From Dacia to the European Union
The History of Romania
Dacians and Romans, medieval principalities, the Great Union of 1918, communism and the 1989 revolution — two millennia of history at a crossroads of empires.
The history of Romania is the story of a Latin people formed at the edge of empires, who kept their language and identity through centuries of foreign domination until their union into a single modern state.
Dacia and Rome
In antiquity, the territory of present-day Romania was inhabited by the Dacians (or Geto-Dacians), a Thracian people who reached their height under King Decebalus. After two hard-fought wars, the Roman emperor Trajan conquered Dacia in AD 106, turning it into a Roman province. The colonisation and Romanisation of the following centuries lie behind the Romanian language and the country's name. Trajan's Column in Rome tells these wars in stone.
The Middle Ages: the three Romanian lands
After the Roman withdrawal and centuries of migrations, three principalities gradually formed: Wallachia and Moldavia to the south and east of the Carpathians, and Transylvania to the west. Voivodes such as Mircea the Elder, Stephen the Great of Moldavia (who defended his land against the Ottomans) and Michael the Brave — who in 1600 briefly achieved the first union of the three lands — marked this era. Transylvania followed a distinct path, under the Hungarian crown and then as an autonomous principality under Ottoman suzerainty.
Between Ottomans and Habsburgs
For centuries, Wallachia and Moldavia were vassals of the Ottoman Empire, paying tribute but keeping their autonomy and their own rulers. In the eighteenth century they were governed by Phanariot princes appointed by the Porte. Transylvania entered the orbit of the Habsburg (Austrian) Empire from 1699. These imperial borders divided the Romanian people for generations.
The birth of modern Romania
In 1859, through the double election of Alexandru Ioan Cuza as ruler of both Moldavia and Wallachia, the two principalities united, forming the nucleus of the modern Romanian state, officially called "Romania" from 1862. Under Carol I of the House of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, the country won its independence from the Ottoman Empire following the war of 1877–1878, and in 1881 became a kingdom.
The Great Union of 1918
The climax came after the First World War: in 1918, Bessarabia, Bukovina and — on 1 December, at Alba Iulia — Transylvania united with the Kingdom of Romania, forming Greater Romania. That day, 1 December, is today Romania's National Day.
The Second World War and communism
The Second World War brought territorial losses and dramatic changes of alliance. After the war, under Soviet pressure, the monarchy was abolished in 1947 and a communist regime installed. From 1965 the country was led by Nicolae Ceaușescu, whose dictatorship grew ever more repressive and isolated, with severe hardship for the population in the 1980s.
The 1989 Revolution and after
In December 1989, a popular uprising that began in Timișoara and spread to Bucharest overthrew the regime; Ceaușescu was removed and executed, and Romania entered, often with difficulty, the path of democracy and a market economy. In the following decades the country joined NATO (2004) and the European Union (2007), integrating into Euro-Atlantic structures — the latest chapter in a long history of resilience at a crossroads of empires.