1. Geography

Romania is a country located in the far east of Europe. It is bordered in the south by Bulgaria, on the north by Ukraine, on the east by the Black Sea, and on the west by Serbia and Hungary. Moldova, an independent country, is located just northeast of Romania, bordering Ukraine. Culturally, the two countries are very closely linked but have distinct political histories.

Modern Romania has seven major regions. The Banat is a fertile plain in the west. Transylvania includes a northern extension of the Banat plain and a range of rugged mountains in the central area, known as the Carpathians. Rolling foothills make up Moldova and Bucovina in the northeast. On the eastern seaboard, Dobrogea features a lengthy coastline along the Black Sea. Finally, Muntenia and Oltenia contain rich oil-producing lands and form a riparian area and delta along the Danube in the south. Each of these regions has a unique music and dance culture.

Moldova (also known as Bessarabia, Moldavia, and Moldovia) has long been ruled by its neighbors to the east and north: Russia and Ukraine (and the Soviet Union when it existed). It is now an independent country. Linguistically and culturally, however, it is closer to its western neighbor, Romania. Within Moldova, there is a tiny breakaway republic called Transnistria (or Pridnestrovie), which has not been widely recognized internationally. Transnistria is located on the border with Ukraine. For the most part, the rest of this reading will focus on Romanian music and dance, but most of what is discussed here also applies to Moldova. The country of Moldova should not be confused with the Romanian region of Moldova, which is on its western border. The music and dances of Romanian Moldova and the country of Moldova form a clear cultural continuum, however.

2. Language and Culture

The Romanian language has a fascinating history; it’s the largest Romance language (i.e., a language descended from Latin) spoken in Eastern Europe. In ancient times, Romania was known as Dacia. In the first century CE, the Romans conquered Dacia, and the people adopted Latin, which eventually evolved into Romanian. This language is related to Spanish, Italian, French, and Portuguese. However, it has many unique features. It has many loanwords from the Slavic languages spoken around it, as well as from the Hungarian minority within its borders. It also has acquired a number of grammatical characteristics associated with neighboring Balkan languages. For example, the Romanian definite article -ul (cognate to Spanish el and Italian il) is a suffix on the word it attaches to, rather than appearing before the noun. This is a characteristic of languages spoken in the rest of the Balkans (for example, in Bulgarian and Macedonian, the definite article -to is also a suffix rather than an independent word).

The land and resources of Romania have been prized by nearly every conquering group throughout history, including the Mongols, Goths, Persians, Slavs, Macedonians, Saxons, Bavarians, Romans, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire. After World War I, the Austro-Hungarian Empire was dissolved by the Treaty of Trianon, and the borders of present-day Romania were established.

Until the 1980s, the country had several active and distinct ethnic enclaves. Germans from Bavaria settled in the Banat around Timișoara in western Romania. They practiced Western Catholicism rather than the Romanian brand of Orthodoxy, and they spoke many dialects of German. They retained their culture, music, and dance, preferring accordionists and brass bands that played waltzes and polkas from “the old country”. They also retained their festivals, such as the Kirchweih, an elaborate, weeklong harvest festival inherited from the Middle Ages that included many rituals and festivities.

Hungarians peopled the area north of the Banat and west of the Carpathians, centered in and around Sibiu in Transylvania. They retained their Hungarian language, Catholic religion, and customs—including music, dance, and costuming—that sounded and looked very Hungarian. One particular group of ethnic Hungarians in eastern Moldova, the Csángó, has a unique musical and dance style.

The Gagauz are a group of people in Moldova who speak a Turkic language related to Turkish, but who practice Eastern Orthodox Christianity. They are related to the Gagauz who live in Ukraine and Bulgaria. Their dances and music are not particularly Turkish in style, except that they often feature dances in 9/8 time, a characteristic meter for Turkish dances and otherwise rare in Romanian dances.

Armenians came to Romania about 1,000 years ago, bringing the Armenian Apostolic Church, unique customs, and cultural artifacts. Most notably, they became renowned as mathematicians and architects who designed many of the distinctive churches in east-central Romania.

Many people from various Slavic nations formed ethnic minorities. These include Ukrainians and Russians in Moldova and Transnistria, as well as Serbs in the Banat area. Another group was the Roma. The Roma are descended from migrants from India. They speak a language called Romani, which is not related to Romanian, except insofar as they are both Indo-European languages. The Roma are important figures in cultures throughout the Balkans because they often serve as the primary musicians at social events such as weddings and festivals. Unfortunately, during the 1980s, the post-WWII Communist regime, under the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, began pogroms against these ethnic minorities. To avoid destruction, many of these people left everything they had and fled the country to start their lives over.

3. Folk Costumes

Romanian women wear long-sleeved white blouses and white mid-calf skirts. Elsewhere in the Balkans, village costume decoration tends to feature floral designs. While floral decoration is not unknown in Romania, villagers’ old-style costume decoration was characterized largely by geometric patterns. Women created embroidered wide patterns, called altiță, at the shoulders of their blouses, often in red, blue, and black. They also decorated necks and sleeves with embroidered vertical stripes and sewed a horizontal stripe at the cuff. Over their skirts, they wore long black woven aprons, front and back. These aprons had golden or silver top-weavings in geometric designs. Often, they wore black vests with additional embroidery or braiding, along with a cloth head covering.

Village men’s costumes are simpler: a white tunic over wide-legged white pants. Sometimes their tunics had a small altiță decoration at the shoulder and embroidery around the cuff and hem. Often, they had a wide belt made of leather or woven and decorated with geometric designs. Black vests with embroidery and red or green pompoms or tassels would complete the outfits. Mountain villagers wear a white woolen vest heavily embroidered in red and black with geometric designs. They might also have fur pieces sewn to the neck and around the fronts and hems of their vests.

4. Music

When you hear Romanian music, the most obvious instrument is the violin. But Romanian folk bands include many other instruments, such as the cobză (guitar), trumpets (especially in Moldova and Banat), and the double bass. Most likely, Romanians inherited the țimbal (cimbalom) from nearby ethnic Hungarians. Favorite wind instruments include flutes (fluier), the panpipe (nai), cimpoi (bagpipes), the caval, which is a long shepherd’s pipe, and the ocarină.

The Romanian taragot is descended from the Turkish double-reeded oboe-like zurna. Romanians adapted the instrument from the Turks during the Turkish wars of the Middle Ages. After the Austrians expelled the Turks in the late 1800s, the Hungarians had a keyed single-reed instrument called the taragoata, which the Romanians adopted as the taragot. It has a sound as hauntingly mournful as the oboe, but unique unto itself.

• Cimpoi, caval, fluier, and ocarina
• Cobză
• Taragot
• Moldovan tunes on the țimbal
• Taraf de Haidouks (one of the best Roma bands playing traditional music)
• Fanfare Ciocârlia (one of the best Roma bands playing brass instruments)
• Zamfir playing the traditional tune Ciocârlia

5. Dances

Romanian dance is characterized by vigorous stamping and arm swinging, as we find in the Sârba dances. But you also find dances that feature the gentle swaying of the body in quarter circles or from side to side. While many dances are based on the Hora (circle dances), Romanians also enjoy couple dances and Brâul (brâul means “belt”; however, belt dances are exceedingly rare in Romania; another possible origin for the name is that these dances were based on French Branle court dances).

Romanian dance is seldom a quiet or sedate experience. Romanians whistle stridently, or they may shout or clap. The shouts, called strigaturi, mark a unique characteristic of Romanian dance. Romanian men shout these rhythmic chants as they dance. They are spur-of-the-moment creations, often done in rhyming couplets or 4-liners—little satiric poems or directions about the dance steps. Often, one man shouts his inspired comments in rhythm with the dance; at other times, they use a call-and-response format. Some examples translated into English here:

“On the spot, in place. Dance until the rosemary flowers.”
“Hey, you guys, let’s move—hey! Move; move with the stamps!”
“You can eat, but you don’t dance; you will not fit in your pants!”

The most common meters are 2/4, 3/4, and 6/8. However, Slavic influence has resulted in dances with more complex meters, such as 5/8, 7/16 (Geamparalele), 9/8, 10/16, and 11/16.

• Moldovan dance with strigaturi
• Joc with strigaturi
• Invirtita
• Sârba

6. Călușari

No discussion of Romanian dance would be complete without a discussion of the Călușari, the male ritual dancers. Secret societies of Călușari dancers wear distinctive costumes and perform their spectacular acrobatic dances during change-of-season festivals, especially in the spring and autumn. They combine rapid stamping, clapping, leaping, squatting, kicking, cartwheels, and heel-clicking into a spectacular dance.

Călușari dancers often wear white pants and thigh-length white tunics, heavily embroidered with geometric red patterns at the collar, shoulders, and cuffs, and down the sleeves and along the hem. They cinch their tunics at the waist with colorful red woven belts that sport narrow red stripes, and across their chests, they wear wide red woven straps crossed in a large X. The Călușari used to carry swords and clubs, but now they carry long, colorfully decorated sticks. They hold the sticks vertically and use them to launch themselves into leaping acrobatics. Călușari wear bells and tassels on their leggings, and they adorn their distinctive hats with spangles and ropes of shiny pearls and long colorful ribbon streamers that hang down their backs below their tunics—all to ward off evil spirits, thereby encouraging health and happiness to the members of the village households that they visit. It is likely that the Călușari represent pre-Christian hunting rituals. Their symbol is the horse, and many of their steps represent horse-like prancing. However, some clubs have hats decorated with garlands of flowers around the crowns. Overall, the costumes bear a striking resemblance to the costumes worn by Morris dancers in England. Morris dancers also wear bells on their leggings, wear crossed red straps, wear hats decorated with flowers, and carry sticks! The coincidence is remarkable, and we can only speculate about why it exists. Some scholars speculate that Morris dancers and the Călușari are both remnants of early Indo-European horse cults.

• Călușarii video

Further Reading

• Giurchescu and Bloland (1995), Grindea and Grindea (1952). For full citations, see the References section at the end of the book.
• http://www.socalfolkdance.org/articles/character_of_romanian_dance_vasilescu.htm
• https://www.sfdh.us/encyclopedia/romanian_dance_and_music.html

Some Suggested Dances for Teaching

The following links take you to descriptions and instructions from my website, Folk Dance Musings, for dances appropriate for teaching to new dancers.

• Alunelul
• Arnăuța
• Colindul Voinicului
• De Strigat
• Hora de Langesti
• Joc in Patru
• Țarina de la Abrud
• Ciuleandra

Discussion Questions

Discussion Question 1

An internationally known dance ethnographer, teacher, and choreographer goes to Boston to teach a dance they have personally researched and learned in a Romanian village. Later, this expert comes to Tucson and teaches the same dance they taught in Boston, but with a different ordering of the figures. You look online and see a group of villagers doing a dance with that same title, but it has yet again a different order of figures; moreover, it also includes a figure that your teacher didn’t mention in their teaching or in their written description of the dance. Which of the three iterations of this dance are “correct”, if any, and why?

Discussion Question 2

Moldova and Romania have been politically divided for over a century, but their music and dance traditions are very similar. Why should this be the case?