Romania

From Roman Dacia to the European Union — a Latin island in a Slavic and Magyar sea, unified, dismembered and remade.

Romania's history is the story of a Latin-speaking people forged on the lower Danube and repeatedly contested by its larger neighbours. Its origins reach back to the kingdom of the Dacians, conquered by the Roman emperor Trajan in 101–106 CE, whose colonists left a Romance language and a sense of 'Romanness' that survived the empire's withdrawal. In the fourteenth century two Romanian principalities, Wallachia and Moldavia, emerged south and east of the Carpathians, producing rulers such as Vlad III the Impaler and Stephen the Great before falling under centuries of Ottoman suzerainty and the venal Phanariot regime. The two principalities chose the same prince, Alexandru Ioan Cuza, in 1859, forming the modern state; full independence was recognised at the Congress of Berlin in 1878 and a kingdom proclaimed in 1881. The First World War brought 'Greater Romania', crowned by the union of Transylvania on 1 December 1918 and confirmed by the Treaty of Trianon in 1920. In 1940 the country was torn apart — Bessarabia and northern Bukovina seized by the USSR, northern Transylvania awarded to Hungary, southern Dobruja ceded to Bulgaria. After four decades of communism and the dictatorship of Nicolae Ceausescu, a violent revolution in 1989 toppled the regime, and a democratic Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007.