Bucovina & Botoşani

The Southern Bucovina and Botoşani regions together form the historic "Upper Country" north of the core Moldova region, split by the River Sireţ.

Stretching from from the north-eastern Carpathian Mountains in the west down to the Sireţ River, the traditional Southern Bucovina region is today's County Suceava, together with neighbouring County Botoşani comprising a population of over a million in the two upper-most of Romania's counties.

The identity of the Bucovina region is equally influenced by the joint influences of the neighbouring Moldova Region (the largest city, Suceava, was once the capital of Moldova from the late 14th to the mid-16th centuries), and the historic Bukovina region, once under Austrian rule and now split between the Ukraine and Romania.

What is roughly County Suceava today was under Imperial Habsburg rule from Austria from 1775 until 1919.  County Botoşani, whilst remaining more "Moldovan" in rule and character, nonetheless was influenced subtly by the almost 150 years of rule from Vienna across the Sireţ river.   See more in the History below!

Top Tourism Destinations:

The Bucovina region features a wealth of tourist attractions related to it's World Heritage area painted churches and monasteries, as well as the medieval fortifications in the main cities of Suceava, Botoşani and Rădăuţi. 

Both Fălticeni and Câmpulung Moldovenesc see major tourist influxes, and the village Ipoteşti enjoys pilgrams to Mihai Eminescu's birthplace.   The eminant George Enescu's home town is the village of Liveni, and a great museum can be found at Săveni.

An extact of the Voroneţ frescoes with the distinctive shimmering blue background

The Painted Churches

The painted churches of Suceava are seven Romanian Orthodox churches built approximately between 1487 and 1532.

Since 1993 they have been United Nations UNESCO World Heritage Sites. 

The oldest in the group were built in 1487, the Church of St George of the former Voroneţ Monastery at Voroneţ, and the Church of the Holy Rood at Pătrăuţi.

At Arbore is the Church of the Beheading of St. John the Baptist from 1503, and at Humor is the splendid
Church of the Assumption of the Virgin of the former Humor Monastery.  

Rounding out these World Heritage sites is the Church of the Annunciation of the Moldoviţa Monastery built in 1532, the Church of St. Nicholas and the Catholicon of the Probota Monastery built the year before in 1531, and in the capital Suceava, the 1522 Church of St. George.

The Humor Monastery

Humor Monastery located about 5 km north of the town of Gura Humorului, Romania. Is a monastery for females dedicated to the Dormition of Mary the mother of God or Theotokos.

It was constructed in 1530 by Voievod Petru Rareş (whom with his wife is buried at the monastery) and his chancellor Teodor Bubuiog. The monastery was built over the foundation of a previous monastery that dated to around 1415. The Humor monastery was closed in 1786 and was not reopened until 1990.

The Frescoes of Humor

Humor was one of the first of Bucovina's painted monasteries to be frescoed and, along with Voroneţ, is probably the best preserved. The dominant colour of the frescoes is a reddish brown.

The master painter responsible for Humor's frescoes, which were painted in 1535, is one Toma of Suceava.  The subjects of the frescoes at Humor include the Siege of Constantinople and the Last Judgement, common on the exterior of the painted monasteries of Bucovina, but also the Hymn to the Virgin inspired by the poem of Patriarch Sergius of Constantinople relating to the miraculous intervention of the Theotokos in saving the city from Persian conquest in 626.

The Persians are, however, depicted as Turks which is a common device in these monasteries, their paintings being used in part for political propaganda in addition to their spiritual meaning.

The Sistine Chapel of the East:  The Voroneţ Monastery

Voroneţ is one of the better known monasteries of the Bucovina region, not far from Gura Humorului. It is one of the famous painted monasteries in the Bucovina region, often known as the "Sistine Chapel of the East".

The stunning frescos at Voroneţ feature an intense giddy shade of blue known in Romania as "Voroneţ blue", hard to reproduce anywhere else! 

The monastery was established in 1488, with St. George the Martyr as its patron saint. The exterior paintings were made in 1547. It remained a working monastery until the start of Habsburg rule in 1785, and only became a religious retreat again after the fall of communism in 1991.

The tomb of the monastery's first abbot, St. Pious Daniil the Hermit is found at the monastery.  This fine old example of inspired traditional painting is one of the Painted churches of northern Moldova listed in UNESCO's list of World Heritage sites.

Click on map locations for more information,
or click here for a larger version with more locations!

The western side of the region consists of mountains from the Eastern Carpathians group: the Rodna Mountains, the Rarău Mountains, the Giumalău Mountains and the three "Obcine" with lower heights. The region's elevation decreases toward the east though a series of substantial higher sloping hilly plains, with the lowest height in the Prut River valley on the border with the Republic of Moldova. 

The rivers crossing the region are the Siret River with its tributaries: the Moldova River, the Suceava River and the Bistriţa River; and the Prut River and it's affluent the Jijia River.

Population

In 2002, it had a population of 1,141,269 and the population density was 84.5/km˛.   The majority of the population are Romanians (97%). There are communities of Ukrainians, Poles, Slovaks and Roma (Gypsies).

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==HISTORY===================================

The western half of today's Bucovina region constituted the southern Bukovina region, all of which was part of Greater Romania for most of the inter-bellum period of the 20th Century.

The Upper Lands of Bukovina and Botoşani

The name Bukovina came into official use in 1775 with the region's annexation to the possessions of the Habsburg Monarchy, later known as the Austrian Empire, and Austria-Hungary. The name has a Slavic origin and is derived from the word for beech tree. 

The standard German name, die Bukovina, which was the official German-language name for the province under Austrian rule, is derived from the Slavic original, via the Polish form of the name which is Bukovina.

This was due to the fact that, for roughly the first half of the 19th century, and for some years prior, Austrian Bukovina was administered as an integral part of neighboring Galicia, whose internal government was, by active Austrian policy, controlled by Polish bureaucrats and nobles (szlachta). Another German name for region, das Buchenland is mostly used in poetry, means, literally, "beech land", or, more poetically, "land of beech trees".

In the eastern portion of the Bucovina region, Botoşani gained it's name probably from a boyar family called Botaş, that lived in this place since the 11th century. The name of this family can be found in old records from the time of Ştefan cel Mare as one of the most important families of the then principality of Moldova.

Another possible origin of the Botoşani name is that of a Tatar chief, Batus or Batu Khan, grandson of Genghis Khan, who occupied this region in the 13th century.

"Ţara de Sus"

In Romanian the original name of the region during the rule of the Moldovan Principality was "Ţara de Sus" (Upper Country), referring to the altitude, as opposed to the lower plains called "Ţara de Jos" (Lower Country).   This Upper Country included all of the hilly higher plains of the Bucovina region, differentiating it from the lower regions further south along the Sireţ and Prut rivers. 

Nowadays in Ukraine it is common to use the terms Chernivtsi Oblast and Bukovina as synonymous words, which originated from the fact that Chernivtsi Oblast and the Northern Bukovina (as of 1910 Austrian border) refer to about the same territory.

In English, an alternate form is The Bukovina, increasingly an archaism, which, however, is to be found in older literature, similar to the articulated naming of "The Banat" in Romania's south-west.

Before the 14th century

During Stone age Bukovina was densely populated by Cucuteni-Trypillian culture of early settlers (4500 BC – 3000 BC).   Since the Roman times, Dacian peoples inhabited the territory. In the 5th century, the territory came under the rule of the Avars. Around 7th century, Slavic populations settled in the region. From 9th to early 14th century a small part of the territory was under the rule of Kievan Rus.

The oldest item found in the area is an Armenian tombstone dated 1350 near Botoşani. The first mention of the Bucovina region in writing is The Chronicles of Moldavia by Grigore Ureche, which records a devastating invasion of the Tatars on 28 November 1493.

Suceava, the Moldovan capital

From the mid-14th century, the Bucovina region became ascendant in the wider Moldovan principality, with the city of Suceava as its capital from 1388. In the 15th century, parts of the region became the subject of disputes between the Moldovan state and the Polish Kingdom. In this period, the patronage of Stephen III and his successors on the throne of saw the construction of the famous painted monasteries of Moldoviţa, Putna, Suceviţa and Voroneţ.

With their renowned exterior frescoes, these monasteries remain some of the greatest cultural treasures of Romania; some of them are World Heritage Sites, part of the painted churches of northern Moldova. Stephen also settled ethnic Ukrainians (known as Ruthenians) in Bukovina with the hope of having a loyal population that would contribute with taxes. In Suceava alone, in the 16th century, two-percent of the population was Ruthenian.

In the 1541, the Bucovina region came under the control of the Ottoman Turks as part of semi-autonoumous Moldova, govered by a Voievod. For short periods of time, the Polish Confederation occupied the northern part of Bukovina. However on 14 October 1703 the old border is re-established, as the Polish delegate Martin Chometowski aknowledges Inter nos et Valachiam ipse Deus flumine Tyras dislimitavit (Between us and Moldova God himself set Dniester as the border).

Botoşani in the eastern portion of the Bucovina region sported "the biggest and the oldest fair of Moldova", the region featuring at the time large communities of Jewish and Armenian traders.

In the course of the Russo-Turkish War the Ottomans were driven out by the Russian Empire (Occupied 14 September-October 1739 and 15 December 1769 - September 1774.)

The Polish nobility had traditionally formed the ruling class in that territory before the Habsburg acquired it for Austria under the partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in the last quarter of the 18th century.

Austrian Empire

The Austrian empire occupied Bukovina in October of 1774 (following the first partition of Poland in 1772), claiming that they needed it for a road between Galicia and Transylvania, and was formally annexed in January 1775. On 2 July 1776, at Palamutka, Austrians and Ottomans sign a border convention, Austrians giving back 59 of the previously occupied villages, and remaining with 278 villages.

It remained part of the Cisleithanian or Austrian territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until 1918, initially as a closed military district (1775 - 1786), then as the largest district, Kreis Czernowitz (after its capital Cernăuţi or in Ukrainian, Chernivtsi) of the Austrian constituent Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (1787 - 1849).

Galicia was the historical region currently split between Poland and Ukraine. The Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, or simply Galicia, was the largest, most populous, and northernmost province of Austria from 1772 until 1918, with Lviv as its capital city. It was created from the territories taken from the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the partitions of Poland and lasted until the dissolution of Austria-Hungary at the end of the First World War.

Bukovina became somewhat cleaved off from Galicia on 4 March 1849, when it became a separate Austrian Kronland 'crown land' (although from August 1849 to 26 February 1861 it was again amalgamated with Galicia). 

On 4 March 1849, under a "Landespräsident" (differing from the Stadthalter, as in other crown lands) and declared Herzogtum Bukovina, a nominal duchy in the Austrian Empire. It got a representative assembly, the Landtag parliament.   During this period, the A.T. Laurian National College was founded in 1859 in Botoşani, one of the most prestigious pre-university educational institutions.

The Rich Ethnic Mix

According to the 1775 Austrian census, the province had the total population of 86,000 made up of Romanians and Ukrainians (Ruthenians and Huţuls). During the 19th century the Austrian Empire policies encouraged the influx of many immigrants such as Germans, Poles, Jews, Hungarians and Ruthenian from Galicia.

The 1871 and 1904 jubilees held at Putna Monastery, near the tomb of Ştefan cel Mare, have constituted tremendous moments for Romanian national identity in Bukovina. Since gaining its independence, Romania envisioned to incorporate this historic province which, as a core of Moldovan Principality, was of a great historic significance to its history and contained many prominent monuments of its art and architecture. 

Despite the influx of migrants encouraged under the Austrian rule, Romanians continued to be the largest ethnic group in the province until 1880, when Ruthenians (Ukrainians) outnumbered the Romanians 5:4. According to the 1880 census there were 239,690 Ruthenians and Hutzuls or roughly 41.5 % of the population of the region while Romanians were second with 190,005 people or 33%, a ratio that remained unchanged until WWI. Ruthenian is an archaic name for Ukrainian, while Hutzul is considered as an ethnic group of Ukrainian stock.

Under the Austrian rule Bukovina remained ethnically mixed: predominantly Romanian in the south, Ukrainian (commonly referred to as Ruthenians in the Empire) in the north, with small numbers of Hungarian Székely, Slovak and Polish peasants, and Germans, Poles and Jews in the towns; the 1910 census counted 800,198 people, of which: Ruthenian 38.88%, Romanian 34.38%, German 21.24%, Jews 12.86%, Polish 4.55%, Hungarian 1.31%, Slovak 0.08%, Slovenian 0.02%, Italian 0.02%, and a few Serbian, Croat, Turkish, Armenian, Gipsy.

In spite of some frictions between Romanian and Ukrainian populations at the time over the influences in the Orthodox hierarchy, the inter-ethnic conflicts did not reach a significant level and both cultures developed in educational and public life. Moreover, at the end of the 19th century, the development of Ukrainian culture in Bukovina surpassed Galicia and the rest of Ukraine with a network of Ukrainian educational facilities.

The Split of Bukovina

In World War I, several battles were fought in Bukovina between the Austro-Hungarian, German, and Russian armies, which resulted in the Russian army being driven out in 1917.

With the collapse of Austria-Hungary in 1918 the National Council of Bukovina, which represented only the Romanian population of the province, voted for union with Romania and subsequently the province was occupied by Romanian troops. Romania formally annexed Bukovina on November 28, 1918.

Although local Ukrainians have unsuccessfully attempted to incorporate parts of northern Bukovina into the short lived West Ukrainian National Republic, the Romanian control of the province was finally formalized in the Treaty of St. Germain in 1919 and the policies of Romanianization were carried in the interwar period. Romanian language was introduced to ethnic minority schools in 1923 and by 1926 all Ukrainian schools in Bukovina were closed. Although in the 1928 - 1938 period, as Romania tried to improve its relations with Soviet Union, Ukrainian culture has given some limited means to redevelop, any gains were sharply reversed in 1938.

Bucovina's Mixed Populations

According to the 1930 Romanian census, Romanians made up almost 45% of the total population of Bukovina and Ruthenians (Ukrainians) 29.2%. However in the northern region and Hertsa which subsequently were surrendered to the USSR in 1940, Romanians made up only 32.6% of the population, while Ukrainians slightly outnumbered Romanians.

Bukovina should not be confused with Chernivtsi Oblast, as the latter included not only northern Bukovina and Hertsa region but also the northern part of Khotin county, thus totaling a population of circa 805,000 in 1940, out of which 47.5% were Ukrainians in 1940 and 28.3% were Romanians, with Germans, Jews, Poles, Hungarians and Russians comprising the rest.

Bucovina in World War Two

Following the Ribbentrop-Molotov Pact, the June 1940 Soviet Ultimatum demanded the northern part of Bukovina, a province connected with Galicia annexed by the Soviet Union at 1939 Poland's partition.

Soviet demand for Bukovina surprised Germany, though it didn't formally oppose it. In the first Soviet ultimatum addressed to the Romanian government, the largely Ukrainian populated northern part of Bukovina was "demanded" as a minor "reparation for the great loss produced to the Soviet Union and Bessarabia's population by twenty-two years of Romanian domination of Bessarabia". At the end of June, 1940, the Romanian government evacuated Northern Bukovina, and the Red Army moved in, with the new Soviet-Romanian border being traced 20 km north of Putna Monastery.

In the course of the 1941 attack on the Soviet Union by the Axis forces the Romanian Third Army led by General Petre Dumitrescu occupied the region along with Hertsa, Bessarabia, Odessa region and other territories in the south of Ukraine.

Romanians Exit Bucovina

During the Second World War, major demographic changes occurred in northern Bukovina. In the first year of Soviet occupation, the population of the region decreased by more than 250,000. These demographic shifts are explained by three separate but concurrent phenomena:

	fleeing of a part of the population to Romania (mainly, but not exclusively, ethnic Romanians
	repatriation of Germans, Hungarians and Poles
	systematic repression, mass deportation and exterminations by the Soviet regime (again mainly, although not exclusively, directed against Romanians)

According to NKVD orders, tens of thousands of Romanian families were deported to Siberia during this period, with 12,191 people deported on August 2, 1940, (less than a month after the occupation), and another 2,057 persons, deported to Siberia in December 1940, together with their families. The largest action took place on June 13, 1941, when about 13,000 people were deported to Siberia and Kazakhstan.

Until the repatriation convention of 15 April 1941, the NKVD troops killed hundreds of Romanian peasants of the northern Bukovina as they tried to escape to Romania away from the Soviet authorities, which culminated on April 1 with the Fantana Alba massacre.

Almost the entire German population of northern Bukovina established during Austrian rule emigrated to the Reich. According to Ukrainian sources, about 45, 000 ethnic Germans had left Northern Bukovina by November 1940.

In July 1941, the new Romanian military government counted at least 36,000 missing persons apart of the Jews murdered in the Holocaust. After the war the Soviet government deported or killed about 41,000 Romanians.

Under the occupation, almost entire Jewish community of the northern Bukovina was destroyed by the deportations to the death camps (see Bogdanovka) over the Dniester and Bug rivers. Despite his promise that he would treat the Old Kingdom Jews differently than non-Regat Jews, Romanian leader Ion Antonescu ordered deportation of Jews from Suceava county. In 1941 and 1942, 21,229 Jews from southern Bukovina were deported.

The Post War Sovietisation

In 1944 the Red Army drove the Axis forces out and re-established the Soviet control over the territory. Romania was forced to formally cede the northern part of Bukovina to the USSR by the 1947 Paris peace treaty. That territory became a part of the Ukrainian SSR as Chernivtsi Oblast (province). After the war, the Soviet government deported or killed about 41,000 Romanians. As a result of killings and mass deportations, entire villages, mostly inhabited by Romanians, were abandoned (Albovat, Frunza, I.G.Duca, Buci -- completely erased, Prisaca, Tanteni and Vicov - destroyed to large extent). Men of military age (and sometimes above) were conscripted into the Soviet Army. That did not protect them, however, from being arrested and deported for being "anti-Soviet elements".

As a reaction, partisan groups (composed of both Romanians and Ukrainians) began to operate against the Soviets in the woods around Cernăuţi, Crasna and Codrii Cosminului.  In Crasna (former Storozhynets county) villagers attacked Soviet soldiers who were sent to "temporarily resettle" them, since they feared deportation. This resulted in dead and wounded among the villagers, who had no firearms.

Spring 1945 saw the formation of transports of Polish repatriates who (voluntarily or by coercion) had decided to leave. Between March 1945 and July 1946, 10,490 inhabitants left northern Bukovina for Poland, including 8,140 Poles, 2,041 Jews and 309 of other nationalities.

Overall, between 1930 (last Romanian census) and 1959 (first Soviet census), the population of northern Bukovina decreased by 31,521 people. According to official data from those two censuses, the Romanian population had decreased by 75,752 people, and the Jewish population by 46,632, while the Ukrainian and Russian populations increased by 135,161 and 4,322 people, respectively.

After 1944, the human and economic connections between the northern (Soviet) and southern (Romanian) parts of Bukovina were severed. While the northern part is the nucleus of the Ukrainian Chernivtsi Oblast, the southern part is tightly integrated with Romanian historic regions.

Current population of Bukovina

The present demographic situation in Bukovina hardly resembles the one of the times of the Austrian Empire. Currently, the Northern (Ukrainian) and Southern (Romanain) parts became significantly dominated by their Ukrainian and Romanian majorities, respectively, with the representation of other ethnic groups being decreased significantly.

According to the Ukrainian Census (2001) data [6], the Ukrainians represent about 75% (689,100) of the population of Chernivtsi Oblast, which is the closest, although not an exact, approximation of the territory of the historic Northern Bukovina. The census also identified a fall in the Romanian and Moldovan populations to 12.5% (114.6 thousand) and 7.3% (67.2 thousand), respectively. Russians are the next largest ethnic group with 4.1%, while Poles, Belarusians, and Jews comprise the rest. The languages of the population closely reflect the ethnic composition with over 90% within each of the major ethnic groups declaring their national language as the mother tongue (Ukrainian, Romanian, Moldovan and Russian, respectively).

The appearance of Romanians and Moldovans in the census as two separate ethnic groups has been criticized by the Romanian Community of Ukraine - Interregional Union which complain that this old Soviet-era practice results in the Romanian population being undercounted. However, the census respondents were free to claim their ethnicity as they wished with no predetermined set of choices, not to respond to any particular census question or not answer any questions at all. Some have chosen to claim to be Rusyns or Hutsuls, which are ethnic groups that were not previously recognized. Thus, the census official results adequately reflect the answers freely given by the respondents as no serious allegation of the counting fraud were ever brought up.

A compact Romanian minority inhabits the southern part of Chernivtsi region, in Hertsa, Novoselitsa (Noua Suliţă), Hlyboka (Adâncata), Storozhinets (Storojineţ). In every other part of northern Bukovina, including the city of Chernivtsi, Ukrainians are in the majority.

The southern, or Romanian Bukovina has a significant Romanian majority (97.5%), largest minority group being the Ukrainians, who make up 1.2% of the population (2002 census). The Romanian 2002 census was subject to a criticism of undercounting of ethnic minorities in Romania brought up by the Ukrainian communities inside and outside Romania

The Bucovina Region Today

In addition to it's main tourist draw, the predominant industries in the Bucovina region today include timber and wood products.  The Bucovina region has the largest surfaces covered with forests in Romania and is a prime logging region as well as having metals explorations.  The region has significant food processing plants, as well as a mechanical components and construction materials industry, with textiles, and some leatherworking.

At Stânca-Costeşti there is one of the greatest hydro electrical power plants in Romania.
 

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