Roumania
An Interpretation
A Serbian politician, conversing with a traveler from Western Europe, mentioned the words “a nice national balance;” and when the other, bored to death with the everlasting wrangle of the turbulent Balkans, tried to lead the conversation to Shakespeare and the Musical Glasses, away from Macedonia and Albania and “komitadjis” and Kotzo-Vlachs, the Serbian remarked with a laugh that the nice national balance of which he was speaking was not political, but economic and social.
“You see,” he said, “we Serbians are born peasants, born agriculturists, men of the glebe and the plow. The Roumanian, on the other hand, is a born financier. Gold comes to his hand like fish to bait. He comes to Serbia to make money—and he makes it.”
“But,” said the Western European, “isn’t that rather hard on the Serbian?”
“No! Not a bit! For it is the young Serbian who marries the Roumanian’s daughter, and the young Serbian girl who marries the Roumanian’s son. Thus the Serbian money, earned by the Roumanian, is still kept in the country. You know,” he added musingly, “the Roumanians are a singularly handsome, a singularly engaging people.
I myself married a Roumanian.”
“A rich Roumanian’s daughter, I suppose?”
“Heavens, no! A poor girl.”
And he added with superb lack of logic:
“Who wouldn’t marry a Roumanian—be she rich—OR poor!”
Who Wouldn’t Marry a Roumanian?
The secret of the Balkans is contained in that simple rhetoric question.
For, clear away from the days when the Slavs made their first appearance in Southern Europe and, crossing the Danube, came to settle on the great, green, rolling plain between the river and the jagged frowning Balkan Mountains, the proceeded southwards and formed colonies among the Thraco-Illyrians, the Roumanians, and the Greeks, to the days of Michael the Brave who drove the Turks to the spiked gates of Adrianople and freed half the peninsula for a span of years; from the days when gallant King Mirtsched went down to glorious defeat amongst the Osmanli yataghans to the final day when the Russian Slav liberated the Roumanian Latin from the Turkish yoke, the Roumanian has held high the torch of civilization and culture.
Latin civilization!
Latin culture!
Latin ideals!
Straight through, he has been the Western leaven in an Eastern land.
Geographically, the Fates were unkind to him.
For he stood in the path of the most gigantic racial movements of the world. His land was the scene of savage racial struggles. His rivers ran red with the blood of Hun and Slav, of Greek and Albanian, of Osmanli and Seljuk. His fields and pastures became the dumping-ground of residual shreds of a dozen and one nations surviving from great defeats or Pyrrhic victories and nursing irreconcilable mutual racial hatreds.
But the old Latin spirit proved stronger than Fate, stronger than numbers, stronger than brute force. It proved strong enough to assimilate the foreign barbarians, instead of becoming assimilated by them. It was strong enough to wipe out every trace of Asian and Slavic taint. It was strong enough to keep intact the Latin idea against the steely shock of Asian hordes, the immense, crushing weight of Slave fatalism, the subtleties of Greek influence.
The Roumanian is a Roman.
His cultural ideal was, and is, of the West, of Rome of France—AND of Himself; and he has kept it inviolate through military and political disaster, through slavery itself.
Roumania has remained a window of Europe looking toward Asia as surely and as steadily as Petrograd was a window of Asia looking toward Europe.
The Roumanian is proud of his Latin descent; and he shows his ancestry not only in his literature, his art, and his every day life, but also, perhaps chiefly, in his government which is practically a safe and sane oligarchy, modeled on that of ancient Florence, and, be it said, fully as successful as that of the Florentine Republic.
Latin, too, is his diplomacy. It is clean—AND clever. It is the big stick held in a velvet glove. It is supremely able. He seeks a great advantage with a modest air, in contrast to the Greek who seeks a modest advantage with a grandiloquent air.
He seeks no “réclame,” but goes ahead serenely, unfalteringly, sure in his knowledge that he is the torch-bearer of ancient Rome in the savage Balkans.
[signed] Achmed Abdullah