Protochronism

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Protochronism is an ideological construct from communist Romania of the Ceaușescu era. It was first published in 1974 by the Romanian writer Edgar Papu in the Bucharest magazine Secolul XX . According to the theory of protochronism, the vast majority of European culture such as Baroque , Romanticism and the ideas and styles of Flaubert and Ibsen are in fact based on the ideas and works of Romanian literature. The ideas of protochronism were promoted by the then head of state and government Nicolae Ceaușescu .

Apartment block in Broos depicting the glorious Dacian ancestors

This new national historiography made a shift from the emphasis on the Roman ancestry of the Romanians, as represented by the Transylvanian School in the 19th century , to the Dacians . This enabled Romanian history to be portrayed in its early days as an anti-imperialist defensive struggle between the defensive Dacians and the Romans . This brought the regime's official historiography closer to the ideas of the far right of the Iron Guard , such as those of the history revisionist Iosif Constantin Drăgan, who lived in exile in Italy . The Dako-Romance theory of continuity was thus elevated to a state doctrine.

The peasant uprising of Horea in 1784 was interpreted as the Romanian forerunner of the French Revolution and the peasant uprising of Bobâlna in 1437 (Rum .: Răscoala de la Bobâlna ) was stylized as a revolution. The party historian Nicolae Copoiu praised the documents of the Moldovan surrender to the Ottoman Sublime Porte in 1975 as evidence of early Romanian sovereignty. Even then, the Romanian countries negotiated on an equal footing with the Sultan, just as Ceaușescu does today with Moscow and the West. These documents ( Roman : Capitulațiile Moldovei cu Poarta Otomană ) had already been exposed as patriotic forgeries by the historian Constantin C. Giurescu .

In the field of science and art, the writings of Neagoe Basarab were compared to those of Machiavelli and rated as more important. The writer Paul Anghel even went so far as to claim that Neago's teachings (Rum .: Învățături ) were not only unmatched in the West, but not even in the Byzantine Empire at that time. The fact that Neagoe wrote in Church Slavonic rather than Romanian was not an obstacle to this national exaggeration. The sociologist Ilie Bădescu, in turn, tried to prove that the Romanian poet Mihai Eminescu had revolutionized the sociological sciences in Europe. The writer Dan Zamfirescu , however, dealt with Ion Creangă and placed his work above the importance of Homer , Shakespeare and Goethe . In addition, early Romanian technology pioneers were glorified, such as the aviation pioneer Aurel Vlaicu , the bacteriologist Victor Babeș , or the polymath Dimitrie Cantemir .

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