Romanian Culture

The culture of Romania is an umbrella term used to encapsulate the ideas, customs and social behaviours of the people of Romania that developed due to the country's distinct geopolitical history and evolution. It is theorized that Romanians and related peoples (Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, and Istro-Romanians) were formed through the admixture of the descendants of Roman colonists and the indigenous Dacian people who were subsequently Romanized.

Background

Romania's history has been full of rebounds: the culturally productive epochs were those of stability when the people proved quite an impressive resourcefulness in the making up for less propitious periods and were able to rejoin the mainstream of European culture. This stands true for the years after the Phanariote- Ottoman period, at the beginning of the 19th century, when Romanians had a historical context and Romania started to become westernized, mainly with French influences, which they pursued steadily and at a very fast pace. From the end of the 18th century, the sons of the upper classes started having their education in Paris, and French became (and was until the communist years) a genuine second language of culture for Romanians.

The modeling role of France, especially in the fields of political ideas, administration, and law, as well as in literature, was paralleled, from the mid-19th century down to World War I, by German culture as well, which also triggered constant relationships with the German world not only at a cultural level but in daily life as well. With the arrival of Soviet communism in the area, Romania quickly adopted many soviet influences, and Russian was also widely taught in the country during Romania's socialist years.

History

Middle Ages

Until the 14th century, small states ( Romanian: ''voievodate'') were spread across the territory of Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia. The medieval principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia arose in the mid 1300s, in the areas south and east of the Carpathian Mountains respectively.

Moldavia and Wallachia were both situated on important commercial routes often crossed by Polish, Saxon, Greek, Armenian, Genovese, and Venetian merchants, connecting them well to the evolving culture of medieval Europe. Grigore Ureche's chronicle, ''Letopisețul Țărîi Moldovei'' (''The Chronicles of the land of Moldavia''), covering the period from 1359 to 1594, is a very important source of information about life, events, and personalities in Moldavia. It is among the first non-religious Romanian literary texts; due to its size and the information that it contains, it is arguably the most important Romanian document from the 17th century.

The first printed book, a prayer book in Slavonic, was produced in Wallachia in 1508, and the first book in Romanian, a catechism, was printed in Transylvania, in 1544. At the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, European humanism influenced the works of Miron Costin and Ion Neculce, the Moldavian chroniclers">Ion Neculce">rom the rule ...