RomaniaΓÇÖs territory has been inhabited from times long past. It is here where, in the Neolithic, some of the most prolific European cultures, Cucuteni and Gumelnita, flourished.
Known by the Greeks under the name of Gets, and by the Romans as Dacians, the ancient inhabitants of the present Romanian territory were first mentioned by Herodotus.
Enigmatic and solitary, the Dacian fortified settlements and strongholds that have been preserved from those times were built and defended with his life by the last Dacian king, Decebalus. However, the oldest fortified towns, the ones on the Black Sea shore, belonged to Greek colonists.
Dacia was conquered by Emperor Trajan after two of the most glorious wars of the Roman history, in 105-106 AD.
The Romanian people was formed following Roman colonization, and, amidst migrating waves, miraculously preserved its unity, including that of its language, spoken without dialectal variations. It is only one thousand years later that the first Romanian states are formed. The following period is politically and culturally active.
The buildings of those times - churches, monasteries, fortified towns and princely courts - were raised by princes who supported local culture and, at the same time, facing increasing external pressures, fought for preserving political, economic, social and religious rights. The medieval fortified dwellings, strongholds and peasant fortresses in Transylvania, landlordsΓÇÖ mansions named cule in Oltenia, are evidence of the restless history on the Romanian provinces territory. Although Wallachia and Moldavia survived the Ottoman domination, the Romanians in Transylvania had to bear the Hungarian oppression first, than endure the Ottoman occupation and, from 1700 to 1918, experience the Austrian occupation.
The national unity partially achieved in 1859 (the union of Wallachia and Moldavia) and completed in 1918 (the union of Romania with Transylvania and Bessarabia) led to the creation of the Great Romania.
The natural modernization of the country was hindered by the world wars that took Romania one of the highest tolls in human lives in Europe, as percent of population. The monarchy, established in 1866, and the functioning parliamentary regime were replaced by a personal dictatorship in 1938, and than by the proletariat dictatorship. After a period of terror, the communist regime experienced a short period of relative success, and than, another period of tyranny that nearly pushed the country outside history. After 1990, Romania has regained normality by making use of the democratic means of a lawful state.
