Cultural-historical project " ROMANIAN HISTORICAL AND ETHNIC SPACE "
The work "Romanian Historical and Ethnic Space", the masterpiece of Romanian historiography, was launched under the prestigious auspices of the Military Publishing House in Bucharest, at the initiative and with the financial support of Computerland Romania.
Elaborated in its initial version during the difficult years of the Second World War, this extensive historical synthesis is an example of scientific probity and patriotism that unequivocally demonstrates the continuity of Romanism in the historical area of Burebista's and Decebal's Dacia. The remarkable work of a collective of historians of the time, the work constitutes an objective academic response to the anti-Romanian theses that appeared over time.
The re-editing of this perfect work, without having a commercial purpose, is the fruit of the generous work of a team made up of great history lovers. These passionate people wanted to bring back to light a work of reference for any Romanian and for Romania, starting from the thesis that "History is primarily called to find and speak the truth".
Compared to the initial work, new chapters were added, including data from the Republic of Moldova, as well as developments of some historical realities that took place in Europe after 1945.
In order to constitute a documentary material of interest for foreign readers as well, the present work was edited in Romanian-English bilingual format, being printed in Italy, at "Arc Group Italia SRL".
As can be seen even from the first pages, this highly erudite work enjoys the support of the Romanian Academy, the exceptional presentations from the opening of the work, respectively: "Romanian Historical and Ethnic Space - Foundation of United Romania from 1918" of Mr. Acad. Ioan-Aurel Pop and "Cuvant-ainte" offered by Mr. Acad. Razvan Theodorescu.
This historiographic approach was supported with special dedication by Mr. Nicolae Badea, who brings to the readers' attention in the short presentation "Words not yet spoken" the idea that "any projection of the future of a nation starts from a documented knowledge of its past."
The illustrations of covers I and IV, which are the work of the Romanian painter, Mr. Valentin Tanase.
This cultural-historical approach initiated by Computerland Romania addresses both cultural and academic institutions, as well as public and private institutions that carry out their activity on the territory of Romania and abroad.
In this sense, several hundred copies were offered to personalities from the Romanian Senate, the Chamber of Deputies, ministries, embassies, town halls, the Patriarchate, colleges, schools and professional academies, writers and journalists, personalities from the banking field and the Romanian private sector and international.
The Romanian historical and ethnic space - the basis of the United Romania since 1918
Selections from the exceptional presentation of Mr. Acad. Ioan-Aurel Pop
"The Act of the Great Union was born from the internal need of the Romanian people to live in their own "house", intended to organize, protect and defend it, but it also came from the need for a new political architecture of the continent, within which it is expected to function, after the destructive world conflict, a concert of the nations...
... Therefore, after 1848, the fundamental objective of the Romanians, who formed a modern nation since the 17th and 18th centuries, turned out to be national political unity.
The leaders of the Romanians (but not only them) understood then that every nation deserves to have its own unitary state, seen as a framework for the preservation and development of the national body, as a whole, and of each individual that made up this body...
... After 1848, the massive desire to unify the Romanians in a national state, was combined with actions on the international level, to obtain the support of the great powers...
... The union of the Romanians into a national state included the following stages:
1) 1848-1859-1866: the union of Moldova and the Romanian Country in one state, officially called Romania and reformed according to the principles of Western democracy;
2) 1877-1878-1881: The proclamation of the absolute independence of Romania, the war for the conquest of independence and the struggle for the official recognition of the country's independence on the international level; the union of Dobrogea with Romania and raising the country to the rank of a kingdom;
3) 1914-1918-1920: participation of Romanians and Romania in the First World War; the union with Romania of Bessarabia, Bucovina and Transylvania; the international recognition of the Romanian unitary national state within its historical borders...
... The formation of modern Romania and today's perception of this process have their particularities, due both to the specifics of the more distant history of the Romanians and the sui generis communist regime in Romania.
In the 40 years of communism proper, the national idea in Romanians traveled a strange path from its absolute denial and condemnation "with proletarian anger" to its complete rise in the Slavs, as "the guiding red thread of the whole history"...
... The Romanians entered the era of freedom with a great handicap in relation to their neighbors from other countries, even from the former socialist ones...
... After 1989, an unprecedented liberation followed, which brought great suffering to the Romanians, and in the realm of history determined the fall, many times, to the other extreme...
... Today, in the context of the hundred years that have passed since the end of the First World War, almost all peoples remember the events of that time, which led, through the years 1917-1920, to major territorial and ethnic changes, resulting, in large part, from the national emancipation movement and from the collapse of multinational empires (at least in relation to the forms in which they had previously existed)...
… All the peoples of this part of Europe had to be part of some serious challenges, living, for example, under the Ottomans, as the Bulgarians (from 1390 to 1878/1908) or as the Hungarians (1541-1699), standing under Ottoman suzerainty as the Romanians (15th century-1878), being erased from the map, like the Poles (18th century-1918) or not having their own state from the 10th century until 1918, like the Slovaks.
However, the Romanian countries were never effectively integrated into the Ottoman Empire, they did not allow the Turks to be landowners north of the Danube, they did not allow the development of Islamic propaganda...
... Secondly, Romania was not formed a century ago, but was formed, through several medieval state nuclei, a millennium ago and was called the Romanian Country/Romanian Countries...
... Thirdly, the political architecture of Europe formed at the end of the First World War was confirmed, in broad terms, after the Second World War and after 1989 and is valid until today...
... As there are no superior and inferior peoples in this world, Romanians must not have inferiority or superiority complexes either...
... There are no reasons for victimization, but neither for euphoria. A century ago, Romania existed a long time ago...
... Therefore, when the National Day of December 1, 2018 is celebrated, triumphalism must be weighted, because the Great Union was not made by today's generation, but by those great statesmen from 1918, imbued with the importance of their role in history …
... The acts of the Romanian national will from 1918 have a perpetual duration, they have a strength that will make them last as long as the Romanian people will endure.
Remembering the Great Union means the Romanians' interest in their "home" which is Romania, the desire to research its foundations, to know its architects and builders and to prepare it so that it reaches in good condition in the hands of their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren...
... This country was created by the ancestors, and the duty of contemporaries is to preserve, perpetuate, protect and always serve it...
... Romania is no longer the same as it was in 1918-1920, but it is a country the size of the United Kingdom and is the sixth country among the 27 EU countries in terms of population (after Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Poland)...
... This book, in a bilingual edition, will help those who wish not only to understand Romania better, but also to place it more realistically in the European concert, to know its aspirations and to see that the Romanians are a people like any other, eager for dialogue, concord and dignity.
" ROMANIAN HISTORICAL AND ETHNIC SPACE " Foreword
Text taken in full from the presentation made by Mr. Acad. Razvan Theodorescu
"In one of his famous radio conferences entitled "Advice in the Dark", Nicolae Iorga said: "For every country and every nation there are certain big problems on which their rights and future depend. Thus the age of the nation's residence in the homeland, the proof of higher qualities and the role it plays in the whole of humanity".
These words were spoken on June 23, 1936, four years before his tragic death and the tragic amputations of a Romania for the defense and increase of which the national historian spent his whole life.
The war that had already started and that would lead dramatically to our country also acutely brought before the public opinion from here and abroad - even if only in the perspective of a future peace - the question of our historical rights over some areas of Romania - I like the term and it use frequently lately -, some barely lost through the transactions of the great powers, others regained on the way of weapons and then lost again.
It was the moment when, under government patronage - we must not be shy to remember that it was the Antonesian regime (1942) -, historical specialists, geographers, sociologists, anthropologists were gathered to create a geopolitical synthesis that you read in the pages following (reissued with addendums that present the situation in Romania up to today).
A synthesis in which the dozens of maps and precise statistics accompanied by stoning historical notations indicated what Iorga called "the age of the nation's dwelling" from the era of pre-Roman Dacia until the interwar period, in the long dispute with a neighboring historiography and with the defenders of theses who wanted the decisions invalidated from 1919-1920 of the Paris Peace Conference and the Trianon conclusions.
With an impeccably executed cartography that had in mind not only Transylvania - the heart of the Romanian nation - but also the space from the midnight, towards Ceremus, the eastern space beyond the Prut and the southern one, beyond the Danube, the Romanian unity, so many times stepped on - in 1775 with Bucovina, in 1812 with Bessarabia, in 1878 with the three southern Bessarabian counties, in 1940 with Northern Transylvania, with Bessarabia again, with the Dobrogean Quadrangle -, is abundantly demonstrated by this collective work which clearly shows that Romania, "country of crossroads" as it is rightly defined, is also a country with an ethnic and cultural specificity that must be stressed.
It is, in a world that was considered "inter-imperial" - where three emperors extended their domination -, the only South-East European space where statehood was a multi-secular reality, through the autonomy of lords, voivodes, the Church preserved as such from the period of the Turcocracy, when the Balkans and Hungary became vassals fully subject to the Porte.
It is the only space of an Orthodox Latinity and a Latin Orthodoxy, often uniting the pragmatism of the West with the ideocratic reflection of the East. It is the only place where a sedentary and ancient Christian people knew the presence of Germanic, Turanian Finno-Ugric and Slavic pagan migrants who, in contact with Romanians from the Carpathians and the Lower Danube, converted here under the sign of the church from Constantinople, " the second Rome" (this is, among others, the case of Gyula's Hungarians, in Alba Iulia, more than a millennium ago, as evidenced by written sources and archaeological traces).
A Romanic and then Romanian world, at first predominantly rural, on a "terra" from which the "peasants" emerged, continuing the traditions of ancient Rome and those of the pre-medieval "Romanians", establishing independent states in the Middle Ages , swarming over a very wide area, from Timoc to Transnistria, the ethnic community of the "Latins of the East" remains a strong, sustainable and deeply European island.
In the year of the centenary of a hard-won unity, the exposition full of comparative meanings like the one in front, due - more than seven decades ago - to some patriotic and highly professional scholars, will be profitably consulted by academics and students, diplomats and people policies, for their and our common benefit."
WORDS UNSPOKEN YET
Text taken in full from the introduction made by Mr. NICOLAE BADEA
"Dear reader,
The idea of reprinting the work Spatiul Istoric y Etnic Romanesc was born one day in 2017 when, by chance, I read on a page of an anodized calendar these words of the great historian Nicolae Iorga: "A people who do not know their history is like a child who does not know his parents".
I realized then that any projection of a nation's future starts from a well-documented analysis of its past.
I searched in the Library of the Romanian Academy and found an album that appeared for the first time in 1942 and was reprinted 50 years later: The Romanian Historical and Ethnic Space .
Scrolling through its pages yellowed by time, I had the image of a precious mina flower that had been waiting for a long time to be brought out to the light, to expose the unique beauty of its facets in the glow of time...
This is how I see this work: a sparkling compilation of the maps of the historical development of Romania in the blessed space where Burebista and Decebal ruled, where the capital of Trajan Dacia was, where the princedoms and voivodeships that made up the Romanian States existed, where they fought the Bessarabians, the Musatians and the Corvinestians, where the Chorus of the Union was sung and where the Romanian National Unitary State was created.
I wanted, through a totally private project, to join the not easy and simple efforts, in the context of the present time, to celebrate the Centennial of the Great Union of Romanians.
One hundred years of state consolidation... Two thousand years of historical development...
There are eras that have known exuberance, confusion and restriction, the search and discovery of the road to United Romania, historical times reflected in maps and documentary works that reflect the eternal struggle of the Romanians to preserve their national identity and for the strong affirmation of their national sentiment.
Going through this work with your mind and heart, you will see, dear reader, that the history of the Romanians has some constants that no one can ever question and that time will not erase in its course: origin and language, territory, faith , culture and, above all, sacrifice.
This highly erudite work is a fresco of the national destiny and is the fruit of a meticulous and persevering work through which its authors answered the anti-Romanian theses of the time when the Romanian Historical and Ethnic Space saw the light of day for the first time .
Without this work, many of the arguments of Romanian historiography would not be and would not have been as comprehensive.
I opted for a bilingual edition because, for the first time, the historical atlas Spatiul Istoric y Etnic Romanesc will go out into the world to serve as a research and information tool, a true guide that aims to make known the history of the Romanian nation, a nation that has always it had its place on either side of the Carpathians, on either side of the lower Danube, the Tisa, and the Prut, near the Great Sea.
Thank you to a wonderful team, without whose support this endeavor would not have been possible, just as I thank each individual member for their constant help and dedication to the project.
I also thank you, the reader, for the moment of respite you will take to go through this unique work, the true archeology of the knowledge of the Romanian nation.
I wish the Romanians, wherever they are, and the Eternal Romania a living, dignified and glorious future, like the history written by the ancestors!"