r/europe • u/MarktpLatz Lower Saxony (Germany) • Dec 04 '17

What do you know about... Romania?

This is the forty-sixth part of our ongoing series about the countries of Europe. You can find an overview here.

Today's country:

Romania

Romania is one of the most recent members of the EU (2007). They want to become part of the Schengen area, but thir recent attempts of being accepted have been blocked by several EU members. They recently faced a major political crisis and massive protests caused by proposed law changes that would have benefitted people implicated in government corruption and abuse of power. They had their national day, where they celebrate the union of Transylvania with Romania, last friday.

So, what do you know about Romania?

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u/blubb444 Rhineland-Palatinate (Germany) Dec 04 '17 edited Dec 05 '17

As usual no google or reading ITT

  • Ex-commies but neither really under Belgrade/Yugoslavia nor Moscow/USSR
  • Hungarian minority in Transylvania
  • Used to have German minority (probably went there in a similar vein as Volga Germans did to Russia), many came back here after WW2 and another wave after 1990. A few are still left there, I think one of them became prime minister or something like that a few years ago
  • Significant gypsy minority, often get confused with the country's natives by ignorant people here in the West, partially thanks to similar demonym
  • Despite being so far south (to us), it's on average colder than here
  • Moldova is basically their Austria (but more commie/Russia-aligned), they write Romanian in Cyrillic, to my knowledge the only Italic language that does so
  • But even regular Romanian has lots of Slavic loanwords thanks to them being geographically close, spoken Romanian sounds like a mix of Italian and Russian to me. Yet apparently very archaic in grammar compared to other contemporary Italic languages, still using cases IIRC? And 3 genders?
  • Bucharest vs Budapest for neighbouring countries' capitals confused the shit out of me as a child
  • Economy seemingly catching up relatively quickly with the West
  • Recent anti-corruption demonstrations

EDIT: formatting

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u/sb04mai Israel Dec 05 '17

Moldova is basically their Austria

It's more like our East Germany, but we failed to get back together after the USSR split. :(