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Photos from Romania

Romanian Church Photo

The Romanian Orthodox Church is among the largest autocephalous, or ecclesiastically independent Eastern Orthodox churches in the Balkans today. It is the church to which the majority of Romanians belong.Great Church of Putna
Christianity first reached Dacia under the Roman Empire as early as the 4th century A. D. By the late 9th century, the Vlachs appear to have accepted a Slavonic liturgy. The first ecclesiastical metropolitanates for the Romanian provinces were not set up until the l4th century however, and Church Slavonic remained the liturgical language until the l7th century, when Romanian began to replace it. The translation of Scripture and liturgical texts into Romanian was not completed until the l9th century.
The Romanian Orthodox Church kept alive a sense of national identity both under Ottoman Turkish rule and, in Transylvania, under the Hungarian sway. In Transylvania, the church was granted no acknowledgement in the post-Reformation settlement, and, consequently, by an act of union in 1698, a proportion of the Romanian Orthodox clergy and laity in Transylvania accepted papal jurisdiction, and became Eastern-rite Roman Catholics. They were forcibly reintegrated into the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1950, after their church was suppressed by the communist government.
The Romanian Orthodox Church became an important factor in the emancipation of ethnic Romanians in Transylvania, and in the integration of the Greater Romania that came into being after 1918. An outstanding figure of the church was the first metropolitan of Transylvania, Andrei Saguna, whose works had a significant influence on the organisation of the church at the beginning of the 20th century.