1rst December - The National Day of Romania or The Great Union Day

The map of Romania with the colours of the national flag

The National Day of Romania is 48 h long! No, is not a typo... not exactly! It's one of my jokes, but is based on interesting and quite serious facts.

Well, today, on 1rst December is celebrated The National Day of Romania also called Great Union Day (Marea Unire). This marks the day when Romanian territories were united in one big country and the scaterred Romanians became one big nation. I don't intend to get into much details here today. Those interested can find several interesting links at the end of this post.

On the other hand, yesterday, 30 November all the Romanians, but mostly the Orthodox Christians have celebrated Saint Andrew, who is considered to be the protector of Romania. Both celebrations are National holidays.

Saint Andrew or Sfântul Andrei, how is locally called is one of the 12 Apostles of Jesus, and he is the one who brought the Christian Gospels to the people living on the actual Romanian territory. Again, I am not going to enter in details today, the subject being too complex for a simple casual blog post.

But I am going to tell one interesting thing that I have observed to be a characteristic of the Romanian nation and culture. Apart from other people who have developed a sense of togetherness and of appartenance to a certain nation based on their common history and cultural values, the Romanians did their Great Union because of their unity of religion, but, most of all, the unity of language.

Other people from other countries speak two-three languages and the same boundaries host multiple dialects. This is not the case with Romania and the Romanians. Yes, it is true that there are a lot of minorities of different ethnics, each of them speaking their own mother tongue, but the Romanian ethnics  speak only one language - Romanian. The language sounds identical all across the country because there are no real dialects, only some sorts of sub-dialects (or grai for singular, graiuri for plural - sorry, I don't know the exact English word for that).

And one last idea. Being the National Days of Romanians, I must mention our brothers from the Moldavian Republic who area also ethnic Romanians and speak Romanian language. Sadly, they live too close to the former Russian Soviet Union, so, for political reasons, the official language in the Moldavian Republic is called as being Moldavian, while, in fact, it is truly and deeply and completely Romanian.

Hey, you, officials from the Moldavian Government! Repeat after me: we speak Romanian! Romanian, is that clear? Moldavian language exists only in your imagination...

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Usefull links about the National Great Union Day:

What do Romanians celebrate on their December 1st National Day?

December 1st - Romania National Day

Great Union Day (Wikipedia article)