Greeks publish statistics of Macedonia, nearly all the people they brazenly write as "Hellenes" are really these half-Hellenized Vlachs, men who talk Greek abroad, who sometimes even call themselves Greeks, but who around their own firesides always fall back into the beautiful Romance tongue of their fathers.[1] And lately, since there has been a free Roumania, the Roumans of Turkey, too, have begun to realize that they are a people; they are no longer ashamed of their own language now that it is the recognized tongue of a sovereign State, and they, too, are now moved by very strong anti-Phanariot feeling. In 1829, the Peace of Adrianople gave the two provinces of Moldavia and Vallachia internal autonomy under the protectorate of Russia. In 1864, Alexander John Cusa made himself master of these lands, and in 1881, Charles von Hohenzollern was proclaimed king of what now became an entirely independent State with the name Roumania.[2] In 1885, as a natural consequence of the national independence, the Church of Roumania became autocephalous. The Patriarch made no difficulty about this; but soon very bitter disputes began between the new Church and the Phanar. The Roumanian Church is governed by a Holy Synod, of which all the bishops are members. The president is the Archbishop and Metropolitan of Vallachia and Primate of Roumania, whose see is Bucharest; after him come the Archbishop and Metropolitan of Moldavia, who sits at Yassi, and six other bishops.[3] Each has an auxiliary-bishop (Archiereu), who helps in the work of the diocese, and who also has a seat in the synod. There are now twenty-two monasteries and nineteen convents for nuns in Roumania; for the secular clergy two seminaries and a theological faculty at the University of Bucharest. According to the census of 1899, there were
- ↑ A curious remnant of this is that in the Roumanian language their own word for themselves (Roumân), at any rate in the country parts, is a word of abuse, and means "uneducated boor"!
- ↑ He became Prince of the tributary States (Moldavia and Vallachia) when Cusa was made to resign in 1866. The kingdom of Roumania then consists of these two provinces, which had always had a certain amount of autonomy under the Phanariot Vaivodes, now made into an independent State. See De la Jonquière: Histoire des Ottomans, pp. 538–544.
- ↑ Of Rimnik, Roman, Buzeu, Huš, Argeš, and the Lower Danube.
