This is an inside look at the current cultural, ethnic, historical, religious, social, and linguistic dimensions of eastern Romania, complete with photos from my 2007 vacation. It also investigates the issue of Islam in Europe.

English name: Romania/Rumania
Local name: România
Population: 22,276,056
Religion: Orthodox 86.8%, Protestant, 7.5%, Roman Catholic 4.7%, other (mostly Muslim) and unspecified 0.9%
Language: Romanian (Român) with Greek and Italian commercial resident minority
Ethnic groups: officially Romanian 89.5%, Hungarian 6.6%, Roma 2.5%, Ukrainian 0.3%, German 0.3%, Russian 0.2%, Turkish 0.2%, other 0.4%
Average fertility/woman: 1.38 per woman
Migration rate: -0.13 migrant(s)/1,000 population [Romanians are leaving]
Per capita average income: $9,100
Unemployment: officially 6.1%
Population below poverty line: officially 25%
Extant populations elsewhere of Romanians: Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary
Source: CIA World Factbook

Romania is one of the more unique nations of Europe, akin to no other. It is a nation with a long and disjointed history compounded by the rule of several world powers both via Jihad and European conquest alike. Its geography gives the region a complicated history with a variety of occupying ethnic groups, empires, and religious. Its original inhabitants included the Iranian-origin Thracian tribes of Thrace, pre-Slavic Bulgaria and Romania, and western Anatolia. The Roman conquest and Slavic invasion displaced this declining previous ethnic minority, but many Romanians and scholars continue to debate to what degree modern Romanians descend from either Slavs, Thracians, or both. It is largely a culturally Slavic nation with a Latin-based language, a result of its volatile position between the Slavic, Romanic, and Greek worlds, as well as the center of Roman-ruled Dacia and Latin-speaking Latin Crusader Empire after the 4th Crusade of the 13th century. It has a rich Orthodox Christian heritage. Its greatest historical heroes are today deemed by the new liberal West as mass murderers of Muslims and Jews alike, including Hitler's greatest and most loyal ally Ioan Antonescu and the mythified Vlad Dracul "the Impaler". Its disunified states of Wallachia and Moldavia fell under the brutal rule of the Jihad of Islam by the Ottoman Turks for nearly four centuries, where many were forced to convert or face unlivable conditions or execution en masse. It made the most drastic transitions in the Cold War as a strong and willing Fascist state into a volatile and unstable Communist state under the Warsaw Pact. After the war, the northern part of Romania called Moldova also declared independence due to broken promises of the collapsed Soviet Union for additional rights, which today too is split between Moldova proper and the pro-Russian Transnistria (which is unrecognized). Therefore, due to its complicated and tumultuous history, we were some of the first to enjoy its allegedly growing tourist industry. We landed at Constanta (Constantza), which is often considered quite poor, but is it a precise indicator of the Gypsy situation and the poverty of Romania that cannot profit from the wealthier Hungarian influence in the west (especially Transylvania) or the commercial business of Bucharest.

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