The Carpathian Folk Fairs and the Origins of National Consciousness among Romanians

Abstract

A series of time-honoured regular folk fairs take place in the Carpathian Mountains that are mainly economic but also socio-cultural events. The participants come from all the three Romanian principalities—Moldavia, Wallachia, and Transylvania, that is, from all the historical provinces of the Romanian state as constituted after the First World War. These folk fairs are “two-land fairs” in the Eastern and Southern Carpathians and “three-land fairs” where all three provinces converge, as in the district of Vrancea. Over the centuries, such fairs advanced the perception that participants spoke the same language, shared the same religious belief, and belonged to the sameneam, that is, implicitly to the same territory (the wordneambeing a vernacular term for “kin group,” but extensible to the notion of “people” and “nation”). In short, the folk fairs contributed to awakening Romanian national consciousness. Such evidence challenges modernist theory, according to which national consciousness should have arisen with the bourgeoise elite, who should have inculcated it into the public mind.