It is often said that Romanians were born Christians. That we are one of the first Christianized peoples, and the roots of Christianity would reach Dobrudja from the 1st century thanks to the Apostle Andrew the First-Called. Such a thesis was widely spread, but its veracity was often questioned.

First, the ethnogenesis of the Romanian people is complex. Thus, the question related to the Christianization of proto-Romanians, Vlachs from the south and north of the Danube, acquires a new meaning. When exactly does this process take place? as? What was the role of settlers in stopping or preaching Christianity? What tangible traces did the first Christians leave on this territory? What exactly made the new Christian religion so firmly established even among the population of the Balkans or Eastern Europe? Why did the Vlachs accept Orthodoxy? What were the poles of power that led to the promotion and spread of Christianity? Were the Vlachs Christianized by the Bulgarians, as some historians say, much later than claimed?

To these and many other questions, I invited Dr. Petre Gouran, a specialist in Byzantine history, to answer his thesis “Imperial Holiness and Ecumenical Authority in the Orthodox World”, a thesis defended at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales, Paris.

Petre Guran was also a member of the Center for Hellenistic Studies at Princeton University, United States of America, a researcher at the Institute of Southeast Europe of the Romanian Academy, a fellow at Noua Europa College, former coordinator of the Romanian session. Monasteries and European Identity Programs, Junior Fellow of the World Academy of Arts and Sciences and first Director of the Institute for Liberal Studies.

You can find out his opinion on all these aspects by watching the video material.

The main ideas discussed:

• The fact that the Apostle Andrew reached Scythia and preached Christianity comes from a short piece of information that came down to us from Eusebius of Caesarea, the biographer of Constantine the Great. He writes this note at the beginning of the 4th century AD. However, the note is short, as I said, and we cannot clearly understand whether it is Scythia ce mare, or Scythia Lesser, Dobruja. This led many to believe that they were Christianized along the Black Sea in such ancient times.
• Christianity was not a religion, but it became a religion in the 4th century AD. Christianity of the first three centuries is a teaching about the afterlife, it is spirituality, it is the revelation of the ultimate meanings of existence. In the fourth century, by what he does, that is, by the freedom and protection he gives to Christians, Constantine encourages Christianity to become a religion. The beginnings of the Christian religion in Roman cities, in state institutions, begin in the second half of the IV century.
• The Christian religion arose as an urban religion, a religion spread in the great cities of the empire, and gradually also in the small towns. And then we have to look at the Roman Empire, where we have cities. Because where we have cities, we are likely to find Christian communities. I say this because, as you know, there are few cities north of the Danube. confusion arises when we speak of Christianity from the north of the Danube and cite basilicas from Dobrudja. Dobruja basilicas are located in the Roman Empire, in Roman cities, so they are a religious phenomenon from the south of the Danube. This happens very hard north of the Danube.

Christianity has been wildly successful because it has the ability to organize solidarity

• Christianity has been wildly successful because it has the ability to organize solidarity, that is, people who want to support each other and create communities vertically and horizontally. I am talking about solidarity between upper class and lower class, and solidarity between one territory and another territory. In the ancient worldview, you have the center, you have the cultural centers, and then you have the peripheries. There is no such thing in Christianity. In late antique Christianity, all people are equal before God geographically and socially. Being a slave and the humane treatment of the slave owner or his release creates attachment, loyalty. Being poor and taking care of you also creates attachment.
• There is this prevailing notion of waves of barbarians destroying the Roman Empire, capturing and exterminating the entire Romanized population and ultimately destroying the empire. Now this point of view has softened in the light of archaeological research. These migration waves are much less witnessed, with less impact. They had no vocation to change or erase Roman civilization from the territory. Where are the Goths who were nearby? Where are the Huns? Where are the breakdowns? Where are the Bulgarians, in the sense of the North Caspian population? Where are the Pechenegs, where are the Polovtsy? Why do these Slavic peoples appear in their place in the 19th century, reviving some medieval realities?
• What kind of Slavs are these, who at first are the least visible of the immigrants, and the migrants should be taken in quotes? Because we have read enough in the historian Florin Kurta to question whether there was a Slavic migration, that is, people who came from other places and settled in the so-called no-man’s land. Then a natural question arises: why do we have no names other than Bulgarian? Instead, we have these Slavic peoples who acquire a new localized identity in the Middle Ages. Yes, but it is about an identity that was rearranged in the 19th century, according to national projects.

Are the Romanian people born Christian? I would say yes, but it’s more of a poetic formula

• Iorga already said that the Romanian people are a product of Balkan Latinity as a whole. His ethnogenesis cannot be placed exclusively north of the Danube, any more than we have a convincing argument telling us that we should place it exclusively south of it. I would talk about proto-Romanians from the 8th century. Placing them in the 6th century is a bit hasty. They are still Romans, they are still just a Roman population speaking a late, provincial Latin with changes in vocabulary.
• Why do these proto-Romanian speakers, practicing Latin Christianity, switch to the Slavic liturgy? Here it also refers to the essence of the 13th century, to the crisis that led to the final separation of the two Christendoms, Latin Roman Christianity, that is, the Papacy, and Eastern Christianity, the Byzantine Empire, the Greeks, but the Greeks, who in the meantime also annexed the Slavic world . Here lies a great key to understanding the role of the Slavic liturgy of the 9th century and its deliberate spread from the Byzantine Empire. Adherence to the Slavic-Greek liturgy means adherence to Byzantine Christianity. This is the meaning.
• Are the Romanian people born Christian? I would say yes, but it’s more of a poetic formula. Proto-Romanians, medieval Romanians, were born from that late antique, Latin-speaking Christian population. They come from that group of ancient Christians from all the Balkan cities who started and walked with their cattle and apparently reached the Carpathians. Yes, they are carriers of the Romanian idea.

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