The culture of Romania is an umbrella term used to encapsulate the ideas, customs and social behaviours of the people of Romania that developed due to the country's distinct geopolitical history and evolution. It is theorized that Romanians and related peoples (Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, and Istro-Romanians) were formed through the admixture of the descendants of Roman colonists and the indigenous Daco-Thracian people who were subsequently Romanized.
Background
Romania's history has been full of rebounds: the culturally productive epochs were those of stability when the people proved quite an impressive resourcefulness in the making up for less propitious periods and were able to rejoin the mainstream of European culture. This stands true for the years after the Phanariote-Ottoman period, at the beginning of the 19th century, when Romanians had a historical context and Romania started to become westernized, mainly with French influences, which they pursued steadily and at a very fast pace. From the end of the 18th century, the sons of the upper classes started having their education in Paris, and French became (and was until the communist years) a genuine second language of culture for Romanians.
The modeling role of France, especially in the fields of political ideas, administration, and law, as well as in literature, was paralleled, from the mid-19th century down to World War I, by German culture as well, which also triggered constant relationships with the German world not only at a cultural level but in daily life as well.
History
Middle Ages
Until the 14th century, small states (Romanian: voievodate) were spread across the territory of Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldavia. The medieval principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia arose in the mid 1300s, in the areas south and east of the Carpathian Mountains respectively.
Moldavia and Wallachia were both situated on important commercial routes often crossed by Polish, Saxon, Greek, Armenian, Genovese, and Venetian merchants, connecting them well to the evolving culture of medieval Europe. Grigore Ureche's chronicle, Letopisețul Țărîi Moldovei (The Chronicles of the land of Moldavia), covering the period from 1359 to 1594, is a very important source of information about life, events, and personalities in Moldavia. It is among the first non-religious Romanian literary texts; due to its size and the information that it contains, it is arguably the most important Romanian document from the 17th century.
The first printed book, a prayer book in Slavonic, was produced in Wallachia in 1508, and the first book in Romanian, a catechism, was printed in Transylvania, in 1544. At the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th century, European humanism influenced the works of Miron Costin and Ion Neculce, the Moldavian chroniclers who continued Ureche's work. Constantin Brâncoveanu, prince of Wallachia, was a great patron of the arts and was a local Renaissance figure. During Șerban Cantacuzino's reign, the monks at the monastery of Snagov, near Bucharest, published in 1688 the first translated and printed Romanian Bible (Biblia de la București – The Bucharest Bible). The first successful attempts at written Romanian-language poetry were made in 1673 when Dosoftei, a Moldavian metropolitan in Iași, published a Romanian metrical psalter.
Dimitrie Cantemir, a Moldavian prince, was an important personality of the medieval period in Moldavia. His interests included philosophy, history, music, linguistics, ethnography, and geography. His most important works containing information about the Romanian regions were Descriptio Moldaviae, published in 1769, and Hronicul vechimii a romano-moldo-valahilor (roughly, Chronicle of the Antiquity of the Romano-Moldavo-Wallachians), the first critical history of Romania. His works were also known in western Europe, as he authored writings in Latin: Descriptio Moldaviae (commissioned by the Academy of Berlin, the member of which he became in 1714) and Incrementa atque decrementa aulae othomanicae, which was printed in English between 1734–1735 (second edition in 1756), in French in 1743 and in German in 1745; the latter was a major reference work in European science and culture up until the 19th century.
Classical Age
In Transylvania, although they formed the majority of the population, Romanians were merely seen as a "tolerated nation" by the Austrian leadership of the province, and were not proportionally represented in political life and the Transylvanian Diet. At the end of the 18th century an emancipation movement known as the Transylvanian School (Școala Ardeleană) was formed, emphasizing the Roman element of the Romanian people, and making significant strides in the formation of a modern Latin-based Romanian alphabet (which eventually supplanted an earlier Cyrillic script). It formed following the Act of Union of 1698, which declared the full communion with the See of Rome of the Romanian Transylvanian church under Metropolitan Atanasie Anghel. Thus, the Romanian Greek-Catholic Church was formed, formalized by a synod of bishops on September 4, 1700. The links with Rome brought to the Romanian Transylvanians the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment. In 1791 the Transylvanian School issued a petition to Emperor Leopold II of Austria, named Supplex Libellus Valachorum based on the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, demanding equal political rights with the other ethnicities for the Romanians in Transylvania. This movement, however, leaned more towards westernization in general, when in fact, the origin of the Romanian people is complex, intertwining elements from the peoples of the former Roman Empire with those of the ancient Dacians, and with the addition of 17th and 19th Eastern influences as emphasized through the Ottomans.
The period from 1711 to 1821 was marked in Wallachia and Moldavia by the reigns of appointed Phanariote Hospodars; thus, the two principalities were heavily influenced by the Ottoman and Greek world. Greek schools appeared in the principalities, and in 1818, the first Romanian School was founded in Bucharest by Gheorghe Lazăr and Ion Heliade Rădulescu. Figures such as Anton Pann, a successful novelist, emerged in that time, with Ienăchiță Văcărescu writing the first Romanian grammar, and his nephew Iancu Văcărescu becoming what is considered to be the first important Romanian poet. In 1821, an uprising in Wallachia took place against Phanariote rule. This uprising was led by the Romanian revolutionary and militia leader Tudor Vladimirescu, and would eventually lead to the restoration of Romanian princes on the thrones of the Danubian Principalities.
The revolutionary year 1848 had its echoes also in Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania, and a new elite had emerged from the revolutions represented by figures such as: Mihail Kogălniceanu (writer, politician, and the first prime minister of Romania), Vasile Alecsandri (politician, playwright, and poet), Andrei Mureșanu (publicist and the writer of the current Romanian National Anthem) and Nicolae Bălcescu (historian, writer and revolutionary).
The union between Moldavia and Wallachia in 1859 brought a growing consolidation of Romanian life and culture. Universities were opened in Iași and in Bucharest, and the number of new cultural establishments grew significantly. The new prince from 1866 and then King of Romania, Carol I, was a devoted king, and he and his wife Elisabeth were among the main patrons of arts. Of great impact in Romanian literature was the literary society Junimea, founded in 1863 by the circle of literary critic Titu Maiorescu. It published its cultural journal Convorbiri Literare where, among others, Mihai Eminescu, Romania's greatest poet, Ion Creangă, a storyteller of genius, and Ion Luca Caragiale, novelist and Romania's greatest playwright, published most of their groundbreaking works. During the same period, Nicolae Grigorescu and Ștefan Luchian founded modern Romanian painting; celebrated composer Ciprian Porumbescu was also from this time.
In Transylvania, the emancipation movement became better organized, and in 1861, an important cultural organization by the name of ASTRA (The Transylvanian Association for Romanian Literature and the Culture of the Romanian People) was founded in Sibiu under the close supervision of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolitan Andrei Șaguna. It helped publish a great number of Romanian language books and newspapers, and between 1898 and 1904, it published a Romanian Encyclopedia. Among the greatest personalities from this period are the novelist and publicist Ioan Slavici, the prose writer Panait Istrati, the poet and writer Barbu Ștefănescu Delavrancea, the poet and publicist George Coșbuc, the poet Ștefan Octavian Iosif, the historian and founder of Romanian press in Transylvania George Barițiu and Badea Cârțan, a simple peasant shepherd from Southern Transylvania who, through his actions became a symbol of the emancipation movement.
Golden Age
The first half of the 20th century is regarded by many as the golden age of Romanian culture, and it is the period when it reached its main level of international affirmation and a strong connection to European cultural trends. The most important artist who had a great influence on the world culture was the sculptor Constantin Brâncuși (1876–1957), a central figure of the modern movement and a pioneer of abstraction, an innovator of world sculpture by immersion in the primordial sources of folk creation.
The relationship between traditional and Western European trends was a subject of heated polemics, and outstanding personalities sustained the debates. The playwright, expressionist poet, and philosopher Lucian Blaga can be cited as a member of the traditionalist group and the literary critic founder of the literary circle and cultural journal Sburătorul, Eugen Lovinescu, represents the so-called Westernizing group, which sought to bring Romanian culture closer to Western European culture. Also, George Călinescu was a more complex writer who, among different literary creations, produced the monumental "History of the Romanian literature, from its origins till present day".
The beginning of the 20th century was also a prolific period for Romanian prose, with personalities such as the novelist Liviu Rebreanu, who described the struggles in the traditional society and the horrors of war, Mihail Sadoveanu, a writer of novels of epic proportions with inspiration from the medieval history of Moldavia, and Camil Petrescu, a more modern writer distinguishing himself through his analytical prose writing. In dramaturgy, Mihail Sebastian was an influential writer, and as the number of theaters grew, also did the number of actors, Lucia Sturdza Bulandra being an actress representative of this period.
Alongside the prominent poet George Topîrceanu, a poet of equal importance was Tudor Arghezi, who was the first to revolutionize poetry in the last 50 years. One should not neglect the poems of George Bacovia, a symbolist poet of neurosis, and despair and those of Ion Barbu, a brilliant mathematician who wrote a series of very successful cryptic poems. Tristan Tzara and Marcel Janco, founders of the Dadaist movement, were also of Romanian origin.