The bulk of today's Romania was part of the Roman province of Dacia until the 3rd Century CE, when it began to be overrun by various tribes from northern Europe and the Eurasian steppes. From the 4th to 6th Centuries Huns and Visigoths marauded through Dacia, breaking Rome's hold on the region. In the 6th through 8th Centuries, the Turkic Avars and Bulgars as well as the Slavs settled in and crossed parts of modern Romania, many heading into the Balkans. The Bulgars set up a powerful state within the boundaries of Byzantium, assimilated with the Slavs, and in 865 adopted Orthodox Christianity. As the Bulgarian kingdom expanded to encompass much of the Balkan peninsula, it spread Orthodox Christianity northward into Romania.

In the 10th and 11th Centuries, the Turkic Magyars and Pechenegs swept into modern-day Romania from the Eurasian steppes, vanquishing the Bulgarians from all lands north of the Danube. The subsequent Magyar state came to dominate much of what is modern-day Hungary, as well as Transylvania, in modern Romania. Magyar elites started converting from paganism to Roman Catholicism from the 11th Century onward, suppressing Orthodox Christianity in the process. Meanwhile, the Pechenegs settled along the northern Danube, but by unwisely harassing both Kievan Russia and Byzantium they precipitated their own demise by the end of the 11th Century. The Pecheneg lands were henceforth overtaken by another Turkic tribe, the Cumans, who also waged war on Byzantium into the 13th Century, though they gradually integrated with the Bulgarians and Magyars, or joined the Golden Horde, a medieval Mongolian empire that encompassed most of Russia and reached the northwestern shores of the Black Sea, decimating Kievan Russia in the process. So, you might ask, where is Romania in all of this?

Following the late 13th Century retreat of the Mongols from the fertile plains in the area south of the Carpathians and north of the Danube, the native inhabitants came down from their mountain refuges to found the principality of Wallachia on those plains. Moldavia emerged from similar circumstances as a sister principality to Wallachia's east. Though the populations of Wallachia and Moldavia had intermixed with invading tribes for centuries, they did retain their Latin language dating back to Roman Dacia, and are considered ethnic Romanians. In-fighting among the native nobility in both principalities made consolidation of a single Romanian state impossible. As the Ottoman Empire expanded in the 15th Century, Wallachia and Moldavia attempted to stave off the Ottoman advance (see Vlad Tepes), but both principalities eventually succumbed to Istanbul. Unlike other Balkan states, however, the principalities made accords with the Porte that allowed the Romanian nobles to retain control of their regions while paying tribute to the Sultans. Transylvania also fell to the Porte but similarly arranged for rule by native princes under Ottoman suzerainty.

Over the 16th and 17th Centuries the Hapsburg Empire arose as a significant force on the western edge of Ottoman-run Romania. After laying unsuccessful siege to Hapsburg Vienna in 1683, the defeated Ottomans soon lost control of their holdings in Romania. Transylvania and the western third of Wallachia came under Hapsburg rule by 1718. In the early 19th Century, while Wallachia and Moldavia were ostensibly still under Ottoman suzerainty, Russia and the Hapsburgs repeatedly traded effective control of the two semi-autonomous principalities. In 1859, Wallachia and Moldavia united under a single ruler, and after the Russia-guided Treaty of San Stefano (1878), Romania (united Wallachia and Moldavia but not Austro-Hungarian-run Transylvania) was granted full independence.

In World War I, Romania's alignment with the winning side added significant territory to Romania after the war: Transylvania, long under Hapsburg control but with a large Romanian population; part of the fertile Dobrudzha, near the Danube Delta on the Black Sea, at Bulgaria's expense; and Bessarabia, a territory on the northwest Black Sea coast that had oft shifted hands between Russia and Moldavia. Interwar Romania was run by a royal dictatorship with increasingly fascist tendencies. When the Soviets invaded Bessarabia early in World War II, Romania's King Carol II abdicated the throne and left the state to the fascist Iron Guard and King Michael, who joined the Axis and attacked the Soviet Union alongside Germany. By 1944, the Soviets had turned the tables and Michael purged his regime of the Iron Guard, but not before Romania's fascists had slaughtered at least 300,000 "undesirables."

Desperate to retain power, Michael switched sides as the Red Army approached, but it was a vain attempt to avert what the Allied leaders had already agreed in private: Within two years the Romanian Communist Party was in power. Though its first Premier, Gheorghiu Gheorghiu-Dej, was initially a willing adherent to Soviet Stalinist orthodoxy, Romanian Communism veered from subservience to Moscow when the reformist Khrushchev insisted that Romania play breadbasket to the USSR's industrial behemoth. Insulted, Dej broke with Moscow and positioned himself as a Romanian Stalin, ruthlessly employing political imprisonment, forced labor, and torturous "re-education" to drive Romanian industrialization. It was this position that Nikolai Ceaucescu inherited in 1967.

While initially he proved popular at home and in the West by denouncing Dej's excesses and the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, and by maintaining an independent foreign policy that included interaction with the West, Ceaucescu soon resorted to his predecessor's tactics. He is infamous for his paranoia-inducing secret police and his "four child minimum" policies aimed at dramatically raising the birth rate (ostensibly to foster economic growth). Like Dej, Ceaucescu insisted on heavy-handed modernization schemes such as forced "systematization" of rural villages and expensive, illogical projects like the People's Palace in Bucharest (the second largest building after the U.S. Pentagon) floated by Western loans that indebted the state. In 1989, amid mass revolts by Romanians deeply angered over state repression, food shortages, and the Communists' unfulfilled promises, Ceaucescu was deposed and executed by the military.

The post-Communist era in Romania has seen difficult fiscal reforms and privatization schemes implemented by both the former opposition and former Communist parties. Poverty has remained high and there has been a worrying resurgence of ultranationalism in politics. Romania's hopes seem fixed on the one-two punch of NATO and EU membership.

Romania is a vast, beautiful country and the Monkey is anxious to return and see more of it. In particular, he longs to visit the Paris of the Balkans, Bucharest, and to push further north toward the Ukraine.

Wallachia_ 2__3__4__5

Transylvania_ 6__7__8__9

Drobeta Turnu-Severin

Fagaras Mountains

Biertan

Sighisoara

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