Facts About Romania

Romania rests in the Southeastern part of Europe, girdling the Black Sea between Ukraine and Bulgaria. It came into being when the two principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia broke the shackles of Turkish Ottoman suzerainty and merged, in 1859, to form a new land - ‘Romania’. Surrounded by Hungary and Serbia to the west, Ukraine and Moldova to the northeast and Bulgaria to the south, Romania is home to the striking Carpathian mountain ranges that pass through its heart. With its sun-kissed beaches, emerald forests, surrealistic history and medieval monuments, Romania remains a very popular tourist destination of Europe. To know more about the place, check out some fun and interesting facts given below.

Fun & Interesting Facts about Romania

• The capital of Romania is Bucharest, once popular as the ‘Paris of the East’.
• Romania covers a total area of 237,500 sq km and the total population of the place is around 22.5 million.
• Apart from the official Romanian language, Hungarian and German form two other major languages of Romania.
• Romania has a Republic type of government.
• The currency of Romania is Romanian ‘leu’ (RON).
• Romania's Danube Delta is a World Heritage site and is the second largest delta in the whole of Europe.
• The Dacian fortresses of the Orastie Mountains, in Romania, belong to the Late Iron Age.
• Gheorghe Marinescu, a professor at the Faculty of Medicine in Bucharest, was the first person to see living nervous cells with a microscope.
• More than half of Romania's Jewish population died in the Second World War.
• Romania was a part of the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (COMECON) and the Warsaw Treaty Organisation.
• After the Second World War, the Soviet Socialist Republic of Moldova was formed, which was earlier a part of Romania.
• Romania joined the European Union in 2007, along with Bulgaria.
• In the year 2000, 100 tonnes of cyanide, from a gold mine in northern Romania, spilled into rivers in Romania, Hungary and Yugoslavia and destroyed aquatic life for several hundred kilometers.
• The Transylvanian city of Sibiu is credited as the European Capital of Culture 2007.
• Irish author Bram Stoker based his horror novel ‘Dracula’ on the fifteenth century Wallachian Prince, Vlad Dracul of Romania.
• The Bran Castle, associated with Vlad Dracul, still lies in Romania and forms its most popular tourist attraction.