita, Iasi, Ilfov, Maramures, Mehedinti, Mures, Neamt, Olt, Prahova, Satu Mare, Salaj, Sibiu, Suceava, Teleorman, Timis, Tulcea, Vaslui, Valcea, and Vrancea.
Main Cities(inhabitants per January 7, 1992 census)
Constanta (350,581); Iasi (344,425); Timisoara (334,115); Cluj-Napoca (328,602); Galati (326,141); Brasov (323,786) Craiova (303,959). Twenty-five cities have a population larger than 100,000, while eight cities exceed 300,000.
PortsOn the Black Sea: Constanta (can take ships over 150,000 dwt), Mangalia and Sulina (free port). On the Danube river: Turnu Severin, Turnu Magurele, Giurgiu, Oltenita, Cernavoda, Braila, Galati, Tulcea (the last three are river and sea ports). The Danube-Black Sea Canal (64.2 km long) between Cernavoda and Agigea-Constanta was opened for traffic in 1984. Following the inauguration in 1992 of the Rhine-Main-Danube Canal, it facilitates a direct connection with the North Sea. It is navigable for river and sea going ships of up to 5,000 dwt.
AirportsBucharest-Otopeni, Constanta-Mihail Kogalniceanu, Arad, Timisoara, Cluj-Napoca, (all for international traffic as well), Bacau, Baia Mare, Bucharest-Baneasa, Caransebes, Craiova, Deva, Iasi, Oradea, Satu Mare, Suceava, Targu Mures, and Tulcea.
National Flag
The first documents that mention the flags of the Romanian armies date back to the 14th century. Under the rule of Prince Michael the Brave, the one who, in 1600 united for the first time Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania, the Romanian flag was white and made of damask linen. Afterwards, until the middle of the 19th century it had various colors (red, green, yellow, white or in combinations). At the time of the Revolution of 1848, the national flag clearly defined its colors that are still preserved today: blue (next to the staff) yellow and red, all in vertical stripes.
National Coat-of-Arms(since 1990)
An eagle holding a cross in its beak and a sword and a scepter in its claws, as well as the symbols of the five historical provinces: Wallachia, Moldavia, Transylvania, Banat and Dobrogea. The whole composition is arranged on blue, symbolizing the sky. The oldest Romanian coat-of-arms mentioned in documents dates back to 1390, from the time of Prince Mircea the Old. The present day form of the Romanian coat-of-arms was adopted in 1922. In 1947, the Communist regime imposed another coat-of-arms that was given up in 1990 when the old one was again adopted.
National DayDecember 1st - marking the anniversary of the 1918 union of all Romanians into one single state, thus uniting Romania with Transylvania into what Europe came to call: The Great Romania.
National AnthemThe National Anthem "Awake, ye, Romanian" (adopted in 1990) is a patriotic call to the Romanian people for national liberation at the middle of the 19th century, written by poet Andrei Muresanu. The music belongs to writer, musician and folklorist Anton Pann. The other Romanian anthems praised either the monarchy or the communist regime.
LanguageThe latin from the Danube, the Carpathians and the Black Sea: the Romanian language.
Romanian is the official language. It was born through the fusion of the language of the natives with the language spoken by the Roman conquerors in the 1st-7th centuries. Latin made a decisive contribution to the vocabulary, grammatical structures as well as for the phonetic system. There are also other influences that appeared throughout the process of genesis on the part of the Slavonic, Turkish, Bulgarian and Greek languages. Romanian is the only Eastern European language that comes from Latin. As a result, it is much different from all the other languages that are spoken in the region. Romanian most closely resemble French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. These Western European languages also developed from Latin.
Linguists say that Romanian is the Latin spoken nowadays by Romanians, i.e., Latin, as it evolved in the course of time on the territories of Dacia and Moesia, since the seal of Rome was forever put here. Italian and French can equally well be defined as variants of Latin, spoken in Italy and Gaul, respectively. The main body of the Romanian vocabulary is of Latin origin. Most of it was inherited directly from Antiquity, through the natural evolution of the language and of the people who created it. Language is a living organism, which is born, grows and develops. The Roman colonists, the soldiers of the legions, the petty superintendents or the ordinary clerks who came to Moesia and Dacia did not bring along literary Latin with its strict grammar rules, accurate and elegant, but the vernacular. Most Thraco-Dacians learnt this lower-class Latin, with its many colloquialisms and slang phrases picked up in the street. The colonists came from various provinces or even from Italy itself, and each brought along with him the “innovations” to the Latin idiom contributed by his native region. Latin was even further modified in Dacia and Moesia.
As seen above, the natives and the colonists lived together. It was only natural, then, that Latin be altered by the local idiom and assimilate some Thraco-Dacian terms. Unwittingly, after several centuries, the Romans stopped being Roman and the Dacians were no longer Dacian; rather they represented a new synthesis in which Latinity triumphed. But it was a new brand of Latinity, different from the classical one. The language underwent a similar transformation: Latin or its vernacular in the beginning gradually metamorphosed into a new kind of Latin, actually, a new language, Romanian. It inherited about 160-170 words of Thraco-Dacian origin, accounting for less than 3 percent of the total 50,000 Romanian words. Long afterwards, after the eighth and ninth centuries, when, roughly speaking, the Romanian nation had been shaped, some Slav words adapted to the grammatical rules of Latin were added to the vocabulary of Romanian. Later on, the Romanian language was further enriched with terms from the languages of other people and population with which Romanians lived in close proximity. However, all its constituent elements-vocabulary, morphology, syntax-show that Romanian is fundamentally a neo-Latin language.
Bucharest - Capital of RomaniaBucharest is the most important political, economic, scientific and cultural center of the country. This is where the President of Romania carries on his activity as well as the Government, the Supreme Court of Justice and the Supreme Tribunal, the main political parties, the most important banking-financial institutions, the Chamber of Industry and Commerce, the Romanian Academy. Also, the most important Romanian universities and many other higher learning and scientific research institutions, the main radio and TV stations, the most influential newspapers, cultural institutions with national character (the National Theatre, the Romanian Opera, the „George Enescu“ Philharmonic, the Art Museum, the Romanian Peasant's Museum and other cultural establishments), and thousands of industrial, construction and trading companies are all in Bucharest. The Capital of Romania is also a great exhibition centre that gathers every year participants from all over the world for traditional economic and commercial events. The city has two airports: Otopeni for international flights and Baneasa for private, charter and airtaxi flights. The development plan of this airport, to be finalized after 2010, envisages, inter alia, the building of modern parking lots, of a transit hospital, a cargo terminal and heliports. The city also has a central railway station „Gara de Nord“ and several smaller ones, the underground and a network of tramway, trolley bus and bus lines.
Located on the banks of the River Dambovita, in the Danube plain, about 150 km far from the Southern Carpathians, Bucharest dates more than 500 years back. The legend says that it got its name from a shepherd Bucur who settled down with its flocks of sheep on the present heart of the Romanian capital. After the first houses were built in the vicinity of the river, it is said that the shepherd would have built a church that is still named after him. The name of Bucharest was mentioned for the first time in a charter signed on September 20th 1459 by Prince Vlad the Impaler who succeeded his father, Vlad Dracul to the throne. In 1862, Bucharest became the capital of Romania. Around 1800, in Bucharest, there were 6.000 houses and 50,000 inhabitants. The census of 1831 recorded 60,000 inhabitants, in 1878 there were 177,646 inhabitants, in 1899 more than 276,000 and in 1918 more than 420,000 inhabitants. In 1938, the Capital of Romania had 800,000 inhabitants while in 1998 there were over 2 million. The metropolis reached its artistic flourishing in the time of ruling Prince Constantin Brancoveanu (1688-1714) who introduced his own style in the Romanian architecture.
In the course of time, Bucharest experienced memorable moments, some of them dramatic which had unfavorable repercussions on its evolution:
• It was occupied by foreign armies (Ottoman, Czarist, Habsburg, German);
• A great fire broke out in 1718 which destroyed a significant part of the Princely Court while the Great Fire of 1874 turned large areas of the town into ashes;
• Between 1812 and 1813, a serious plague epidemic burst in Bucharest and it entered history as „Caragea's Plague“ (after the name of the Phanariot Prince that was ruling Wallachia at that time);
• In 1730 an earthquake destroyed even the stone foundations of the Princely Palace. The seism of 1821, much stronger, destroyed the Coltea Tower, Bucharest's symbol in the 18th century. In 1940, a catastrophic earthquake (over 7 degrees on the Richter open scale) again shook the metropolis when many buildings tumbled down. A similar seism caused the death of more than a thousand people and great damage in March 1977;
• The first line of tramway (pulled by horses) from Gara de Nord to the „Sf. Gheorghe“ Square was inaugurated on December 28th 1872.
• The capital of Romania was the first city in the world lit with oil in 1861. Ten years later, on December 31st 1871, it passed to the lighting with gas;
• On June 9th 1878, the first airship (a huge balloon made in Paris) rose with two persons on board on the Hill of the Metropolitan Church in Bucharest;
• In 1878, the first telephone was installed in Bucharest (two years after the American Graham Bell patented his invention). In 1886, the first telephone exchange with 5 lines was installed in the Capital;
• The peace treaty between the Russians and the Turks was signed here, ending the 1812 war between the two Empires. One hundred years later, in 1913, the officials of the countries that took part in the Balkan War signed the peace treaty also in Bucharest.
In the pre-war period, Bucharest was considered to be "the Little Paris" or "the Balkans' Paris", because, just like the French capital, it had straight boulevards lined with trees and very beautiful parks, gardens and a chain of lakes. The Arch of Triumph of Paris has a replica in Bucharest. The reason for which at that time Bucharest was called "the Little Paris" was the similarity in architecture to that of the French capital. It was to be expected since many French architects such as Bradeau, Gottereau, Le Blanc, Maimarlou, Ballu erected wonderful buildings in the Romanian capital. Among them, there is the Romanian Athenaeum, one of the most representative buildings in Bucharest. After years of restoration works, the Romanian Athenaeum is again ready to receive music fans.
The Romanian Athenaeum was partially commissioned in 1866. It was built in neoclassical style with decoration elements typical to the French architecture of late 19th century. The blueprints were made by French architect Albert Galeron backed up by the greatest Romanian architects of that time: Grigore Cerchez, lon Mincu, Ion Gr. Cantacuzino. The concert hall has 28.50 m in diameter, 18 m in height and 794 seats. The building is 41 m high. The dome of the concert hall is decorated with zoo~, phyto~ and anthropomorphic elements in gilded multicolour relief „reminding of the heavens in the Romanian fairy tales.“
New buildings were erected near these genuine architectural gems, the most famous one being the Palace of Parliament, the first largest construction in Europe and the second largest one in the world after the Pentagon building. Over the past 12 years, new residential areas with modern villas have emerged in the outskirts of Bucharest. In the capital there are numerous theatre companies with exquisite repertoires, as well as casinos, discos, cafes and restaurants, just as a wide variety of shops.
Worth mentioning is also the „Dimitrie Gusti“ National Village Museum, which hosts 342 units belonging to the national heritage, each representing a document, signed and dated by the craftsmen that created them centuries ago. This justifies the care and passion of specialists today to reconstruct the fragment lost a year ago restored to „the national library of world reference“, located in a garden of the museum, a genuine school of millenary traditional crafts and art of survival of those peasants.