Romania

Romania traces its language and a founding national myth to Roman Dacia, conquered by the Emperor Trajan in AD 106. In the Middle Ages three principalities took shape: Orthodox Wallachia and Moldavia, under Ottoman suzerainty but never fully absorbed — the homelands of Vlad the Impaler and Stephen the Great, remembered for resisting the Turks — and Transylvania, long tied to Hungary and then the Habsburgs, with its Hungarian, Saxon, and Székely communities and a Romanian majority. Wallachia and Moldavia united in 1859 to form Romania, which gained independence in 1878 and expanded after the First World War into "Greater Romania".

In the Second World War, Romania under General Antonescu allied with Nazi Germany, was complicit in the Holocaust, and then switched sides in a 1944 royal coup. Four decades as a communist state followed, culminating in the bizarre and brutal personality cult of Nicolae Ceaușescu, whose forced natalism, village demolitions, monumental building projects, and export of the country's food to pay off debt made the 1980s years of cold, dark, and hunger.

The revolution of December 1989 — the only violent one in the Eastern bloc — ended with Ceaușescu and his wife shot on Christmas Day. A rocky transition run by former communists, with miner-mob crackdowns and endemic corruption, gave way to EU accession in 2007 and an anti-corruption drive that jailed much of the political class. In 2024–2025 a court annulled a presidential election won in the first round by a Russia-linked nationalist, before a pro-EU centrist, the mayor of Bucharest, won the re-run.

Romanian identity rests on the Latin-descended language, Orthodox Christianity, and a deep rural tradition of wooden churches, painted monasteries, hand-carved gates, embroidered blouses, and the doina folk song and lăutari fiddle music of the Roma musicians. Village life — hay meadows scythed by hand, shepherds moving flocks to the mountains, feast days and elaborate weddings — survives more strongly than in most of Europe, and Maramureș in the north is its showcase.

The country has produced outsized figures: the sculptor Brâncuși, the playwright Ionesco and the essayist Cioran, the historian of religion Eliade, the composer Enescu, and the gymnast Nadia Comăneci, the first to score a perfect 10. Vampire folklore is a small, real strand of rural belief that the outside world, via Bram Stoker, has magnified into an industry around "Dracula".

Café culture is strong in the cities, and hospitality — pressing food and țuică plum brandy on a guest — is a point of honour.

Romania is emptying and ageing: since 1990 several million people, disproportionately young and skilled, have left for Italy, Spain, Germany, and the UK, and the population has fallen by well over two million, with rural areas and the poorer south and east hit hardest.

The counterweight is a fast-growing urban economy — Bucharest, and the Transylvanian cities of Cluj-Napoca, Timișoara, Brașov, and Sibiu, along with Iași — driven by a large, well-paid IT and software sector, a big automotive industry, and EU-funded infrastructure. Wages remain among the lowest in the EU, though rising quickly, and the gap between the booming cities and villages where subsistence farming and remittances are still the norm is wide.

Corruption, slow public administration, and a chronically underbuilt motorway network are the standing frustrations, and the country lives with the war next door as a front-line NATO and EU state supporting Ukraine.

Romanian cooking is hearty, pork-heavy, and shaped by Balkan, Turkish, Hungarian, and German influence. Mămăligă, a firm cornmeal polenta, is the traditional staple, eaten with cheese, sour cream, and a fried egg or alongside stews. Sarmale — minced pork and rice rolled in pickled cabbage, simmered for hours — is the festive centrepiece, especially at Christmas.

Ciorbă, a large family of sour soups, ranges from tripe to chicken to meatball, and the grill gives mici, skinless minced-meat rolls eaten with mustard and bread. Zacuscă, a roasted-pepper and vegetable spread put up in jars each autumn, telemea cheese, and pickles are everywhere.

Sweets include cozonac, a rich walnut or poppy-seed sweet bread for holidays, and papanași, fried doughnuts with sour cream and jam. Wine is a serious and improving industry with native grapes such as Fetească Neagră, and țuică and pălincă plum spirits, often homemade, are the strong drinks.

Transylvania is the tourist heart: the fortified Saxon churches and villages of Viscri and Biertan, the medieval towns of Sibiu, Brașov, and Sighișoara (Vlad the Impaler's birthplace), and the castles the Dracula industry has attached itself to — clifftop Bran and the grander Corvin at Hunedoara.

The Carpathians, curving through the country, offer the Bucegi and Piatra Craiului massifs, the Retezat and Făgăraș ranges, brown bears and wolves, highland shepherd culture, and the two spectacular alpine roads, the Transfăgărășan and Transalpina. In the northeast, Bucovina's painted monasteries — Voroneț, Moldovița, Sucevița — are covered inside and out in Renaissance frescoes, and neighbouring Maramureș keeps its tall wooden churches, carved gates, and the "Merry Cemetery" of Săpânța.

The Danube Delta, where Europe's second-longest river fans out into a vast wetland before the Black Sea, is one of the continent's great birding and wilderness areas. Bucharest itself mixes belle-époque boulevards, Ceaușescu's colossal Palace of Parliament, and a lively café and nightlife scene.