Celebrations in May
May 9 and 10 are highly significant dates for Romanians.
Bogdan Matei, 10.05.2021, 13:50
May 10 is a day of outmost importance in the creation of the Romanian modern state, and had been the country’s national day until the fall of communism. On May 10, 1866, Prince Carol I of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen took over the throne in Bucharest. His wisdom and devotion to his new country and his 48-year rule, the longest in Romania’s history, allowed Carol to turn the small state near the Balkans into a European country, through thorough reforms.
May 9 is, first of all, the Independence Day. Proclaimed as such by Parliament, in 1877 and defended on the battlefield, it marked the separation from the Ottoman Empire of Dobruja, a south eastern province at the Danube and the Black Sea, and its inclusion in the future kingdom, proclaimed also on May 10, 1881.
Carol’s heir, Ferdinand, would complete the process of national unification at the end of the First World War, when Bessarabia (east), Bukovina (north-east), Transylvania (centre), Banat, Crisana (west) and Maramures (north-west), provinces with mostly Romanian population, which had previously been under the occupation of the Czarist and Habsburg empires, were brought together under the authority of Bucharest.
The dynasty also linked its destiny to the victory over Nazi Germany. According to historians, the decision of Romania’s last king, Mihai I, to withdraw the country from the alliance with Hitler, in 1944, and bring it back alongside traditional allies, the Anglo-Americans, reduced the Second World War by at least six month in Europe and saved hundreds of thousands of lives. Decorated by the Soviet dictator Iosif Stalin with the Victoria order, the Romanian King would soon be faced with the ingratitude of the new allies. In 1947, when the country was under the occupation of the Soviet troops, which imposed a puppet government, King Mihai I was forced to abdicate and go into exile. He returned to Romania only in the 1990s, when he retrieved his Romanian citizenship, previously withdrawn by the communists, as well as a number of properties.
Condemned, by the post-war communism, to terror, humiliation and poverty, Romanians can, following the 1989 revolution and their country’s EU accession in 2007, celebrate Europe Day like a holiday of their own. Europe Day celebrates peace and unity in Europe and marks the fall of Nazism in 1945 and the statement by which, in 1950, the French Foreign Minister, Robert Schumann, launched the project of today’s European Union.
In a message on Europe Day, Romanian President Klaus Iohannis said that this year the celebration takes place in a context still marked by the Covid-19 pandemic, that puts to the test the EU and the member states, but that the challenges we are all facing do not diminish the relevance of the European project, but reconfirm it. (EE)
