"Deșteaptă-te, române!" is the national anthem of Romania and former national anthem of Moldova.
The culture of Romania is an umbrella term used to encapsulate the ideas, customs and social behaviours of the people of Romania that developed due to the country's distinct geopolitical history and evolution. It is theorized that Romanians and related peoples were formed through the admixture of the descendants of Roman colonists and the indigenous Paleo-Balkanic people who were subsequently Romanized.
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Hora, also known as horo and oro, is a type of circle dance originating in Aromanian and Romanian communities, especially in Romania and Moldova. It is also found in other South East European countries and culturally adopted by ethnic minorities such as the Ashkenazi Jews and the Roma.
The Romanian word lăutar denotes a class of musicians.
Ileana Cosânzeana is a figure in Romanian mythology. She is represented as a beautiful good-natured princess or daughter of an Emperor, or described as a fairy with immense powers.
A balaur in Romanian folklore is a type of many-headed dragon or monstrous serpent, sometimes said to be equipped with wings. The number of heads is usually around three, but they can also have seven heads or even twelve heads according to some legends.
Caloian (also Calian(i), Caloiță, Scaloian, Gherman, or Iene) was a rainmaking and fertility rite in Romania, similar in some ways to Dodola. Its namesake is a clay effigy, whose sculpting, funeral, exhumation, and eventual destruction are centerpieces of the display. The source of this ritual, as is the case with those of many other local popular beliefs and practices, precedes the introduction of Christianity, although it came in time to be associated with Orthodox Easter or with the Feast of the Ascension. In some variants it was performed on a precisely calculated day two to three weeks after Easter, though local communities could also revive it at other times of the year, specifically during drought. The figurine was generally made from clay and most often by girls, though sometimes also by boys or married women; the ceremony itself would draw in the whole village community as spectators, and, in isolated cases, also had active participation from the Romanian Orthodox clergy. The mimicry of Christian funerals was widespread, but absent from the more established forms of the ritual.
"Miorița", also transliterated as "Mioritza", is an old Romanian pastoral ballad considered to be one of the most important pieces of Romanian folklore. It has numerous versions with quite different content, but the literary version by poet Vasile Alecsandri (1850) is the best known and praised. This had erstwhile been the oldest known written text, arousing suspicion that the poet may have authored it entirely, until the discovery was made of a version from the 1790s.
Sânziană is the Romanian name for gentle fairies who play an important part in local folklore, also used to designate the Galium verum or Cruciata laevipes flowers. Under the plural form Sânziene, the word designates an annual festival in the fairies' honor. Etymologically, the name comes from the Latin Sancta Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt and moon, also celebrated in Roman Dacia. Diana was known to be the virgin goddess and looked after virgins and women. She was one of the three maiden goddesses, Diana, Minerva and Vesta, who swore never to marry.
Estonian mythology is a complex of myths belonging to the Estonian folk heritage and literary mythology. Information about the pre-Christian and medieval Estonian mythology is scattered in historical chronicles, travellers' accounts and in ecclesiastical registers. Systematic recordings of Estonian folklore started in the 19th century. Pre-Christian Estonian deities may have included a god known as Jumal or Taevataat in Estonian, corresponding to Jumala in Finnish, and Jumo in Mari.
Greuceanu is a hero of the Romanian folklore. It is a brave young man who finds that the Sun and the Moon have been stolen by zmei. After a long fight with the three zmei and their wives (zmeoaice), Greuceanu sets the Sun and the Moon free so the people on Earth have light again.
The Călușari are the members of a fraternal secret society who practice a ritual acrobatic dance known as the căluș. Originally Romanian, the practice later spread to Bulgaria and North Macedonia. From three weeks after Easter until Pentecost, called Rusalii in Romanian, for around two weeks they have traditionally travelled to all their local communities where they would dance, accompanied by a few fiddlers.
The Solomonar or Șolomonar is a wizard believed in Romanian folklore to ride a dragon and control the weather, causing rain, thunder, or hailstorm.
Luceafărul is a narrative poem by Romanian author Mihai Eminescu. It was first published in 1883, out of Vienna, by Romanian expatriates in Austria-Hungary. It is generally considered Eminescu's masterpiece, one of the greatest accomplishments in Romanian literature, and one of the last milestones in Europe's romantic poetry. One in a family or "constellation" of poems, it took Eminescu ten years to conceive, its final shape being partly edited by the philosopher Titu Maiorescu. During this creative process, Eminescu distilled Romanian folklore, Romantic themes, and various staples of Indo-European myth, arriving from a versified fairy tale to a mythopoeia, a self-reflection on his condition as a genius, and an illustration of his philosophy of love.
Păcală is a fictional character in Romanian folklore, literature and humor. Primarily associated with Transylvania and Oltenia, he is depicted as a native of Vaideeni, located in an area of contact between those two regions. An irreverent young man, seemingly a peasant, he reserves contempt and irony for the village authorities, but often plays the fool, or displays an erratic and criminal behavior that scholars attribute to the eclecticism of sources weaved into the narrative. Păcală seems to be at least partly modeled on other characters in European folklore, in particular Giufà and Till Eulenspiegel. He may therefore be borrowed from Western chapbooks, with scholar Traian Bratu hypothesizing that Romanians were introduced to the Eulenspiegel anecdotes by their prolonged contact with the Transylvanian Saxons. The stories were then adapted and, in at least some cases, substantially modified, for instance by the addition of a native mythological layer, and by the appearance of a sidekick, the more slow-witted Tândală.
Simion Florea Marian was an ethnic Romanian Austro-Hungarian folklorist, ethnographer, Orthodox priest and teacher, from the Duchy of Bukovina.
Anca Giurchescu née Ciortea was a Romanian researcher of folk dance, and an ethnochoreologist, one of the founders of the discipline. Born in Bucharest to a family formerly from Translylvania, she lived in that region as a child. Entering university, she studied dance at the National Institute of Physical Education. During her schooling, she participated in competitive target shooting and was a silver (team) and bronze (individual) medalist in the 1955 European Shooting Championship. While still studying, she began working as a researcher at the Folklore Institute and in 1962 became a member of the International Council for Traditional Music. The Council established a working group which included Giurchescu, that laid the foundation for the science of ethnochoreology.
Maria Iliuț is a Moldovan singer of muzică populară.
