Romanian culture: an Orthodox country that writes in Latin letters

Why Romanians stopped writing in Cyrillic

Romanian first appears in writing in the sixteenth century, and it appears in the wrong alphabet for a Romance language. The oldest known text is a letter sent in 1521 by Neacșu of Câmpulung to the mayor of Brașov, written in a script derived from the Old Church Slavonic version of the Cyrillic alphabet. That script carried the language in Wallachia and Moldavia until 1859.

Printing followed the same eastern channel. A prayer book in Slavonic came off a press in Wallachia in 1508, and the first book printed in Romanian, a catechism, appeared in Transylvania in 1544. Both landmarks happened at the edge of the German world rather than in the principalities: the letter of 1521 went to the mayor of the Saxon town of Kronstadt, which Romanians call Brașov, and the catechism was printed at Hermannstadt, which they call Sibiu.

Becoming a literary language took another century and a half. Dosoftei, metropolitan at Iași, published a Romanian metrical psalter in 1673, the first successful poetry written in the language, and the monks at Snagov near Bucharest printed the first Romanian Bible in 1688. Grigore Ureche's chronicle of Moldavia, covering the years from 1359 to 1594, is among the earliest non-religious texts in it.

The alphabet changed because a group of scholars decided the ancestry of the language ought to be legible on the page. The Transylvanian School, formed at the end of the eighteenth century, argued the Roman element in Romanian origins into grammars and histories and built a Latin-based alphabet, which eventually supplanted the Cyrillic one. The modern alphabet is the twenty-six letters of the Latin one plus five more, ă, â, î, ț and ș, for a total of thirty-one.

What makes the switch legible as a decision rather than a drift is what happened across the Prut. In the Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic the same language went on being written in a Cyrillic alphabet until 1991, when Moldova moved to the Latin one. Two scripts, one language, and the choice between them was always an argument about which half of Europe it belonged to.

What the Orthodox Church does differently here

At the 2021 census 73.60% of respondents identified as Orthodox Christians and 73.42% specifically as members of the Romanian Orthodox Church, with Protestants at 6.22%, Roman Catholics at 3.89 and Greek Catholics at 0.61. Some 58,347 people were Muslim, mostly of Turkish and Tatar ethnicity, and 2,708 were Jewish, the remnant of a community that numbered 728,115 and made up 4% of the population at the 1930 census.

The church is autocephalous and in full communion with the other Orthodox churches, and its canonical jurisdiction covers Romania and Moldova. The feature with no parallel anywhere is in the service itself: alone among Orthodox churches, this one operates inside a Latin culture and uses a Romance liturgical language. The formulas the modern national mythology repeats follow from that, an island of Latinity in a Slavic sea, the only Orthodox Christian Latin people.

The smallest figure in the census carries the largest history. Habsburg pressure produced the Act of Union of 1698 and a synod of bishops on 4 September 1700, and the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church that came out of it sent its clergy to be trained in Catholic institutions. What travelled back along that link was the Enlightenment, and with it the Transylvanian School and the alphabet it built. Greek Catholicism now accounts for 0.61% of the population, and the movement it carried set the terms the rest of the culture has argued in ever since.

The church remains the most trusted institution in the country even as its weight in daily life has fallen, and attendance is highest in rural communities and among older people in the cities. Accusations of collaboration with the communist regime continue to attach to it, and clerics including Dumitru Stăniloae and Richard Wurmbrand protested openly against political interference. Outside formal practice, belief runs together with the farming calendar: homes are blessed at Epiphany, candles are lit for the dead at Easter, and icons sit inside ordinary domestic routine rather than beside it.

Where the buildings carry two traditions

Romanian churches were traditionally not built on a monumental scale, and the ones that matter are small, remote, and made of whatever the region had.

In Maramureș in the north the material is timber, and the wooden churches there push the technique to its limit: tall, slim bell towers at the western end of the building, a spire that reads as Gothic, and a plan underneath it that is Orthodox. Eight are on the World Heritage list, at Bârsana, Budești, Desești, Ieud, Plopiș, Poienile Izei, Rogoz and Șurdești.

In northern Moldavia the monastery churches were built roughly between 1487 and 1583 and painted on the outside as well as the inside, Moldovița, Sucevița and Voroneț among them. In Wallachia the cathedral at Curtea de Argeș is Byzantine with Moorish influence, and the eighteenth-century churches show Greek influence.

The one style the country produced on its own terms is the Brâncovenesc, named after Constantin Brâncoveanu, the prince of Wallachia who founded the monastery at Horezu in 1690. Horezu is listed as the reference example: Byzantine composition carrying Renaissance sculpted detail, votive portraits and painted decoration. Snagov and Sâmbăta de Sus in Transylvania are the other classic cases.

The Saxons who settled Transylvania built in stone and built for defence. Seven villages with fortified churches are listed, six of them Saxon and one Székely, holding a settlement pattern that has survived since the late Middle Ages, and the citadel of Sighișoara, founded by Saxon colonists in the twelfth century, is still inhabited.

Four of the six are churches, which is a fair account of where the craft went.

How Paris became a second capital

From the end of the eighteenth century the sons of the upper classes were educated in Paris, and French became a genuine second language of culture in Romania, and remained one until the communist years. France supplied the models for political ideas, administration and law as well as for literature, and from the middle of the nineteenth century until the First World War German culture ran alongside it, in daily life as well as on the shelf.

The institutions arrived quickly once there was a state to hold them. Gheorghe Lazăr and Ion Heliade Rădulescu founded the first Romanian school in Bucharest in 1818, in a principality whose schools had until then been Greek. After the union of Moldavia and Wallachia in 1859, universities opened at Iași and Bucharest, and Carol I and his wife Elisabeth became the principal patrons of the arts.

The decisive literary institution was Junimea, founded in 1863 around the critic Titu Maiorescu, whose journal Convorbiri Literare carried most of the groundbreaking work of the poet Mihai Eminescu, the storyteller Ion Creangă and the playwright Ion Luca Caragiale. Nicolae Grigorescu and Ștefan Luchian founded modern Romanian painting in the same decades. The relationship between native tradition and western models was argued rather than assumed: Lucian Blaga stood for the traditionalists and Eugen Lovinescu, from the circle around the journal Sburătorul, for pulling the culture closer to western Europe.

Bucharest was rebuilt far enough on the French model to be called the little Paris, and the engineering went with it: Anghel Saligny built what was then the longest bridge in Europe to tie Dobruja to the rest of the country. Romania joined the Organisation internationale de la Francophonie in 1993, and the organisation counted 4,756,100 French speakers in the country in 2010. The 2012 Eurobarometer found English spoken by 31% of Romanians and French by 17, which is where the second language has been moving.

How the exiles wrote in other languages

The country has an unusual habit of producing its most internationally visible figures abroad, working in somebody else's language. Constantin Brâncuși, born in 1876 and dead in 1957, went from a village in the Carpathian foothills to Paris and became a central figure of the modern movement and a pioneer of abstraction, working outward from the sources of folk carving. His sculptural ensemble stands at Târgu Jiu, and his Bird in Space sold at auction in 2005 for 27.5 million dollars. Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, both of Romanian origin, founded Dada.

Communism turned emigration into a permanent diaspora, the first in the country's history. Eugen Ionescu, who became Eugène Ionesco in France, created the Theatre of the Absurd and was elected to the Académie française; the historian of religion Mircea Eliade and the essayist Emil Cioran, who wrote in French, are the other two. The regime called them traitors to the Fatherland, published them only sporadically after 1960, and none of the three saw the country again. Three Nobel prizes have gone to people born in the country: George Emil Palade took the 1974 prize in Physiology or Medicine for describing the organelles inside cells, Elie Wiesel of Sighetu Marmației the Peace Prize in 1986, and Herta Müller, from the Banat Swabian minority, the Literature prize in 2009.

What the folk tradition still carries

The ballad Miorița, published in its most widely read version by Vasile Alecsandri, turns on a plain action: two shepherds plan to murder a third because they envy his flock. It is philosophical rather than dramatic, and it is the text the culture treats as its own.

Ion Creangă gave the folk tales their classic form in the nineteenth century, among them Harap Alb, and Petre Ispirescu published volume after volume of them. The recurring cast is the prince Făt-Frumos, the princess Ileana Cosânzeana, the ogre Zmeu, the dragon Balaur, the good Zână and the Muma Pădurii.

The calendar customs are practised rather than performed. Colinde are sung at Christmas and sorcova at New Year; plugușorul, ursul and capra are winter house-visiting games worked with masks and animal costume; paparuda, a rain-making custom of the summer, is presumed pre-Christian. On 1 March a mărțișor is given, a small talisman worn for luck at the opening of spring. Twelve public holidays are non-working days, the largest of them Great Union Day on 1 December, for the union of Transylvania with Romania in 1918. Traditional dress went out of daily use over the twentieth century and survives as ceremonial clothing worn at these festivals.

Folk music is the oldest layer of Romanian musical creation and the source the composed music draws from, religious and secular alike. The older instruments are the tobă, a double-headed drum, the caval or shepherd's pipe, the cobza, a lute related to the oud, the cimpoi or Balkan bagpipe, the violin and the tambourine, joined later by the accordion and the clarinet, and the playing is punctuated with clapping, whistles and shouted calls. Liturgical music took Byzantine chant and bent it towards those intonations, with schools of it inside the monasteries between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, and polyphony arrived from Russian and western models in the eighteenth. The genre with the largest audience now is manele, which reaches it down the same Ottoman and Balkan channel as half the vocabulary of the kitchen.

What Romanians cook and when they cook it

The kitchen is a list of borrowings held together by pork. The pie called plăcintă keeps the Latin word placenta and the Roman thing it named. The Turks brought meatballs, grilled as mititei or dropped into the sour soup called ciorbă as perișoare; the Greeks musaca and covrigi; the Bulgarians vegetable dishes such as zacuscă; the Austrians the șnițel; the Hungarians their pastries.

The dish that comes closest to national is sarmale: pork, or pork with beef and lamb, mixed with onion and rice, rolled in semi-soured cabbage or vine leaves, layered in a pot with tomato paste and cuts of pork, and cooked slowly. It is served with mămăligă, a cornmeal mush that was the poor man's meal for long enough to leave proverbs behind and now sits on restaurant menus.

Two feasts organise the year and both involve killing an animal at home. Nearly every family slaughters a pig at Christmas and works through the whole of it: cârnați, caltaboși made with liver and offal, piftie set as a jelly from the feet, head and ears, tochitură eaten with mămăligă and wine. The sweet at the end is cozonac, a rich bread with nuts, poppy seeds or Turkish delight. Easter is lamb: borș de miel, roast lamb, and drob, a baked mix of offal, meat and vegetables close to haggis, served with the cheese pie pască. The home slaughter of pigs at Christmas and lambs at Easter required a specific exemption from European Union law after Romania joined in 2007, which is a precise measure of how domestic the practice is.

Wine has been made here for more than three millennia, from domestic varieties such as Grasă and Tămâioasă alongside the international ones, and Romania is one of the larger producers in the world. Plums matter more. Plums are grown in quantity and almost the entire crop is distilled, once into țuică and twice or more into palincă; țuică alone takes as much as three quarters of the national plum crop and reaches 70% alcohol. In 2019 Romania recorded the highest alcohol consumption per head of any country, and Sibiu was named European Region of Gastronomy in the same year.

How the communist state ran culture

Control of culture between 1947 and 1989 was total, and in a narrow material sense it was also generous. Censorship reached almost every part of public life, the Sovietisation years tried to build a new identity out of socialist realism, and two currents formed under the pressure: one that glorified the regime and produced nothing of lasting value, and one that worked around the censor and was read all the more closely for it. The second gave the period the novelist Marin Preda and the poets Nichita Stănescu and Marin Sorescu. Writers who refused to emigrate lived under house arrest or in forced domicile, and some retreated to remote monasteries; the philosophers Constantin Noica, Petre Țuțea and Nicolae Steinhardt were mostly published after 1989.

The generosity was in the plant. Between the 1950s and 1989 publishing houses such as Cartea Românească and Editura Eminescu issued vast collections, among them Biblioteca pentru Toți with over 5,000 titles, and a print run below 50,000 copies was unusual. Libraries opened in every village and prices were low enough for ordinary households to build their own shelves, on paper poor enough that the books fell apart. Theatres were built in the smallest towns, and the National Theatre went up in the middle of Bucharest beside the country's kilometre zero. A film industry was assembled at Buftea from the 1960s, where Sergiu Nicolaescu directed more than anyone else.

What changed after the regime fell

State control ended in 1989 and so did the state money. Publishing exploded, saturated and collapsed: many houses closed after a handful of titles, others turned to translated commercial fiction, and the survivors were those that learned to sell, Humanitas in Bucharest and Polirom in Iași among them. The cultural press narrowed to a few titles, Dilema Veche, Revista 22 and Observator Cultural, beside a state radio station and television channel that few people watch.

Cinema moved the other way. Romanian film-making had almost no money through the 1990s, and the generation that came out of that decade took the major European prizes inside a few years: Cristi Puiu's The Death of Mr Lazarescu won the Prix Un Certain Regard at Cannes in 2005, Cristian Mungiu's 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days the Palme d'Or in 2007, and Călin Peter Netzer's Child's Pose the Golden Bear in Berlin in 2013. Corneliu Porumboiu and Radu Jude belong to the same wave, and low costs brought foreign producers with them. The festival calendar grew alongside: the George Enescu classical festival in Bucharest, the Sibiu Theatre Festival, TIFF at Cluj, Anonimul in the Danube Delta. Sibiu was European Capital of Culture in 2007, jointly with Luxembourg.

What Romanians play and what they win

Football is the most popular sport, with over 219,000 registered players as of 2018 and a professional market that UEFA valued at roughly 740 million euros in the same year. The national team played its first match in 1922 and is one of only four to have appeared at each of the first three World Cups, alongside Brazil, France and Belgium. It has reached seven in total, and its strongest run was sixth place at the 1994 tournament. Steaua București won the European Cup in 1986, the first club from eastern Europe to do it.

The medals are concentrated somewhere else entirely. Romanian athletes have taken 306 medals at the Summer Olympics since the country began competing, 89 of them gold, and the single best Games was Los Angeles in 1984, where the team won 53 medals, 20 of them gold, behind only the host United States. Gymnastics produces most of them. Handball is the second team sport and the more decorated one: the men won the world championship in 1961, 1964, 1970 and 1974, the women in 1962, and CSM București took the EHF Champions League in 2016. Tennis holds the next largest following, and the Davis Cup final was reached in 1969, 1971 and 1972.

The pattern that runs under all of it is the one the alphabet made explicit. The material is eastern: an Orthodox liturgy, Byzantine chant bent to local intonation, Ottoman meatballs, a lute descended from the oud. The form is western: a Latin script, a Paris education, a French sentence, a symphony, a European film prize. The country never chose between the two. It changed the letters and kept the liturgy, and everything since has followed the same rule.