Explore the History of Romania

Romania lies around the arc of the Carpathians, between the Danube, the Black Sea and the plains of Moldavia and Wallachia, with the Transylvanian plateau at its heart. Here the earliest securely dated modern humans of Europe were buried in a cave at Oase some forty thousand years ago, farmers of the Cucuteni culture painted their pottery, and the Getae and Dacians, Thracian peoples who built the fortresses of the Orăștie Mountains, were united by Burebista and defended by Decebalus until Trajan made Dacia a Roman province in 106 CE.

After the Romans left in the 270s, Goths, Huns, Gepids, Avars, Slavs, Bulgars and Magyars crossed or ruled these lands, and the Romanian language, a Romance tongue surrounded by Slavic, Hungarian and Greek neighbours, took shape in an obscure age whose location is still debated. The kingdom of Hungary absorbed Transylvania, while beyond the Carpathians Basarab I won independence at Posada in 1330 and Bogdan I founded Moldavia, two principalities ruled by voivodes and princes who faced the Ottomans, from Mircea the Elder and Stephen the Great to Michael the Brave, who briefly united the three lands in 1600.

Under Ottoman suzerainty and the Phanariote princes, and with the Habsburgs in Transylvania, the Romanians looked to national revival; the revolutions of 1848 failed, but Moldavia and Wallachia elected Alexandru Ioan Cuza in 1859, Carol of Hohenzollern became prince in 1866, independence was won in 1877 and a kingdom proclaimed in 1881. The Great Union of 1918 created Greater Romania, which lost a third of its territory in 1940, fought on the Axis side, took part in the Holocaust and changed sides in 1944. Communist rule under Gheorghiu-Dej and Ceaușescu ended in the revolution of December 1989, and Romania joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union in 2007; the annulled presidential election of 2024 and the government crisis of 2026 mark its most recent years.

Explore the eleven ages below through selected events from the timeline.