View attachment 16228
Romania in
A Toasted World. Officially the
Romanian United Principalities, it is a country of two lands, of two constrasts.
The Principality of Wallachia is a strong and stable economy, more or less, and considers itself developed. It is a land of skyscrapers, of sleek roads, of diverse cities full of ethnic tensions, and tends to be the more liberal of the two halves of Romania. You'll often hear from Wallachians how they're "bailing out the Moldovians" year after year and get nothing back. In the west, in Oltenia, you may hear grumblings about how their grand old city of Craiova, traditionally the capital of Oltenia, is now part of the land given to the Roma in the 1940s. Certainly, when anti-Roma sentiments are high, you'll hear in Oltenia and elsewhere "Reclaim Craiova!". The governments of the day pay little heed to this of course.
The Principality of Moldovia, formerly the Moldovian Socialist Republic, was once part of the Global Socialist Union after a revolution in the late 1920s [or an invasion by the Russians, but who do you believe, the people in Moldovia, or
those Wallachian lies?]. Once the Russian Socialists fell, Moldovia's stability fell and a counter-revolution led to reunification in the mid-1990s. Now, regret may have seeped in, as the "Red Dogs", a militant communist organisation calling for an "Union of Eastern European Socialist Republics" has risen up in Transnistria, the most left-wing region in Moldovia. Moldovia's Socialist legacy still lingers, as it is both more socially conservative and economically socialist than Wallachia, and tends to be the less developed area comparatively and its cities are built in that distinctive 20th century Socialist Brutalist touch.
The autonomous provinces, those of Dobruja, Bukovina and Gaguazia, serve as a reminder that despite appearances, Romania is not just two lands, but of several perspectives. But has forty-four years of unification proved ephemeral and is Romania set to spin apart once more?