"Romania" a Romania Travel Page by glenn57

Romania is a land that exhibits a large difference between urban and rural life. While life in the large cities appears much the same as cities in other parts of Europe, the rural people live a life more like the West did a hundred years ago. Go now and see it before it disappears....

Romania, in roughly its current form, has only existing since the Treaty of Paris, 1919. Before World War I, the north-western part of Romania, called Transylvania, belonged to Austro-Hungarian Empire. The Treaty sought to unite people of the same ethnic group under one country. Although there were a lot of Hungarians in Transylvania (and still are), most of the people there were Romanian (as defined by their language), and so the authors of the Treaty of Paris decided to unite Transylvania with the rest of Romania. They also added a part of the Banat to Romania at that time, and Bessarabia.

The Soviet Union took Bessarabia (the north-eastern part of Romania) during World War II. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, this area became the Republic of Moldova. It remains a mostly Romanian-speaking country.