Preparations for the National Day of Romania
On December 1st, Romanians celebrate their National Day
Bogdan Matei, 29.11.2024, 13:50
This coming Sunday is going to be a busy election day in Romania, as Romanians will be electing, this time, their senators and deputies. And the Central Electoral Bureau would announce, in the evening, the result of the recount of the votes from the first round of the presidential elections, held on November 24. An unprecedented political tension in 35 years of post-communist Romanian democracy threatens to eclipse a supposed day of concord, when what is celebrated in historiography is the Great Union of all Romanians.
As an apolitical institution, the Romanian Army has its own program. The rehearsal for the military parade dedicated to the National Day, December 1, initially scheduled for Thursday, was moved to Saturday – the Ministry of Defense has announced. About 2,500 soldiers and specialists from the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Romanian Intelligence Service, the Special Telecommunications Service, the Penitentiary Administration and the Romanian Customs Authority, with about 190 technical equipment and 45 aircraft, will participate in the parade. Along with the Romanian soldiers, about 240 foreign soldiers will march in the military parade, as part of detachments from allied countries: Albania, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Croatia, France, Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, North Macedonia, Poland, Portugal, the United Kingdom, Spain, United States and Turkey. The foreign detachments include about 21 technical devices, including combat aircraft. For the first time, women from the Army of the neighboring Republic of Moldova (ex-Soviet, mostly Romanian) will parade under the Arch of Triumph in Bucharest.
The foreign offices of the Romanian Cultural Institute have also scheduled special events to celebrate the National Day. The Institute in Warsaw, for example, together with the “Watch Docs International Film Festival. Human Rights in Film’ invites the cinephile audience to a Romanian retrospective in the ‘Large Format Documentary’ section, dedicated to the most important achievements of the genre. This year, the section is devoted to Romania and runs until December 1. The group of Romanian documentaries recalls some archival productions from the 60s-70s-80s of the last century, but also presents a new creation by the Romanian director Radu Jude, one of the most appreciated contemporary filmmakers in Poland, for the Polish premiere.
An official holiday after the anti-communist Revolution of 1989, December 1st marks the completion, at the end of the First World War, in 1918, of the process of establishing the Romanian unitary national state. It was then that all the provinces with a majority Romanian population under the rule of the neighboring multinational empires, the Tsarist and Austro-Hungarian one, came under the authority of Bucharest: Bessarabia (east), Bucovina (northeast), Transylvania (center), Banat, Crisana and Maramureş (west) .
