Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 23:10, 9 September 2008

This article may require cleanup to meet Misplaced Pages's quality standards. No cleanup reason has been specified. Please help improve this article if you can. (February 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

This article possibly contains original research. Please improve it by verifying the claims made and adding inline citations. Statements consisting only of original research should be removed. (February 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Moldovans" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (February 2008) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Moldovans
Moldoveni

Regions with significant populations
Moldova 2,741,849 (2004) (Transnistria included) Ukraine 258,619 (2001) Russia 172,330 (2002) Italy 55,803 (2006) Brazil 20,000 - 30,000 (2006) Kazakhstan 19,458 (1999) Portugal 12,632 (2003) Spain 10,434 (2006) Belarus 4,300 (1999) Kyrgyzstan 778 (1999) Lithuania 704 (2001) Estonia 645 (2000) Tajikistan 300 (2000)
Languages
Moldovan/Romanian
Religion
Predominantly Eastern Orthodox.
Related ethnic groups
• Vlachs   • Romanians   • Aromanians   • Megleno-Romanians   • Istro-Romanians

Moldovans, or Moldavians (original name: Moldoveni; Молдовень in the Moldovan Cyrillic script, used nowadays only in Transnistria) are the native population in, depending on one's interpretation, all or part of the lands that correspond to the former Principality of Moldavia. The first chronicle Descriptio Moldaviae attesting of Moldavians dates back to the beginning of the 18th century, which itself describes Moldavians as of the XIVth century .

Population

Moldova

Moldovans constitute 76.1% of the population of Moldova. In the breakaway region of Transnistria, in the eastern part of the country, they compose a plurality with 31.9% of the population. In the Republic of Moldova, the term Moldovans is used to officially denote an ethnicity separate from Romanians

A 1992 survey by American professor William Crowther, showed that 87% of the Romance-speaking population of Moldova considers itself "Moldovan", rather than the "Romanian". Also, according to a 2002 study, among self-declared Moldovans, more than 80% consider themselves as different from Romanians, and only 5% see no difference.

Other former Soviet republics

The 2001 census in Ukraine counted 258,600 Moldovans. They live mostly in the Budjak region or south-west Odessa Oblast and the Novoselytskyi Raion, but also in other areas of Odessa Oblast, bordering the Republic of Moldova.

In Russia 172,330 Moldovans have been counted on the 2002 Russian census. Moldovans are concentrated mostly in Moscow, but also in some rural areas in Kuban and in southern Siberia.

Around 20,000 Moldovans live in Kazakhstan, mostly in Almaty, the former Kazakh capital an in some rural areas in the northern part of the country.

It should be noted that in all these countries, people who declared themselves "Romanians" were counted separately from Moldovans in the official censae results.

Romania

Vladimir Socor claims that in Romania, some six or seven million people consider themselves to be "Moldovans" as an integral part of, not distinct from, the Romanian nation. In 2007 a group of Romanian citizens have attempted to seek official recognition of the minority status for the Moldovans in Romania. Around the same time, during a visit of three delegates of this movement in Moldova, Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin spoke of 10 million Moldovans living in the neighbouring country, though this number may be exaggerated. People who declared themselves Moldovans in the last Romanian census were reported as Romanians in the census results.

History

Until the 1920s, specialists generally considered the Moldovans a subgroup or regional group of the Romanian ethnos. After 1924, Soviet authorities began to emphasize a distinct Moldovan language, history and culture, and to support the claim that Moldovans constitute a separate ethnic group. Soviet policy on the Moldovan language was not constant: there were two intervals (1932-1937 and in the mid-1950s) during which the Soviet scholars declared the unity between the two languages.

Numerous Romanians, as well as a part of the Moldovan population, claim that external interference rather than any actual differences led to Moldova's increasingly separate identity. Despite this, Moldovans have pressed for recognition of an ethnic Moldovan identity, separate from that of Romanians. In the 2004 census, out of the 3,383,332 people living in Moldova, 16.5% (558,508) chose Romanian as their mother tongue, whereas 60% chose Moldovan. While 37% of all urban Romanian/Moldovan speakers chose Romanian as their mother tongue, in the countryside this percentage was just under 15.

Religion

The major denomination in both Moldova and Romania is Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The difference between Moldova and Romania is the acceptance of different bishop authority (see Eastern Orthodox Church organization), expressed as affiliation to distinct autocephalous churches (respectively Russian and Romanian) within the Eastern Orthodox communion. Basically, there is an in Moldova ongoing politically charged bishop territorial jurisdiction and administrative succession issue which, from an ecclesiastical point of view, is subject to canon laws (not a faith related, theological, or denominational difference). Thus, most Eastern Orthodox in Moldova belong to the autonomous Moldovan Orthodox Church, which depends on the Russian Orthodox Church. Immediately after Moldova declared independence from the Soviet Union (1991), the Romanian Orthodox Church reactivated a previous structure, forming the autonomous Metropolis of Bessarabia (1992), which was officially recognized only in 2002. The dispute's subject is the succession of the pre-WWII Metropolitan See of Bessarabia. The Supreme Court of Moldova ruled in favor of the Moldovan Orthodox Church, while the European Court of Human Rights - in favor of the Metropolis of Bessarabia. This remains an open issue between the Russian and Romanian Orthodox Churches. As of 2007, the Moldovan Orthodox Church has 1255 parishes, while the Metropolis of Bessarabia has 219.

Moldovan ethnos theory and the Romanian identity

Moldovan ethnos theory

In the past, the term Moldavian or Moldovan has been used to refer to the population of the historical Principality of Moldavia. However the term had gained an ethnic connotation by the 20th century: in May 1917, at a congress of the Bessarabian teachers, a dispute arose over the identification of the people from Bessarabia: a group protested against being called "Romanians", affirming they were "not Romanian", but "Moldavian", while another group, led by Alexei Mateevici, supported the view that the Moldavians are part of the Romanian nation.

After 1924, this direction was supported by Soviet sociologists, against the one that claimed identity between Moldovans and Romanians. On December 19, 2003, the Moldovan Parliament adopted "The Concept on National Policy of the Republic of Moldova" which pro-Romanian critics have accused as a revival of the Soviet-style Moldovenist theories. The document states that Moldovans and Romanians are two distinct peoples that speak two similar languages, Romanians form an ethnic minority in Moldova, and that the Republic of Moldova is the legitimate successor to the Principality.

Romanian identity

On the other side of the debate, the arguments go that the self-designation of Romanians living in Transylvania, Wallachia and the Principality of Moldova as Romans is mentioned in scholarly works as early as the 16th century, such as works of Italian humanists traveling to those lands. Thus, Tranquillo Andronico writes in 1534 that Vlachs "now call themselves Romans". In 1532, Francesco della Valle accompanying Governor Aloisio Gritti to Transylvania, Wallachia and Moldavia notes that Romanians preserved the name of the Romans (Romani) and "they call themselves in their language Romei". Ferrante Capeci writes around 1575 that the inhabitants of these countries call themselves “Romanesci”, Other evidence about the name "Romanians" comes from authors having lived in the these principalities, such as Anton Verancsics, who writes around 1570 that Romanians living in Transylvania, Moldavia and Wallachia call themselves "Romans"

As the appellative "Romanian" was gaining more and more popularity throughout the western Ottoman-dominated Moldavia during the 19th century, its introduction in Bessarabia, a province of the Russian Empire at the time, was welcomed mostly by the Romanian-oriented elite, while the majority of local population continued to use the old ethnonym "Moldavians".

Modern controversy

In Romania, there was no Moldovan ethnicity reported in the 2002 census because people whose self-identification is considered regional by the Romanian government having been counted as Romanians. In the CIA World Factbook section on Moldova, a single entry "Moldovan/Romanian" is used. A group of international census experts observing the 2004 Moldovan census had stated that "the census had been generally conducted in a professional manner", however, they also identified certain problems in the collection of data for this census, among others in the domain of nationality and language. Experts have noted that large part of the population has responded spontaneously, however they have reported some cases when the census enumerators have encouraged respondents to declare that they were "Moldovans" rather than "Romanians". According to BBC, European observers that monitored the 2004 Moldovan census contested the data about the spoken language and the ethnic affiliation in reference to Moldovan-Romanian debate, noting that these data can not be considered as expressing the truth.

See also

• Ethnogenesis
• Moldovan diaspora

References

1. 2004 census results
2. census 2001
3. census 2002
4. "Foreign citizens. Resident Population" (2006) at the Istituto nazionale di statistica
5. A Imigração em Portugal,Comunidades lusófonas, Países do Leste da Europa
6. ^ 2004 census results in Moldova Cite error: The named reference "mold-census" was defined multiple times with different content (see the help page).
7. ^ "Official Chisinau Seeks Recognition Of Moldovan Ethnicity And Minority In Romania" The Jamestown Foundation, February 28, 2007, by Vladimir Socor.
8. Charles King, "The Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and the Politics of Culture", Hoover Press, 2000, pg. 159
9. Pal Kolsto,National Integration and Violent Conflict in Post-Soviet Societies: The Cases of Estonia and Moldova, pg. 34, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002, ISBN 0742518884
10. , , , 2001 census results in Ukraine
11. ^ The Handbook of the Census Staff, 2001, at UNECE website
12. King, pg. 2
13. ^ King, pg. 3
14. Michael Bruchis. The Language Policy of the CPSU and the Linguistic Situation in Soviet Moldavia, in Soviet Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1. (Jan., 1984), pp. 119.
15. International Religious Freedom Report 2007, by the US Bureau of Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor
16. Stuart J. Kaufman, Modern Hatreds: The Symbolic Politics of Ethnic War, Cornell University Press, 2001, ISBN: 978-0-8014-8736-1, pg. 134
17. Template:Ro icon Mateevici's speech at the teachers' congress at Romanian wikisource
18. Gribincea A., Grecu, M. The Concept on National Policy of the Republic of Moldova UNHCR.
19. "nunc se Romanos vocant" A. Verres, Acta et Epistolae, I, p. 243
20. Cl. Isopescu, Notizie intorno ai romeni nella letteratura geografica italiana del Cinquecento, in Bulletin de la Section Historique, XVI, 1929, p. 1- 90
21. “Anzi essi si chiamano romanesci, e vogliono molti che erano mandati quì quei che erano dannati a cavar metalli...” in Maria Holban, Călători străini despre Ţările Române, vol. II, p. 158–161
22. „...Valacchi, qui se Romanos nominant...„ “Gens quae ear terras (Transsylvaniam, Moldaviam et Transalpinam) nostra aetate incolit, Valacchi sunt, eaque a Romania ducit originem, tametsi nomine longe alieno...“ De situ Transsylvaniae, Moldaviae et Transaplinae, in Monumenta Hungariae Historica, Scriptores; II, Pesta, 1857, p. 120
23. Cristina Petrescu, "Contrasting/Conflicting Identities:Bessarabians, Romanians, Moldovans" in Nation-Building and Contested Identities, Polirom, 2001, pg. 157
24. Charles King, Moldovan Identity and the Politics of Pan-Romanianism, Slavic Review, Vol. 53, No. 2. (Summer, 1994), pp. 345-368.
25. Moldova CIA World Factbook. Retrieved 2002, 07-17
26. Experts Offering to Consult the National Statistics Bureau in Evaluation of the Census Data, Moldova Azi, May 19, 2005, story attributed to AP Flux. Retrieved October 11, 2005.
27. BBC, 29 Nov. 2007

Further reading

• Matthew H. Ciscel (2007) The Language of the Moldovans: Romania, Russia, and Identity in an Ex-Soviet Republic", ISBN 0739114433 - About the identity of the contemporary Moldovans in the context of debates about the their language.
• King, C. (2000) The Moldovans: Romania, Russia and the Politics of Culture, Hoover Institution Press, ISBN 0-8179-9792-X.

• Articles needing cleanup from February 2008
• Cleanup tagged articles without a reason field from February 2008
• Misplaced Pages pages needing cleanup from February 2008
• Ethnic groups in Europe
• Moldovan society
• Romanian society
• Romance peoples