I think that the history of Romania is a lesson of survival. What else can it be since Romania managed to resist over the centuries to invasions, earthquakes, wars, the communism ... For much of its history, Romania was surrounded by three empires: the Ottoman from South, the Russian from North and East and the Austro-Hungarian from West. And not only managed to survive, but the Romanians never lost their sense of humor, their friendliness and hospitality.
Let's see what the Frenchmen Paul Morand said about Romania and Romanians in 1934 in his book "Bucharest":
"Countless times destroyed, sacked, burned, shaken by earthquakes, by pests and armies, countless times rebuilt, the history of Bucharest was the one of a hunt (...) This people of twenty million souls is hard to defeat and the reader could understand that the various calamities that God sent, from Attila to Lenin, didn't succeed here. Its vital impetus is so huge, that in less that a quarter of a century, it transformed a country almost ruined and hardly self-conscious into a nation perfectly equipped, prosperous and wise (...)
The Romanian doesn't perish. He falls but he doesn't brake. If beaten, he stands up and smiles with that natural politeness that stems from a good heart, not from a good education.
Bucharest (...) kept its humor and never ceased to proclaim: happiness. (...) Westerner with the forehead wrinkled by anxieties, I've learnt here that the unhappiness may make you smile sometimes. It's the lesson that this people gives us (...); a malleable people, which possesses the experience of the fatalism of all that's transient and ephemeral (...)
The lesson that Bucharest offers us is not an lesson of art, but a lesson of life. It teaches you to adapt to everything, even to the impossible. It incarnates well the soul of a people whose patience is endless, sublime like that of animals and whose soft optimism invented this saying: "Large is the garden of God". Capital of a tragic land, where often everything ends in comic, Bucharest left itself floating to the events without that rigidity and thus, that fragility caused by anger. Therefore, wandering the sinuous path of a picaresque destiny, Bucharest has remained happy."
Sorin Cristescu, February 2005
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