Romania

A Latin-speaking country in a Slavic region, which is the fact its national identity is built on. Roman Dacia lasted under two centuries, but Romanian is a Romance language, and whether its speakers descend from Romanised Dacians who stayed or from later migrants is one of the most politically loaded questions in European historiography because Transylvania's ownership has been argued from it. The principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia were Ottoman tributaries for centuries, governed partly through Greek Phanariot appointees. Vlad III of Wallachia supplied the name for a novel he otherwise has little to do with. The two principalities united in 1859 and won independence in 1878. Romania gained Transylvania after the First World War, doubling in size, and lost territory again in 1940. Its Jewish and Roma populations suffered heavily under the Antonescu regime. Ceausescu's rule became the most personalised in the bloc, with a birth-rate policy that banned contraception and abortion and filled state orphanages, and a debt repayment programme that starved the country; he was executed on Christmas Day 1989, the only violent end in that year's revolutions. Bucharest is the capital. The country has about nineteen million people, the largest in the Balkans. Romanian is closest to Italian among living languages. The Danube delta is the largest and best preserved in Europe. The painted monasteries of Bucovina and the fortified Saxon churches of Transylvania are World Heritage sites. Romania joined the EU in 2007. Bucharest holds the heaviest building in the world, the palace Ceausescu built by demolishing a fifth of the historic city.

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