Friday 5 October 2012

‎Islam in Romania

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Sheik Omar Bakri, who has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of a busload of Israeli tourists in Burgas, in Bulgaria, in July, said in an interview published in the Bulgarian press that both Romania and Bulgaria are legitimate targets for attacks, because they are ‘Islamic land’ and because troops from those countries are fighting in Afghanistan. 

"Once Islam enters a land, that land becomes Islamic and the Muslim have the duty to liberate it some day. Spain, for example, is Islamic land, and so is Eastern Europe: Romania, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia."


The head of Romania’s Intelligence Service (SRI), George Maior commented on this on television:
“We are not exempt from terrorist threats. It is increasing and we are on the map of terrorism organizations as a potential target because of our presence in Afghanistan and because of the anti-missile shield. And we are very careful. Omar Bakri was under analysis by the Service in the past, he tried to come to Romania, he has connections in Romania, he’s a man we are looking at carefully.”
Actually, the Sheik's history is not accurate, at least not about most of Romania, though he could have dragged in the Ukraine, Hungary, Greece and Southern Italy where Islam did enter (even Rome was sacked, but not occupied, by the Muslims). All of what is now Romania was, it is true, once in some sense part of the Ottoman Empire and shown as such on the maps, but Islam never 'entered' Romania, except for the Dobrudgea, the Bucovina and for 150 years the Banat. The great achievement of the Wallachians, Moldavians and Transylvanians was, when they could no longer resist the Turk by force of arms, to make terms and preserve their autonomy and the property of their landowners. Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria and Greece failed to preserve their system of landownership and government. The three principalities which made up most of what is now Romania simply paid tribute to the Sublime Porte and were untouched by Islam. They were always ruled by Christian princes, owned by Christian landlords and governed by their own laws. In fact, Wallachia and Moldavia were never territories of the Ottoman Empire but protectorates.The only other semi-detached part of the Ottoman Empire which had this form of self-government was the Lebanon. Romanian landlords and nobles were very lucky to escape the fate of their counterparts elsewhere in South-Eastern Europe.


Mosque at Constanza

Muslims were forbidden to settle in Wallachia and Moldavia to prevent them from appealing to the Sultan for protection against the Christian authoritiesEthnicity in the era before nationalism was less important than religion and every Christian who owned land was a citizen. Greeks, Serbs, Armenians and Albanians were magistrates and bishops. Jews could settle, but could not be citizens unless they converted.

It is not clear how we should describe the status of the Regat in English, but protectorate or suzerainty are inaccurate approximations. Home rule is not quite right for the Phanariot era in the 18th Century, when the principalities were ruled by Greeks, who bought their throne from the Sultan and did not last long, but would apply to the periods of native princes in the seventeenth century and after the Wallachian uprising of 1821. At any rate the Sultan played no part in ruling the Regat whose rulers had far more freedom from Constantinople than Romania now has from Brussels. Only in 1876 did the new Ottoman constitution for the first time enact that Wallachia and Moldavia were full parts of the empire. The War of Independence followed in 1877, a war, though, that was not really fought for de jure independence, but under compulsion from the Czar who would have marched his army across the principalities in any case.

Romanians tell me that Romania resembles other Balkan countries, especially Serbia and Greece, and they should know much better than me, but I always fancy that the Balkan feeling, which you get in other Balkan countries, Albania most of all, and which is really a Turkish feeling, is sensibly less in evidence here. This may be simply due to the fact that Romanian is, despite all attempts to deny it, a Latin language. But if I am right and it goes deeper than this, this would be the explanation. At any rate, there are no mosques here, except in the Dobrudgea.
Ali Ghazi Mosque in Babadag, built in the 16th century, is the oldest mosque in Romania. 


I first came to the Balkans in 1990 by train, hoping to see Europe morph into Asia. Strada Lipscani felt utterly sui generis and un-Western, with gypsy or Arab music playing from transistor radios, but, apart from the old town in Bucharest, Romania was Europe and so was Bulgaria, despite her statues of Lenin, mosques and the gypsy quarter in Plovdiv. In 1990, after Romania, Istanbul was almost a bore - it was back to capitalism and Mars bars and foreign newspapers - but it was Muslim and the East. It felt like Asia. Now that I have lived in the Balkans for fourteen years, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey feel as if they have very much in common. At moments they almost feel like the same country, which historically they were - Greater Greece, Byzantium. 

When I went to Constanza for the first time in 1999 and saw the mosque there, overlooking the Black Sea, I felt that I was in an odd, hybrid place. My generation was the last that could forget that there were large numbers of Muslims in Western Europe. That was in 1999 and we cannot forget them now. The roughly 20,000 Romanian Muslims, inaccurately labelled Turks, are a tiny number compared with the millions in England, France, Germany and Spain. The town where I was born, like Constanza, now has two mosques.

I have met three or four Romanian so-called Turks, who were all very nice people. The one I liked most was a very sympathetic young woman (she might have had gypsy blood) in Constanza who told me she had converted to Christianity and in her spare time went around Muslim villages, trying to convert other Muslims. She wanted, she said, to set them free. How different from the Anglican way of doing things. Something about her simplicity moved me a great deal.

Emil Perhinschi, to whom I am indebted for teaching me much about Romanian history, comments as follows (Ion Bratianu was Liberal Prime Minister during the War of independence and Mihail Kogalniceanu was a highly regarded former Prime Minister):



"At moments they almost feel like the same country, which historically they were - Greater Greece, Byzantium." 
that country was calling itself (herself ?) Romania, too ;) not Greater Greece, nor Byzantium, and the Romaioi and Rumanians North of the Danube were the last to abandon the original Megali Ideea, which was to restore the Eastern Roman Empire ... the former 48ers were still talking about a Greek-Rumanian confederation until close to 1860. At least they were accused by their enemies of having such plans ... Barbu Catargiu mentions this in his speeches.
"I suspect there were not very many Romanians in the Dobrudgea in 1878 and think it was poor substitute for Bessarabia which Alexander II and Disraeli ensured the Romanians lost." 
Very likely Bratianu traded Bessarabia for Dobrudgea when he made the secret deal with the Russians, but had to pretend he does not agree since his deal was not extremely popular. ... in 1877 there were hot debates against whom should Rumania go to war, and while the wives were entertaining Russian officers at court receptions the husbands were drilling the army in Oltenia and would have gone against the Russians but for the article 7 in the 1876 Ottoman constitution.
Rumania needed a useable sea port. Galatz and Ibrail were accessible to sea-going vessels, but only to small ships, and the Delta route was long, dangerous and infested with malaria ... around 1840s it was said that 1/10 of the sailors that crossed the Delta got infected. The Sulina channel was dredged since at least 1820, but the depth varied and at the mouth it was very low, ships had to be unloaded before crossing the bar then loaded back. Chilia was deeper, but lengthened very much the time needed to get to the Bosphorus.
Before 1878 Kustendge was a village of fishermen with very small docks, and the railway from Cernavoda was almost bankrupt because the docs in Kustendge were very poor and not protected, so very little traffic went that way. The port was built after 1878. 
During winter Dobrudgea was a popular destination for Rumanian shepherds, so there was a sizable Rumanian population, but no Rumanian majority, not even during the winter :). Dobrudgea was not very populated anyway: invasions and pitched battles fought in your backyard every 20 years took care of that. Some Circassian refugees were settled there after 1840, too. Taxes were much lower in the Ottoman Empire so when Dobrudgea became part of Rumania a lot of the natives sold their land and left before the government realized what is going on and lowered the land tax (Kogalniceanu took advantage of the sales then lobbied for a lower tax rate when he realized he sunk money in semi-desert). 

30 comments:

  1. First, Omar Bakri and his pals are not "Muslim". Picking convenient bits and pieces from Koran and 1500 years of legal tradition and ignoring the inconvenient parts is what they do. Bakri is just a Muad'Dib wannabe, not an educated Islamic scholar.

    The Ottomans had garrisons in Dobrudgea, Giurgiu on the Danube, Hotin in the North of Bukovina, Oradea in the West of Rumania, Timisoara in the SW, and in Bassarabia, which is the strip of land now controlled by Ukraine just South of Moldova, the Republic I mean. The deal the Ottomans had with the two Rumanian states East and South of the mountains was a peace and mutual support treaty more like Rumania's relationship with NATO than Rumania's EU membership. Moldova, Wallachia and a bit later Transylvania were dar al-Amn not dar al-Islam.

    Yes, Muslims were forbidden to settle (with one exception in the XIVth century when asylum was granted to a Muslim dissident sect), first Muslim religious establishments were built after 1877, Muslim judges and laws had no traction and Muslims were not allowed to own land.

    This was not because of some special and ardent hate for Islam, but because Islamic law claimed precedence over all other codes and the natives of Moldavia and Wallachia did not want to create precedents by having locals appeal to Islamic courts. That happened once in 1595, and the result was yet another war which the Ottomans won but the peace was signed on a basis of status quo ante and nobody ever mentioned that the Kadi that claimed his decisions were binding in Wallachia was summarily executed by the Wallachian prince or that the fortress (now called Giurgiu) where the Kadi operated was destroyed.

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    1. That is why it is important to know history...;-)

      Nevertheless on all the maps available on the internet the Romanian principalities between the middle of the 1400’s and until the gaining of independence are not shown on the map (they are considered part of Hungary, Poland, Austria, Russia and the Ottoman Empire).

      So in this simplistic and illiterate world an extremist Muslim from abroad might think that the space between the Southern Carpathians and the Danube is dar-al-Islam.

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    2. the Rumanian principalities had very complicated deals with all the neighbours :-) quite a few princes were vasals to both the king of Poland and the Hungarian king, in the same time; it was a looong game of using one neighbour (Ottomans, Russians, Poles, Hungarians, Austrians) to keep the ambitions of another in check ... and when it did not work, they made it very expensive to keep a garrison :-) ... lost almost all the wars but managed to get, by pure stuborness and sometimes long guerilla wars, status quo ante peace deals for about 500 years ... having no significant natural resources helped too, nobody was motivated to invest too much in pacifying the locals.

      again, these are not representative for Islam, but only for a very heretical sect combined with a lot of inspiration fom Frank Herbert's "Dune".

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    3. This complicated diplomacy reminds me of a certain art [cited below] - certainly a more high-brow current, so to speak, but nonetheless...

      http://yalepress.yale.edu/book.asp?isbn=9780300152289

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  2. Of course, the conception of the Sheik is aberrant. But it is a misconception that Islam per se is at fault here. If the Arabs in the Middle East, who are racially and culturally, quite similar to the Jews were to be Christians or of a different religion we will still have the present conflict.

    One needs a certain psychology or personality in order to think in those terms (Sheik’s) and/or to be a suicide bomber. Fanaticism and hyper-ethnocentrism. Traits that are not foreign to some (many?) Jews ( see Baruch Goldstein, Yigal Amir, etc.).

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  3. I have not been reading these comments but I read this one andit is insane. Coptic Christians a threat to Europe? Or Jews who have enriched Europe so much?

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    1. “Copts a threat to Europe?”

      No not a threat to “Europe” but maybe a threat to Muslim Egyptians. I cannot develop the point about Copts because I am ignorant on this. But Christian Lebanese were quite good warriors from what I know. Again, I know very little.

      “Jews enriched so much Europe”.

      It is a fair assessment. They enriched it economically and culturally (including scientific achievements and inventions) from the second half of the 18th century until today (“the Jewish century”). But this fact is due to their inborn high intelligence, energy, ambition and creativity. Not because of a sense of duty or generosity towards their host country. IMO.

      Politically they maintained an antagonism towards the traditional institutions of the European states (institutions that you seem to respect a lot from what I have read so far) :

      The Church (Christianity), the King, the aristocracy, the middle class (they were not really middle class, that was their chagrin; sociologists call it “status incongruence”, remember Proust novels), our “noble lies” (ethnogenesis myths), our traditional (Christian) culture, etc.

      We talk here about politics, aggressiveness, war not intelligence. Ashkenazi Jews are way more intelligent than the white Europeans let alone Arabs, Pashtuns or Pakistanis (on average of course).
      They are considered a “soft power”. But power.

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    2. YES I AM a Ash-ke-nazi Jew, thanks for the compliment, we also live longer suffer more, Chosen ones., Read By priest Thomas Cahill book The GIFTS OF THE JEWS, how a tribe Nomads Changed the way Everyone thinks and feels. Also remember Hebrew Calendar 5773, over 3500 years older, more recorded history, more info, more data just much more of everything.Yet total population of Jews in the world is less that 15 million. Yes Christians 2013, 2 Billion people, ISLAM less than 1500 years and 1.3 billion people. So why with those thousands of years more and yet far less population. WHY? Because you kill Jews off every 25 years, Both Christians and Islam have been busy killing JEWS. Know History NO surprises.

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  4. Really? It is interesting information. I have read nothing of Joseph de Maistre or about him (yet...). I know that he was an anti-Jacobin and an archconservative political thinker (and a forefather of fascism).

    My first guess (to use my sociological intuition) for an explanation of his idiosyncratic sensibility towards Jews is that during his lifetime (he died in 1821) Jews still lived in the “ghetto” their traditional life style.(Conservative as you said. Orthodox? But in what sense are the ultra-religious British Muslims different? Why don’t you like them too...?).

    But would a person with de Maistre sensibility like Jews still if he were to be alive during the Dreyfus scandal or before the Russian Revolution? I wonder.

    However, I did a very quick Google search and I have found some links that disprove your claim... (I take your claim to be that he was a philo-Semite, which is not what you exactly stated, I concede).

    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=VL4zOEYPpyIC&pg=PA44&lpg=PA44&dq=de+maistre+jews&source=bl&ots=pELM8gSLor&sig=oIxb0FDTUt_6JDBA6vx7TFosbew&hl=en&sa=X&ei=TzVvUJp2x5SzBpiogLAL&ved=0CCwQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=de%20maistre%20jews&f=false

    in the footnotes (again Cioran, I love the guy):

    http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JB7y_ARSN6YC&pg=PA236&lpg=PA236&dq=de+maistre+jews&source=bl&ots=Mnnkxl9-WR&sig=kaTw49smgN35PEiolJu_aBFSe1Y&hl=en&sa=X&ei=TzVvUJp2x5SzBpiogLAL&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=de%20maistre%20jews&f=false

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  5. THIS IS MY LAST POST ON THIS SUBJECT. I AM PUTTING TOO MUCH PASSION. AND I INTEND TO LET YOU BREATHE...

    You tried to guess where my “anti-Semitism” comes from. You must have guessed that I am a Christian Orthodox conservative and you tried to lure me with the “philo-semite” Catholic conservative de Maistre.

    However, at this moment I am trying to purge myself from any false doctrine (religion, ideology). That is why a prefer King Solomon, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Cioran to the “catholic” de Maistre and the “orthodox” Dostoyevsky.

    You are an Englishman (that is what you stated...) that is mainly why you feel an adversity to my (and others) “anti-Semitism”. Modern Britain had few problems with her Jewish minority. That is not the case with modern Russia, Poland, Hungary, Romania, Germany and Austria (where the bulk of ASHKENAZI Jews lived). Your views are biased by ethnocentrism, similarly to a Chinese who could not FULLY comprehend “anti-Semitism”.

    Yes, it is true that Diaspora Jews “learned the lingo” (that is, they managed to integrate fully into the European society and culture during the “Jewish century”) as opposed to the recent European Muslim minority. But Diaspora Jews are not Europeans!
    To help you understand my point, I can bring the analogy with nationalist Irishmen. The Irish speak your mother tongue and wrote some fine pieces of English literature but they are not Englishmen. They also like to bomb you from time to time...

    Nietzsche said that the correct question is not “what” but “whom”. Not “what is beauty” but whom says this or that about beauty. What is one’s inner psychological motivation to state something? “Who are you?”.

    Take Melanie Philips (who while having an Anglo-Saxon name does not have an Anglo-Saxon look...) It is pretty clear to me that she care more for the “Eternal Israel” than for her residence country.

    (It is ironic that while in the West many Jewish intellectuals of Ms Philips AGE are neo-conservatives (which, nota bene, is not the TRUE conservatism) in Romania Jewish intellectuals of Ms Philips age (Andrei Oişteanu, Victor Neumann, Andrei Cornea, Michael Shafir, etc) are still defending multiculturalism and are ach critiques of nationalism and ethnocentrism (Romanians’ nationalism of course)).

    My motivation for my “anti-Semitism” originates from my personality (and a bad experience with an ethnocentric Jew (I suppose that you are not interested in this story which is of utmost importance to me...). People like me like truthfulness and fairness.

    I consider, in the light of what I have read so far, that it is correct to say that Jews are partly to blame for their predicaments culminating with the Holocaust. (Of course, the Holocaust is a disgusting barbarity). The Jews were actors in a tragedy not some children or angels.

    If I were to hold a POSITION in the academia or press in the UK, USA, France, Germany (the important countries for the Diaspora Jews) and express similar opinions to these I would be most probably fired and slandered.

    IS THIS THE “EUROPEAN VALUE” OF THE FREEDOM OF SPEECH (ON WHICH THE MOHAMED CARTOONISTS BASE THEIR JUSTIFICATIONS)?

    To conclude: Non-Europeans (non-Aryans) = Muslims = Jews = Gypsies = Turks /Tartars = Africans.

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  6. Oh man, I was hoping Bulgaria and Romania were too unimportant to be noticed by these crazy islamists and get away from bomb attacks... that attack blew up my hopes...

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  7. Crazy indeed. Had England's Liberal Government kept close to the Ottoman Empire after 1905 there would be no Middle East crisis of course and the Caliphate would still exist, therefore no Al Qaeda.

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    1. If you can still imagine a Liberal world - a vanishing creed I never quite got the hang of ...

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  8. The picturesque mosque in the picture is not the historical mosque of Constanta. It is a mosque build (or finished) in 1912 by the Romanian government as a gift to the Muslims of Constanta for the good relationship between the Muslim minority and the Romanian sate.

    In Dobrogea used to live many more Muslims. The Dobrogea County had a special status between 1878 and 1884 when it was fully integrated into the Romanian state. After the creation of the modern sate of Turkey most Dobrogean Muslims (ethnically Turks, Tartars and Circassians (Cerchezi)) chose to immigrate to Turkey. In Constanta unfortunately, we were left mainly with the Muslim Gypsies...

    Btw, do you know of the German colonists to Dobrogea?

    http://ro.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germani_dobrogeni

    And of course there lived (live) other ethnicities: Bulgarians, Greeks, Italians, Jews, Armenians, Russians (Lipoveni) and Aromanians.

    No, it is not language. Aromanians speak a romance language (very similar to Romanian) but they have the looks of the Greeks (the more good looking part of the Greeks...). Their behaviour also differs from that of Romanians. More intelligent and more ambitious I would say. More like my hobby horse, the...Armenians.

    Moreover, Transylvanian Romanians (Ardeleni) are culturally different than the Old Kingdom Romanians (Munteni si Moldoveni). So they claim... I have not notice it.

    I would say that Transylvania is more like Central Europe, Wallachia more like Balkans sand Moldova more like Eastern Europe.

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  9. Personally I like Muslims Jews Gypsies Turks /Tartars and Africans and everyone else really but I respect Muallaf's right not to do so. A couple of years ago I would have considered his views wicked but now I simply think they show an absence of imagination.

    I suspect there were not very many Romanians in the Dobrudgea in 1878 and think it was poor substitute for Bessarabia which Alexander II and Disraeli ensured the Romanians lost. But everything flows.

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    1. My Jewish psychiatrist implied that I have too much imagination…

      He insisted that I take a la long his prescription for anti-psychotics. He said that they will stabilize my mood and restrain my thoughts (will eliminate “parasitic” and negative thinking). I thought that I am treated for depression but it turned out that he wanted to treat me of a different, unstated, condition without my consultation and acknowledgment. Treating depression with antipsychotics is controversial to say the least. However, I acknowledge that I am suffering from a personality disorder (lets say avoidant-dependent). Nevertheless, personality disorders are not treatable with medication (only). Anyway, it is a long story and you are not the person to hear it.

      I concluded (after doing my research- post factum wisdom) that he betrayed my trust and committed an act of malpractice.
      You may ask why I don’t punish him trough the official and legal route. H’m…(deep breathe) Anyway, I badly need to move on…
      (This psychiatrist is an older Romanian Jew who resided all the time in Romania and with whom I talked freely about anything, including politics.)

      Freud (whom I respect very much- I would have preferred to do a talk therapy for my depression instead of drug therapy) agreed in “Civilization and its Discontents” that “man is wolf to man”:

      <<. . . men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? As a rule this cruel aggressiveness waits for some provocation or puts itself at the service of some other purpose, whose goal might also have been reached by milder measures. In circumstances that are favorable to it, when the mental counter-forces which ordinarily inhibit it are out of action, it also manifests itself spontaneously and reveals man as a savage beast to whom consideration towards his own kind is something alien.>>

      http://www.historyguide.org/europe/freud_discontents.html

      What prevents us to harm people in situations where we can do harm with impunity (medicine, dentistry, legal profession, banking, psychiatry, psychotherapy, etc) is our conscience (super-ego). But some people have little of it. And my guess is that being a foreigner or of a different race reduces the propensity to empathise with the other (who is of a different race than you).

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  10. Since when is it correct to write "the Dobrudgea, the Bucovina, [...] the Banat"?

    Surely you'd grumble if one of us unwashed foreigners would prattle on about the Yorkshire, the Devon or the Essex, no?

    Andrei P.

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  11. Andrei, you are an intelligent man and speak English like a native. I cannot believe you are serious. The Banat, the Bucovina, the Maramures, etc. are new expressions to you? P.

    Are you unwashed? Is this relevant?

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  12. They're not new. They're from the 19th century and belong to the way Brits those days used to talk. They belong in Olivia Manning.

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  13. I wouldn't grumble at how foreigners refer to Devon or Essex in their languages - why should I? - but I might at foreigners telling me what is correct in my language. Olivia Manning by the way wrote in the 1960s.

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  14. Actually, I admire nationalism. Not the tribal 'nationalism by blood,' but if you carry a Romanian (American, French, etc.) passport you should be giving your love and respect to that nation/culture. Self-identification by hyphenated cultures is only of passing interest.

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  15. "At moments they almost feel like the same country, which historically they were - Greater Greece, Byzantium."

    that country was calling itself (herself ?) Romania, too ;) not Greater Greece, nor Byzantium, and the Romaioi and Rumanians North of the Danube were the last to abandon the original Megali Ideea, which was to restore the Eastern Roman Empire ... the former 48ers were still talking about a Greek-Rumanian confederation until close to 1860. At least they were accused by their enemies of having such plans ... Barbu Catargiu mentions this in his speeches.

    "I suspect there were not very many Romanians in the Dobrudgea in 1878 and think it was poor substitute for Bessarabia which Alexander II and Disraeli ensured the Romanians lost."

    Very likely Bratianu traded Bessarabia for Dobrudgea when he made the secret deal with the Russians, but had to pretend he does not agree since his deal was not extremely popular. ... in 1877 there were hot debates against whom should Rumania go to war, and while the wives were entertaining Russian officers at court receptions the husbands were drilling the army in Oltenia and would have gone against the Russians but for the article 7 in the 1876 Ottoman constitution.

    Rumania needed a useable sea port. Galatz and Ibrail were accessible to sea-going vessels, but only to small ships, and the Delta route was long, dangerous and infested with malaria ... around 1840s it was said that 1/10 of the sailors that crossed the Delta got infected. The Sulina channel was dredged since at least 1820, but the depth varied and at the mouth it was very low, ships had to be unloaded before crossing the bar then loaded back. Chilia was deeper, but lengthened very much the time needed to get to the Bosphorus.

    Before 1878 Kustendge was a village of fishermen with very small docks, and the railway from Cernavoda was almost bankrupt because the docs in Kustendge were very poor and not protected, so very little traffic went that way. The port was built after 1878.

    During winter Dobrudgea was a popular destination for Rumanian shepherds, so there was a sizable Rumanian population, but no Rumanian majority, not even during the winter :). Dobrudgea was not very populated anyway: invasions and pitched battles fought in your backyard every 20 years took care of that. Some Circassian refugees were settled there after 1840, too. Taxes were much lower in the Ottoman Empire so when Dobrudgea became part of Rumania a lot of the natives sold their land and left before the government realized what is going on and lowered the land tax (Kogalniceanu took advantage of the sales then lobbied for a lower tax rate when he realized he sunk money in semi-desert).

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    1. Megali... I'd go with that idea for a club in Brussels !

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  16. Romanian principalities were in "the house of treaty", not in "the house of Islam" (like Serbia, Bulgaria and others", so that sheik talks bulshit.

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  17. Romania is Dacia. Never islam on this land. Don.t come here.Be aware Romanians are different from occidentals.You are not welcome here never ever. And camels are not horeses .

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  18. was bucharest muslim in the late 1880s? who was the ruler @ that time? what was the name of the empire?

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    1. Bucharest was never Muslim, unlike Budapest, Belgrade, Athens etc - it was the capital of Wallachia which was an Ottoman protectorate. It was shown on the map as part of Turkey but was autonomous and was governed by a Christian prince (Voivode). Muslims were forbidden to settle there.

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    2. Laura, haven't you heard of Google?

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