September 3, 2014
Romania!
I got this information from Cultures of the World: Romania by Sean Sheehan.
-In the Romanian flag, the red, yellow and blue stripes represent Moldova and Walachia, the two principalities that united to form Romania in 1859. The colors are found in the coat of arms of these former states. The coat of arms consists of an eagle holding a cross in its beak, with a sword and a scepter in each claw.
-The name of Romania, a country in southeastern Europe, means land of the Romans. Romanians are proud of the fact that they can trace their language and ethnic identity back to the days of the ancient Roman Empire. The country is a little smaller than the state of Oregon.
-About 31% of the country is covered by the Carpathian Mountains. The Carpathians are like the Alps and spread across seven European countries, including Romania. The Carpathians are home to the largest virgin forests in Europe. The area contains 60% of all of Europe’s brown bear population and 40% of the continent’s wolf and lynx populations.
-Romanian caviar is one of the best in world. Sturgeon, from which caviar is obtained, was once found in abundance in the Danube River.
-Winters are very cold in Romania. Cold northeasterly winds known as the crivat blow in from the Russian plains.
-In World War II, General Ion Antonescu took control of Romania and made it a dictatorship. While Antonescu initially permitted some Jews to emigrate, pogroms were also organized within Romania where thousands of Jews were executed. Jews in the newly recovered territories of Bessarabia and Bucovina were either killed or sent to camps in parts of Ukraine held by the Axes forces. By 1944 opposition to Nazism was increasing in Romania. King Michael overthrew Antonescu in August 1944, just as Russian troops crossed the border.
Before World War II, Romania was home to the third largest community of Jews in Eastern Europe, after Poland and the Soviet Union. However, emigration, deportation, and the extermination pogroms carried out in Bucharest, Iasi, and other cities changed this. It is estimated that between 250,000 and 300,000 Romanian Jews were killed during the Romanian Holocaust. Today, about 9,000 to 15,000 Jews live in Romania, most of them in Bucharest.
-Any person or organization that was unwilling to support the Communist regime, which was headed by Nicolae Ceausescu beginning in 1965, risked being punished. For instance, churches, especially those belonging to ethnic minorities that refused to cooperate with government policies, were disbanded. Political prisoners spent their time in jail or were sent to work on labor projects, such as the Danube-Black Sea canal, where the work was so dangerous it became known as the Canal of Death. The project claimed the lives of over 100,000 workers.
-Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife, Elena, were executed on Christmas Day, 1989. The event was marked by a celebratory spirit across the country, a reaction that many outsiders found difficult to understand until details of Ceausescu’s regime of terror came to be general knowledge. Books, food, and music were banned, and there was police brutality, starvation and murder.
-Romania is still working on a huge national debt. The severity of the economic situation was made worse by a powerful earthquake in 1977, with equally disastrous floods in 1980 and in 1981, that badly disrupted industrial production.
-Coca-Cola built a soft drink infrastructure in Romania in just two years. It is now the market leader throughout central and eastern Europe, including Romania, where it is one of the country’s largest foreign investors.
-The country is the largest oil producer in Central and Eastern Europe. Romania is also the largest producer of natural producer of natural gas in Eastern Europe.
-Many of Europe’s most endangered and vulnerable animals live in Romania’s virgin forests and wetlands. The Romanian Carpathians are home to 6,000 brown bears, some 2,500 wolves, and 1,500 lynxes, or about 40% of Europe’s lynx population.
-The novel Dracula, written by the Irish writer Bram Stoker in 1898, helped turn Vlad Tepes into a legend that later caught the eye of Hollywood film producers. Stoker had studied accounts of vampirism in Europe, delved into Romanian folklore that included a belief in vampirism, and read about Vlad the Impaler. He combined elements of all three, and Dracula was the result.
Even though Vlad the Impaler became a national hero to Romania, because of battles and victories against the invading Turks, as his name implies, he wasn’t the friendliest guy. When Vlad the Impaler became rule of Walachia in 1456, he established a fearsome reputation for his method of punishment: spread-eagling bound victims, raising them off the ground on the end of stakes, and leaving them aloft to die in prolonged and awful pain. Other such punishments included boiling a captive alive. Eeeck! 
-A tradition in a Romanian wedding includes a forgiveness ritual in which the young couple formally asks their parents and relatives to forgive them for leaving behind their respective families.
-Romania’s countryside is sparsely populated. 124 people per square mile (48 people per square hm) as compared to 1,244 per square mile (480 people per square km) in urban areas.
-The craft of producing icons was done in monasteries, with a group of monks working together on one icon. One monk might work on the eyes or hair, while another would devote himself to painting the robes of the figure being represented. Icon painters (iconographers) prepared themselves for painting through fasting, prayer, and Holy Communion, because it was believed that to paint Christ better, one must have a close relationship with God.
-A belief in vampires existed in Romania and neighboring parts of southeastern Europe long before the Dracula story appeared at the end of 19th century. Vampirism is related to the notion that the soul may not always leave a person’s body after death. Various stories have tried to explain the belief in vampires. For example, in the past, cases of premature burials were common because there was no sure way of determined death, (ahhh!!!) hence the existence of the living “dead.” Romanians fear death through hanging because of the notion that constriction of the neck forced the soul downward and hence prevented its escape from the body.
Like the vampire phenomenon, a belief in werewolves has long been part of traditional Romanian folklore. Rational explanations for werewolves include the medical condition of lycanthropy (an unreasonable and obsessive belief that one is a wolf); the infrequent disease of erythropoietic porphyria, which results in inflamed and itchy skin after short exposures to sunlight; and hirsutism, which causes the sufferer to develop excessive growth of body and facial hair.
-Folk music is the strongest and richest form of music in the country and is among the most enduring and fruitful tradition of folk music in Europe. A diversity of styles that stretch back centuries have been passed down and improvised from one generation to the next. Much of the music has been compared with American blues because of its soulful and melancholy rhythms.
-Romanian children are encouraged to play chess from an early age. Chess is thought to have been invented in India in the sixth century and was brought to Europe by the Arabs. The game became extremely popular in aristocratic circles as the tournaments and power struggles in medieval Europe could be enacted on the chessboard.
-Nadia Comaneci became the first athlete to score a “1-“ at the annual American Cup International Gymnastics Competition in 1976. In the same year, she achieved perfect scores at the Montreal Olympics. Comaneci is the first woman to perform the double back somersault as a dismount from uneven parallel bars. She scored three 10s, a perfect score in the Olympics. No one had ever before been awarded such a score in the history of gymnastics in the Olympic Games.
That is it for random information on Romania. Next time I’ll write about the more serious aspects of Romania and what I’m praying about this week! If any of you want to add anything else, feel free!!!
God Bless!
~Tori
