Bukovina

From Freepedia

Bukovina is the territory on the slopes of the northeastern Carpathian Mountains and the adjoining plains. It comprises a historic province now split between Romania and Ukraine.

1 Name
2 History
3 Population
4 Cities and towns
5 External links

Name

The original name of the region in Romanian during the rule of the Principality of Moldova was "Ţara de Sus" (Upper Country), refering as opposed to the lower plains called "Ţara de Jos" (Lower Country).

The name Bukovina came into official use in 1775 with the region's annexation to the Austrian Habsburg possessions, later known as the Austrian Empire, and Austria-Hungary. The name has a Slavic origin and is derived from the word for beech tree; the German equivalent, das Buchenland, mostly used in poetry, means, literally, "beech land", or, more poetically, "land of beech trees". Its pronounced and written similarly in several European languages, Romanian: Bucovina; Ukrainian: Буковина, Bukovyna; German: das Buchenland' or die Bukowina, etc.

The standard German name, die Bukowina, which was the official German-language name for the province under Austrian rule, is derived from the Slavic original, via the Polish form of the name which is exactly the same. This was due to the fact that, for roughly the first half of the 19th century, and for some years prior, Austrian Bukovina was adminstered as an integral part of neighbouring Galicia, whose internal government was, by active Austrian policy, controlled by Polish bureaucrats and nobles (szlachta) who had also traditionally formed the ruling class in that territory before the Habsburg acquired it for Austria under the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the last quarter of the 18th century. In English, an alternate name is The Bukovina, increasingly an archaism, which, however, is to be found in older literature,

One explanation for the reason why this part of Moldavia was referred to as Bukovina unofficially even before the Habsburgs wrested it from the Russians, as the price for their continued neutrality in a dispute between the Ottoman Empire and Russia, was due the region's having been the site of an ancient battle between the Hungarians and the Moldavian Romanians.

On the field of battle littered with the corpses of the fallen, a forest of beech trees grew up, nourished by the blood of both sides - admittedly a rather gruesome, poetical, and, likely apocryphal, image.

Thus, despite the fact that the stories of Dracula popularised by Bram Stoker have made the vampire count's homeland more famous outside the region than Bukovina, the latter territory can claim a great compliment, and subtle one-upmanship, in having its more famous neighbour named after it.

History

Image:Present to bogdangiusca.jpg

From Roman times, Dacian peoples (the traditional ancestors of the present-day Romanians) inhabited the territory. In the 5th century, the territory came under the rule of the Avars. Around the 7th century, Slavic populations settled in the region.

In the 9th to early 14th centuries the territory was a part of Kievan Rus and one of its successor states, Galician-Volhynian principality. From the mid-14th century, this region became the nucleus of the Romanian Principality of Moldova, with the city of Suceava as its capital from 1388. In the 15th century, parts of the region became the subject of disputes between the Moldavian state and the Polish kingdom. In this period, the patronage of Ştefan cel Mare and his successors on the throne of Moldavia saw the construction of the famous painted Monasteries of Moldoviţa, Putna, Suceviţa and Voroneţ. With their renowned exterior frescoes, these monasteries remain some of the greatest cultural treasures of modern Romania.

In the 16th century, Bukovina came under the control of the Ottoman Turks, after which it was occupied by the Russian Empire in 1769, and then by the Austrian Habsburgs in 1774. It remained under Austrian administration until 1918, first as a closed military district (1775 - 1786), then as the largest district, Kreis, of the Austrian constituent Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (1787 - 1849), and, finally, in 1849, becoming an Austrian crownland, Kronland, and duchy, as Herzogtum Bukowina. During the period of the Dual Monarchy, Bukovina remained part of the Cisleithanian or Austrian territories of the Empire. Ethnically, Bukovina remained mixed under the Austrian rule: predominantly Romanian in the south, Ukrainian in the north, a few Hungarian Székely and in the towns Germans, Poles and Jews being added to the mix. In spite of some frictions between Romanian and Ukrainian populations at the time over the influences in the Orthodox hierarchy, the interethnical conflicts did not reach a significant level and both cultures developed in educational and public life. Morevoer, in the end of the 19th century, the development of Ukrainian culture in Bukovina surpassed most of the rest of Ukraine with a network of Ukrainian educational facilities being developed on the ground.

Since Romania's gaining of independence in 1878, it became the country's important priority to incorporate an entire historic province which, as a core of Moldavian principality, was of a great historic significance to Romanian history and containied many prominent monuments of the Romanian art and architecture.

Image:Bukovina 1910.jpg

In World War I, several battles were fought in Bukovina between the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian armies and the Russian army was finally driven out in 1917. With the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 the province was occupied by Romania. Although local Ukrainians have unsuccesfully attempted to incorporate parts of northern Bukovina into the short living West Ukrainian National Republic, the Romanian control of the province was finally formalized in the Treaty of St. Germain in 1919 and the policies of Rumanization were carried in the interwar period.

On 28 June, 1940, northern Bukovina, centred on the capital, Chernivtsi, was occupied by Soviet troops as a consequence of the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact between Hitler and Stalin. Almost the entire German population of northern Bukovina established during Austrian rule emigrated to the Reich. Northern Bukovina changed hands twice more during the course of World War II, notably when Petre Dumitrescu led the Romanian Third Army into the North, and later when the Soviet Army retook the territory for the Soviet Union.

During World War II, Bukovina's Jewish community was destroyed by the deportations over the Dniester and Bug rivers. In the end, a then-Communist Romania was forced to cede the northern part of Bukovina to the USSR by the 1947 peace treaty. The territory, now known as the Chernivtsi Oblast (province), became part of the Ukrainian SSR and the southern part of the province surrounding Suceava became part of the Romanian People's Republic. This division of the region, now between the modern states of Romania and Ukraine, is still in place today.

Population

A compact Romanian minority inhabits the southern part of Chernivtsi region. The Romanian percentage of the population in the following districts preponderates or forms a significant segment as indicated by these recent census figures, viz.: