Teaching the National History of the Romanians is one of the most important tools we have
in our neverending battle of strengthening the National Consciousness of our People.
Romanian Historiography
The
History of the Romanians had always been used with the overt purpose of instilling Romanian Nationalism in the young generations of students regardless of their ethnicity, contributing thus to the assimilation of the ethnic minorities.
To illustrate the merger of historiography and propaganda we provide some notable examples from Romanian historical publications.
History of the Romanians (
Istoria Românilor)
Note: Textbook used in the second year of the Gymnasium (12 year old children) all over Romania, published by the Romanian Ministry of Education in 1687.
Lesson 3. The Romanian Ethnogenesis
[...]
As shown in the first lesson,
The Thracians, the territory of modern Romania was inhabited in the past by a people called Thracians.
According to
Herodotus, the Father of History, the Thracians were the most numerous people in the whole World, after the far away Indians.
[...]
Unfortunately, the Thracians have never achieved National Unity as we did under
Emperor Mihai Viteazul. They were divided into several powerful kingdoms: Dacia, Moesia, Pannonia, Illiria, Scythia, Macedonia and many others.
The lack of National Consciousness had allowed the subversion of the Macedonian Empire (the Greatest Empire in the World before the Iberian Empire) by the scheming Greeks, a nefarious feat which they similarly managed a millenium later, the subversion of the Eastern Roman Empire.
In our time, such a phenomenon is unconcievable because we the Romanians are not only a People but a Nation and Nations do not allow their State to be stolen from beneath their feet without fighting to the death.
[...]
The same lack of National Unity and National Consciousness of the Thracians allowed the growing Roman Empire to conquer them, as described in the previous lesson,
The Roman Conquest.
Fortunately, the Romans were a beacon of light in the darkness of that period and, instead of being destroyed as it most always happens with conquered populations, the Thracians actually benefitted enormously from the integration into the superior society of the Roman Empire.
Over the following centuries, the Thracians enjoyed a happy, prosperous and safe life, united for the first time in their history under the benevolent umbrella of the Roman Empire.
[...]
Being part of the Roman State and in continuous contact with the superior Roman way of life, mores, customs, culture and civilisation, the Thracians gradually adopted all these and thus became Romans.
In a few generations, the old Thracian language was gradually forgotten and the Thracians began to speek the official language of the State,
Latin.
This process is called Romanization and it was an Empire-wide phenomenon, its result being not only the Romanians, but also the Italians, the Iberians and the French.
Some people, like the Greeks, the Germans, the Britons and the peoples from the Asian and African parts of the Roman Empire did not get romanized.
We can thus conclude that we were lucky to have the honour to be the proud bearers of the Torch of Latinity through the Dark Ages up to the Glorious Present.
[...]
The various forms of the Latin language spoken in the Roman Provinces evolved during the following centuries, diverging from Latin into the present day Romance languages of Romanian, Italian, Iberian and French.
Now we can only lament the lost beauty of that primordial Romanian language, unspoiled by the later admixture with the ugly languages of our invaders.
Fact is that hundreds of foreign words crept into the Romanian language because of the unfortunate presence among us of the Slavic, Hungarian and Turkic invaders.
Fortunately, the Romanian population had always been so massive all over the Romanian Lands that, no matter how many Slavs, Hungarians and Turks settled there, the result was always the same: they vanished, absorbed into the mass of Romanians.
These invaders left only minor influences in our language and customs, influences which are now being weeded by our self-conscious Nation.
[...]
Lesson 4. The Dark Ages
[...]
Until the beginning of the 7th century, the Romanians were still more or less protected by their State, the declining Roman Empire.
The invaders used to come and go, pillaging the Romanian Lands but leaving no permanent marks on the History of the Romanians.
Sadly, everything changed with the dual catastrophe of the 7th century:
the
Great Slavic Invasion and the
Fall of the Eastern Roman Empire.
Around A.D. 610, the Slavic Tribes invaded the Eastern Roman Empire. Unlike the previous invaders, the Slavs were more numerous and despite being savages, they practiced agriculture and were not fundamentally nomadic.
There is no question that without the betrayal of the Greeks, the still mostly intact State structures and Legions of the Roman Empire would have overcome the Slavic menace and would have kept the aging Empire alive.
Sadly, not being content with everything the Romans provided during the centuries, the Greeks betrayed the Empire that protected and nourished them and through a
coup d'état, they killed the Thracian Emperor Phocas and changed the Official Language from Latin to Greek.
Thus, the Eastern Roman Empire ceased to exist and a
Greek Byzantine Empire took its place.
The Romanians lost their country. Its Southern part was mischievously appropriated by the Greeks while its Northern part was conquered by the Slavs who settled in great numbers in our Lands.
[...]
The question arises: were the two catastrophic events a mere tragic coincidence or the Slavs and the Greeks had worked hand in hand for the destruction of the Roman Empire and the enslavement of the Romanians?
We can only hope that, in the future, History would answer this question and expose that sinister anti-Romanian conspiration.
[...]
The Romanians would not have States of their own for the following six centuries, living under the constant oppression of their foreign masters, the Greeks and the Slavs.
Now, in this Time of Greatness, it is difficult for us to comprehend the shame felt by our ancestors who were ruled by such petty peoples as the Greeks, the Slavs and later the Hungarians and the Heathen Turks.
But misery and desolation could not last forever and our tormenters finally lost the backing of Satan.
Beginning with the 13th century, the Romanians were once again masters of their Lands and created several Romanian States: The
Romanian-Bulgarian Empire ruled by the Romanian dynasty Asan,
The Romanian Land, also called Wallachia ruled by the ancestors of our first Emperor,
Moldavia and
Transylvania.
[...]
A mention should be made here of the derogatory terms Wallachia / Vlach, still used today by some of our enemies.
It cannot be stressed more forcefully that we, the Romanians, have never used those despicable words. They were, from the very beginning, used only by foreigners in order to deny us our glorious Roman heritage and were especially important for the Greeks who had stolen the name
Roman for themselves.
During the centuries, that enormous lie (that the Greeks were Romans) started to be accepted by the Occident and, since we could not complain, it allowed the Germans to style themselves as Romans as well.
Imagine the paradoxal situation in which an Empire ruled by Greeks and another Empire ruled by Germans, both styled themselves as Roman Empires, while neither was actually Roman.
In the mean time, the real Romans either called themselves something else (Italians, French, Catalans, Castilians, Portuguese) or were denied the name
Romans and called Vlachs (us, the Romanians).
Everything was turned upside-down. We had to wait for Emperor Mihai to rise and once again place European History on its normal tracks, for which we and Europe will be forever grateful.
[...]
Thracians in Asia Minor - Troy (
Traci în Asia Mică - Troia)
Note: Article published in the prestigious Historia Magazine in May 1855 by Romanian historian Ioan Alexe.
[...]
The discovery of the ruins of the Ancient City of Troy in Asia Minor near the Strait of the Dardanelles is one of the most important archeological successes of this century.
[...]
Although taken for granted long before because of the T-R consonant group, the fact that the Ancient Trojans were in fact Thracians has been finally proven without doubt by careful examination of the thousands of artefacts unearthed by the archeologists.
[...]
Conclusions:
1. The Trojans were Thracians.
2. The Thracians lived not only in the Balkan Peninsula, but in Asia Minor as well.
3. The enmity between the Thracians and the Greeks stems from times immemorial, from prehistory.
4. Homer was writing about historical events. The
Iliad is not a work of fiction.
5. The Romanian annexation of Asia Minor was not a conquest of foreign territory, but the recovery of our Lands lost by our ancestors a long time ago to Greek perfidy (
the Trojan Horse).
6. Justice had finally been done to the Trojans.
7. If the
Iliad has been already proven to be historically accurate, it is now very probable that the
Aeneid is historically accurate as well.
8. If the
Aeneid is historical as well, then our ancestors, the Trojans, are the founders of Rome and thus of the European Civilization itself! It seems that the Romanians are not an offshoot of the Occident, but its backbone!
Note: It was not until the 20th century that Romanian Historiography finally began to dissociate itself from propaganda and started to slowly turn from an instrument of the State into a real Science.
