Romania, formerly also spelled Roumania and Rumania, is a unitary semi-presidential republic located in southeastern-central Europe, North of the Balkan Peninsula and on the western shore of the Black Sea. It borders Hungary, Serbia, Ukraine, Moldova, and Bulgaria. It covers 238,391 square kilometres (92,043 sq mi) and has a temperate-continental climate. With its 20.1 million inhabitants, it is the seventh most populous member of the European Union. Its capital and largest city, Bucharest, is the sixth largest city in the European Union. Romania emerged within the territories of former Roman Empire province Dacia as the principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia formed in 1859 a personal union. It gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1877, and at the end of World War I, Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia united with the sovereign Kingdom of Romania. At the end of World War II, territories which today roughly correspond to Moldova were occupied by the Soviet Union and Romania became a socialist republic and member of the Warsaw Pact. Following the 1989 Revolution, Romania began a transition towards democracy and a capitalist market economy. Since then, the living standards saw a vast improvement, and currently, Romania is an upper-middle income country with a high Human Development Index. It has been a member of NATO since 2004, and part of the European Union since 2007. Following rapid economic growth in the 2000s, Romania has an economy predominantly based on services, and is a producer and net exporter of machines and electric energy, featuring companies like Automobile Dacia and OMV Petrom. Around 90% of the population identifies themselves as practitioners of Eastern Orthodoxy, and are native speakers of Romanian, a Romance language. With a rich cultural history, Romania has been the home of influential artists, musicians, and inventors, and features a variety of tourist attractions such as Draculas Castle. The oldest surviving document written in Romanian, a 1521 letter known as the Letter of Neacșu from Câmpulung, is also notable for including the first documented occurrence of the countrys name: Wallachia is mentioned as Țeara Rumânească (The Romanian Land, țeara from the Latin terra, land; current spelling: Țara Românească). Two spelling forms: român and rumân were used interchangeably until sociolinguistic developments in the late 17th century led to semantic differentiation of the two forms: rumân came to mean bondsman, while român retained the original ethnolinguistic meaning. After the abolition of serfdom in 1746, the word rumân gradually fell out of use and the spelling stabilised to the form român. Tudor Vladimirescu, a revolutionary leader of the early 19th century, used the term Rumânia to refer exclusively to the principality of Wallachia. The use of the name Romania to refer to the common homeland of all Romanians—its modern-day meaning—is first documented in the early 19th century. The name has been officially in use since 11 December 1861. English-language sources still used the terms Rumania or Roumania, derived from the French spelling Roumanie and/or the Greek Ρουμανία, as recently as World War II, but the name has since been replaced with the official spelling Romania.
Posted on: Thu, 04 Sep 2014 17:23:59 +0000
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