"Basarabia istorica"

Basarabia este teritoriul dintre Prut ºi Nistru, mare parte a acestuia aflându-se în momentul actual în componenþa Republicii Moldova, iar partea de sud (Bugeac) ºi cea de nord în componenþa Ucrainei.

Numele regiunii este legat de familia domnitoare Basarab. În1350, Nicolae Alexandru, fiul lui Basarab I, domnitor al Þãrii Româneºti duce o campanie impotriva tãtarilor. Reuºeºte sã-i împingã pe tãtari dincolo de Nistru ºi consemneazã in hãrþi teritoriul de aproximativ 45.000 km2 cuprins între Nistru, Prut ºi gurile Dunãrii pe care îl denumeºte Basarabia ºi care este azi cunoscut ºi sub numele de Basarabia Istoricã. În urmatoarele secole teritoriul devine parte integrantã a Þãrii Româneºti Moldova.

Aºa cum se afirmã mai sus, iniþial numele de Basarabia era folosit doar pentru partea de sud. Dar, în 1812, prin Tratatul de la Bucureºti încheiat în urma rãzboiului ruso-turc, otomanii cedeazã Basarabia Imperiului Þarist, însa ruºii ocupã întreg teritoriul cuprins între Prut si Nistru, aproximativ 45.000 km2.

Teritoriul rãmâne sub ocupaþie ruseascã pânã in 1917 când, pentru scurt timp, în urma revoluþiei, devine republicã ºi ulterior voteazã unirea cu România. În 1940 este ocupat de trupele sovietice ca urmare a Pactului Ribbentrop-Molotov.

Partea de sud a Basarabiei este inclusã în Ucraina.

Dupã dezmembrarea Uniunii Sovietice, în 1991, Republica Sovieticã Moldoveneascã se declarã independentã sub numele de Republica Moldova, situaþie în care se aflã ºi în ziua de azi.

Încercãrile de unire cu România iniþiate din ambele pãrþi n-au dus la nici un rezultat, clasa politicã moldoveneascã încercând sã zãdãrniceascã orice apropiere dintre cele douã þãri, astfel cã în momentul de faþã, limba oficialã este cea moldoveneascã în loc de românã.





sursa : http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basarabia

o varianta britanica a istoriei acestei regiuni...
http://www.eliznik.org.uk/RomaniaHistory/moldavia-history.htm

si lista voievozilor de-a lungul istoriei
http://www.eliznik.org.uk/RomaniaHistory/moldavian-rulers.htm

Slavic and romanian place names in north Moldavia





sursa: http://www.eliznik.org.uk/RomaniaHistory/moldavia-history.htm

The Republic of Moldova: An Historical Background


Born like the other Romance speaking peoples in the 1st millennium AD, the ancestors of those who are now known as Romanians have continuously inhabited the geographical space encompassing the territories stretching from the Pannonian Plain in the west to Transnistria (Transdnestr) in the east, from the Black Sea and Danube in the south to the Trans Carpathian area and Galicia in the north. Their forefathers, the Thracian tribes, had populated a larger area as early as the 2nd millennium BC. The Greeks called them Getae, the Romans called them Dacians, but they were actually a single Geto-Dacian people. The important historical references about them came mostly from Greek, Byzantine and Italian sources. From the 7th century B.C., the Greeks and then the Byzantines and Italians established their own ports and trading colonies along the northwestern shore of the Black Sea (Pontus Euxinus) and on the Danube, and continued to trade with the local people.
mai mult pe http://www.compudava.com/moldova/history/ancient.html

Harta anului 1370



Harta anului 1500

Middle Ages Principality of Moldova

When the great migrations ended, the Romanians began to descend from the forested piedmonts, hills and Carpathian Mountains and gradually moved toward the lower southern and eastern lands once inhabited by their ancestors. The attraction of the new uninhabited lands, and the demographic pressure of the overcrowded lands "at home," motivated the move. This slow natural movement took several centuries. In their eastward drive, the Romanians reoccupied the whole region between the eastern Carpathian range and the surrounding hills to the Nistru River, and crossed Nistru en masse as well as in scattered groups.
In 1352-1353 Voivode Dragos from Maramures (northern part of Transylvania) became the first appointed ruler of the boundary province of Moldova. The economic exchanges, the development of boroughs and of towns linked through transit trade routes with the commercial world abroad, offered a good chance to the Romanian political formations to place their unification projects on a viable basis. Once their independence from the Hungarian Crown had been won in battle, two other Romanian Principalities appeared -- Wallachia in 1324, and Moldova in 1359.
The Principality of Moldova occupied a larger area stretching from the Black Sea and the Danube in the south, to Galicia in the north, and from the Carpathian Mountains in the west to the Nistru River in the east. Moldova had a glorious and legendary century starting with the rule of Alexandru cel Bun (1400) and with the end of the rule of Stefan cel Mare (1504).
Stefan cel Mare (Stephen the Great or the "Saint" who was canonized in 1992) ruled Moldova between 1457-1504 and won European renown for his long resistance to the Ottoman Empire. Never before was Moldova so expanded and so highly respected as it was during Stephen the Great's rule. A remarkable army commander and politician, he sought to strengthen princely authority, to organize and bring about prosperity for Moldova, and to fight for its independence against foreign invasions. Though it was marked by continual strife, Stephen's long rule nonetheless brought considerable cultural development, and was a period of great ecclesiastical building and endowment. As the legend has it, he ruled for 47 years and led 47 battles, mainly against the Turks. He built, rebuilt or patronized about the same number of fortresses, churches and monasteries, which won him the acclaim of Pope Sixtus IV as the "Athlete of Christ". Eventually (in 1503, when he concluded a treaty with sultan Bayezid), he managed to preserve Moldova's independence, but only at the cost of an annual tribute to the Turks.
An important stage in the history of the Romanians was marked by the sway of Mihai Viteazul (Michael the Brave), the prince of Wallachia between 1593-1601. Mihai Viteazul joined the Christian League, an anti-Ottoman coalition initiated by the Papacy and the Holy Roman Empire (Austria, Mantua, Ferrara, Spain), and won the battles of Calugareni and Giurgiu against the Turks (1595), to regain the independence of his country. In 1600, he was the first who for a short while ruled and controlled the three Romanian lands -- Transylvania, Wallachia, and Moldova. But the great powers -- Austria, the Ottoman Empire, and Poland -- did not favour such a policy, so that the union was short-lived. However, the idea of unification, embraced earlier by Russians, was kept alive and gave fresh impetus to the Romanians' struggle for the setting up of an independent national state.
A relatively prosperous period for the principality of Moldova during the Ottoman suzerainty was during the years of the rule of Vasile Lupu (1634-1653). Vasile Lupu succeeded to not only strengthen and modernize the state and local administration, but also to develop an educational system and stimulate the genuine cultural flowering of Moldova.Among significant reforms and achievements of that period are: adoption in 1646 of the first Moldovan code of law ("Pravila lui Vasile Lupu"), publishing the first printed monument of the Romanian language ("Romanian Book of Teaching for Sundays and Other Holidays", 1643), opening of the first college in Moldova -- Academia Vasiliana (1640), erection of the unique church in Iasi "Trei Ierarhi" (1639), etc


Harta anului 1540

Actually, from a cultural point of view, the 17th and the first half of the 18th centuries represent a period of "Great Moldovan chroniclers," which formed the basis of the Romanian literature and historiography. Among them Grigore Ureche (1590-1647) with his "Letopisetul Tarii Moldovei" ("Chronicle of the Land of Moldova"), and Miron Costin (1633-1691) with his "De neamul moldovenilor" ("On the Origin of the Moldovans") had articulately and persuasively argued, for the first time in Romanian historiography, the Roman beginnings and Latin origin of the people of Moldova. The language and historical proofs we see in the chronicle "O seama de cuvinte" ("Some words") of Ion Neculce (1672-1745) certifies the genuine cultural development in Moldova of that period. Later, Dimitrie Cantemir (1673-1723), the ruler of Moldova between 1710-1711, succeeded to summarise and formulate in some of his fundamental works, written in Latin, Romanian or Turkish and translated in several European languages, the most important facts and aspects of Moldova's history, geography, ethnography etc.
The Russian armies appeared in Moldova in 1711, led personally by Peter the Great. Prince Dimitrie Cantemir and Peter the Great concluded the Lutsk alliance treaty against the Turks with Russia, recognizing fully the sovereignty of Moldova and her territorial integrity. But the Russian defeat at the hands of the Turks in 1711 proved disastrous for Moldova.
mai multe la http://www.compudava.com/moldova/history/middleages.htm

Modern times: Bessarabia. Romania.

Thus, at the Passarowitz Peace talks (1718), the Turks ceded Oltenia, a region of Wallachia, to the Habsburg Empire, which held it until the conclusion of the Belgrade Peace (1739). In 1775, the Habsburgs received another similar "donation" from the Turks, this time the northern part of Moldova -- Bucovina. Bordering with the Tzarist Empire since 1792 when Russia acquired the territory known today as Transnistria, and extending its borders to the west along the river Nistru (Dnester in Russian), the Ottoman Empire was permanently threatened to lose control over Moldova. Since Russia didn't want to wait too long for the right moment, in 1812 the Ottoman Empire "ceded" her the eastern half of the Principality of Moldova as a result of the Russo-Turkish war of 1806-1812.
At the time of its annexation by Russia, the eastern half of Moldova between Prut and Nistru did not have a name. In many ways its central part had become the core of Moldova. The Russians gave the name Bessarabia to the entire region, which before that was defined only to the southern part of the interfluves area along the Black Sea.
It was actually a shrewd diplomatic move to circumvent the Tilsit Treaty (1807), which committed Russia to evacuate both Wallachia and Moldova. Since the Treaty did not mention "Bessarabia," the Russian troops could remain there. In 1812, the Russians argued that Bessarabia was still different from Moldova and it was in their interest to extend that name to the whole territory between the Prut and the Nistru rivers. The Turks who signed the Treaty were not aware of how far the region extended either.
The annexation of Bessarabia had a dramatic impact over the destiny of Romanian Moldovans from this province which, since 1812, with some short interruption, remained under Russia's discretion until the end of communism. The annexed province had an area of 46,000 square kilometres and approximately 480,000 people, of whom 90 percent were Romanians. In the beginning Bessarabia was an autonomous province, but in 1829 when her autonomy was ended it became a simple Russian Gubernia. Life began to deteriorate immediately and thousands of Romanians, nobles and peasants alike, crossed the Prut into what remained of Moldova, preferring to live under Turkish suzerainty.
The Russian management of Bessarabia was a disaster. The land remained underdeveloped and the people, the native Romanians in particular, remained overwhelmingly illiterate. Bessarabia had the highest mortality rate in Europe, 50 percent higher than the Russian average. The Romanian language was gradually eliminated from schools, administration and even churches. Almost all the towns of Bessarabia had a massive settlement of Russians who controlled the local authorities and industry, and the Romanian Moldovans became a source of unqualified workers for the emerging regional Russian market. They remained aloof and could not integrate into the new Russian administration.
In 1877, at the beginning of the 1877-78 Russian-Turkish War, Romania declared its independence from the Ottoman Empire, and fought beside Russia in that war. The war brought not only the independence of Romania, but after the war, in 1878, the southern part of the territory between Prut and Nistru Rivers was re-annexed by Russia, while the Bulgarian region Dobrogea became part of Romania. Thus, the whole of Bessarabia, a region predominantly populated by ethnic Romanians, remained under the Russian Empire control until the end of 1917.
In Bessarabia, Romanian Moldovans were under a ferocious process of Russianisation, with very low literacy, and in a continuing decrease of their influence among the total population of Bessarabia (from 86% in 1817 to 47.6% in 1897). In the western part of Moldova the Romanian Moldovans contributed substantially in creating a new modern state of Romania, in the founding of Romanian classical literature, and in establishing a new and remarkable pleiad of political leaders, scientists, economists.
mai multe la http://www.compudava.com/moldova/history/modern.htm

Harta anului 1795



Harta a 1860

Union of Bessarabia with Romania.

After Romania entered World War I (1916) on the side of the Triple Entente (Britain, France and Russia), the Romanian soldiers from Bessarabia, Romania and Transylvania (still under Austria-Hungarian Empire) were forced to fight on different sides. Since the war scene encompassed their native lands, this encouraged them to look for a common post-war future.
Thus, in 1917, the Romanian soldiers and prisoners from the eastern front (natives from Bessarabia, the Kingdom of Romania, and Transylvania), together with legal representatives of workers, peasants, teachers and clerics from whole Bessarabia, initiated and organized the State Council (Sfatul Tarii) of Bessarabia. On December 2, 1917 the Council declared Bessarabia an autonomous republic, and soon, on January 24 1918, it proclaimed the independence of the Moldavian Democratic Republic (Bessarabia) and its separation from Russia.

Confronted with threats of isolation or absorption by the Ukraine, and in order to prevent the atrocities of the Russian soldiers withdrawn from the Romanian-Galician front, and the chaos prevailing in Russia after the Bolshevik revolution, the Sfatul Tarii called in the Romanian troops. Soon after, on March 27, 1918, the Bessarabian council voted to reunite Bessarabia with Romania. During the same year, with the defeat of Austria-Hungary, the unification with Romania of three other Romanian territories -- Banat, Transylvania and Bucovina -- was achieved.

At the Paris Peace Conference on March 9, 1920, the three great western powers - the United Kingdom, France and Italy -- consented to the reunion of Bessarabia with Romania, re-establishing the new boundary along the Nistru River as it had been prior to the annexation of 1812. The most important measures taken by the Romanian authorities after the reunion were land reform, building of elementary free-of-charge schools in all localities of Bessarabia, and creating conditions for the Romanian language to become the language of all inhabitants of the region. These reforms, along with the introduction of universal suffrage and the passing of a new constitution, one of the most democratic on the Continent, created a general-democratic framework and allowed for fast economic growth in Romania (e.g. the industrial production doubled between 1923-1938.

Meanwhile, the new Soviet government, aggressively opposing the union of Bessarabia with Romania, took various steps to acquire what it considered were "lost territories". In 1924 a Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (MASSR) was established within the Ukrainian SSR on the border of Romania, in the territory known as Transnistria, of which about a third of the population were Moldovans/Romanians at the time. The town of Balta was its designated capital until 1929, when the capital was transferred to Tiraspol.

Located on the eastern, or "left", bank of the Nistru River, the MASSR was meant to serve as a bridgehead for Soviet influence in the interfluves and, in the greatest possible hopes of the Soviets at the time, a paving of the way towards prospective "sovietization" of the entire Romanian kingdom. This "Bessarabia in miniature" provided Soviet policymakers and cultural planners with a diabolic laboratory. Indeed, the notion that Romanians and Moldovans in Bessarabia and the MSSR formed two separate ethno national groups, speaking different languages and possessing separate historical, cultural, and even biological traits, became a standard element of Soviet discourse on the Bessarabian question and the central justification for Moscow's territorial claims. In a sense, the MASSR represented a first Stalinist step towards the "liberation" of the "Moldovan nation".

mai multe http://www.compudava.com/moldova/history/unionwithrom.htm

Harta a 1896




Harta a 1882

Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic.

The opportunity for the Soviets to "liberate" Bessarabia came in 1940. In August 1939, under the terms of the secret protocols to the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact, Germany declared its "lack of interest" with respect to Finland, Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, eastern Poland and Bessarabia. Less than a year later, although Romania declared its neutrality in September 1939, the USSR managed to force the Romanian government into conceding Bessarabia and northern Bucovina. Soviet forces occupied these regions in June 1940 within a matter of a few days.
At first the Soviet authorities continued to call the occupied interfluves area "Bessarabia", but soon afterward the Soviet leadership proceeded to dismember the occupied territories. Thus, on August 2, 1940, the "Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic" was "proclaimed" by the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union, and the former "Moldavian ASSR" was abolished. Northern Bucovina, northern and southern Bessarabia, and an important part of the Moldavian ASSR were included into the "Ukrainian SSR", while 6 of 14 former districts of the Moldavian ASSR, and 6 of 9 Bessarabian districts entered the Moldavian SSR. The inclusion of Bessarabia's Danube and Black Sea frontage into the Ukrainian SSR placed these strategic assets in the hands of a reliable Soviet republic rather than leaving them under the control of a newly created entity, and not to mention a probable object of Romanian aspiration towards re-unification with its dismembered territory.

Between 1941 and 1944 the entire territory of Bessarabia, as well as northern Bucovina again became parts of Romania, but in 1944 Soviet troops retook these territories. Finally, they remained parts of the USSR until the disintegration of the Soviet empire in 1991, when the independent republics of Moldova and of the Ukraine where established.

As the only republic in the union whose titular nationality was represented by a sovereign state outside the USSR (Romania), the MSSR represented a special case in Moscow's economic and cadre policies. After the re-occupation of Bessarabia and northern Bucovina in 1940 and again in 1944, the Soviet Union continued the colonial Tsarist policy of genocide implemented by means of mass deportation, organized famine (provoked by Communists grain requisitioning in 1946-47), forced nationalization and collectivisation. The leadership of the USSR tried its very best, using different methods by now infamous, to change the very ethnic structure of the occupied Romanian territories in an overall two-pronged approach: the diminution of the Romanian element, and the maximisation of the ethnic Slav element. The following statistical figures illustrate this policy:
[img=http://img296.imageshack.us/img296/7646/tabelca0.th.gif]
Immediately after Bessarabia's occupation, the Soviet regime concentrated on the creation of a distinctly "Moldovan" language and culture. Soviet cultural policy in Moldavian SSR was designed to sever any historical, cultural or linguistic links between Romanians and "Moldovans", and to posit the existence of a distinct "Moldovan" cultural heritage. Thus, the Russian script replaced the Latin script; Soviet scholars declared "Moldovan" and Romanian to be separate languages within the same east-Romance language family; while the "literary critics and historians" stressed the historical connections and traditions shared by Moldovans, Russians and Ukrainians.
In addition, Moscow ventured to alter the traditional names of ethnic Romanians and other non-Slavic population in Moldova, as well as names of towns and villages. Typically, family and given names were transliterated using the Russian alphabet, and a Russian-styled father's name (patronymic) was appended as one's middle name; middle names were not generally used in Bessarabia at the time. In a similar fashion, names of many towns and villages were changed to sound more Russian (usually by adding a Slavic suffix), and often replaced altogether by names of revolutionary leaders or cities in Russia. The Communist Party and cadres from Transnistria, controlled and supervised by KGB, played a leadership role in the implementation of this diabolic project.