 Discovering... Romania
A few words about Romania Romania is the perfect land of contrasts and paradoxes: the country of Constantin Brancusi, Eugene Ionesco, Emil Cioran, Mircea Eliade and Nadia Comaneci, but also of Dracula and Nicolae Ceausescu.
  
HISTORY
The history of the Romanians cannot be isolated from the history of the European peoples as a whole, though it could be seen as among the most eventful.
Their origins lie at the beginning of the 1st millennium AD. Today the Romanians are the sole descendants of the Eastern Roman world, and their language, along with Spanish, Portuguese, French and Italian, is a major offspring of Latin. They are the only people who through their name - roman (derived from the Latin "romanus") - have preserved to this day the memory of the Seal of Rome, a memory to be further perpetuated in the name adopted by the national state - Romania.
It is a Romance island that has survived among a sea of Slavic and Finno-Ugric neighbours, in a region that has been devastated for more than a millennium by wave after wave of migrants and invaders. Christians of the Orthodox rite, the Romanians lived from the Middle Ages to modern times in three neighbouring self-dependent principalities - Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania - which despite their location at the crossroads of great expansionist empires - Czarist Russia and the Ottoman and Hasburg Empires - managed to preserve their statehood, faith and civilization, at a time when neighbouring kingdoms like Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary and Poland were being wiped off the map of Europe. Later, despite the hostility and open opposition of the same great and powerful neighbours, they managed to achieve national unification in 1859, a process eventually completed in 1918.
At the end of World War I, the centuries old dream of reuniting all Romanians within the boundaries of a single state became reality, an achievement paid for with the sacrifice of over 800,000 lives.
The ensuing two decades of economic, political and cultural advances were cut short in 1940 by the outbreak of World War II, when one third of the country's area and population were annexed. In 1945, after four years of war, leaving another 700,000 dead, the almost century old democratic tradition of the Romanian state was cut chort by the arrival of Soviet troops and the imposition of a communist regime. The hopes awakened by the Party's deviation from the Soviet model between 1960 and 1968 were soon dispelled by the rise to power of Nicolae Ceausescu with his oppressive and absurd totalitarian regime. That devastating period of dictatorship was brought to an end by the revolution of December 1989, closing the historical black hole into which Romania had descended for the previous 45 years, and opening a new page in Romania's contemporary history.
This page is still being written... letter by letter, word by word...
GEOGRAPHY
With an area of 238,391 sq km, Romania is the largest country in Eastern Europe, not counting Russia and Ukraine.
The river Danube drains the whole of Romania, apart from the Black Sea coast. It finishes the 2850km course it has taken through nine countries in Romania's Danube Delta. Most of Romania's rivers are tributaries of the Danube.
Much of northern and central Romania is made up of the U-shaped Carpathian Mountains, which loop north through Romania, western Ukraine, southern Poland and Slovakia. The Transylvanian plain, a worn down plateau of hills and valleys, takes up the centre of the U. To the east is the Moldovian plateau. In the south and southwest of the country earthquakes are not unusual. The recent major earthquake in Turkey was felt in Bucharest.
Almost a third of the country's territory is taken up by the Carpathians, with their alpine pastures at higher altitudes and thick forests of beech, fir, spruce and oak lower down. hills and tablelands rich in orchards and vineyards account for another third, while the fertile plains with their cereals, vegetables, herbs and other crops, make up the reminder of rural Romania.
 
We actually have Snow here... :)
CLIMATE
Average temperatures range from 11 Celsius degrees in the south of the country to just 2 Celsius degrees in the mountains.
Winters are often very cold, with large quantities of snow between December and March, while summers are usually hot and sunny. +40 Celsius degrees is not unusual in Bucharest in July and August.
Spring can be very wet, with a good portion of each year's 600 to 700mm rainfall occuring at this time. Most rain falls in the mountains, while the Danube Delta gets the least.
POPULATION (as of July, 2001): 22,43 million
FORM OF GOVERNMENT: Republic
CAPITAL: Bucharest
 
Known throughout Europe during the pre-war era as "Little Paris" or "the Paris of the Balkans", Bucharest still retains much of the flavour that led to that epithet. It is a green city, of boulevards lined with trees and park-environed lakes. It even has its own Arc de Triomphe. In spring and summer the population can be found relaxing in the parks and beer gardens, the air vibrates to the sound of music, both accidental and oriental, and the city seems a very fine place to be indeed. Bucharest has a generous helping of interesting museums, outstanding, if sometimes decaying architecture, and a soothing Latin feel that sits comfortably with the beauty and mysticism of its Orthodox Churches. It has its problems, but if approached with patience and tolerance, rewards the traveller by proving to be among the most fascinating cities in the world.
NATIONAL CURRENCY: leu (pl. lei)
$1=lei 32,762 (as of July 2002)
OFFICIAL LANGUAGE: Romanian
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