Poland-Romania Cultural Season, 2025

Culture.pl has been celebrating a Poland-Romania Cultural Season 2024-2025 with many postings on diverse topics.

The Poland-Romania Cultural Season 2024-2025 is being announced in Warsaw and Bucharest on March 3rd for a reason. In a joint decision by both countries last year, the date now marks the celebration of Polish-Romanian Solidarity Day, commemorating the signing of their first defensive alliance in 1921. That document sealed the bonds of friendship that long connected both countries and its leaders – Józef Piłsudski and the Romanian royal family of King Ferdinand and his wife Maria. Tangible later evidence of these relations was the Romanian reception in September 1939 of tens of thousands of Polish refugees, as well as the assistance given in hiding Poland’s gold reserves and the Jagiellonian tapestries, which found safe refuge in Romania.

Here's a snippet from one contribution by Mikołaj Gliński, who writes on language-related topics. He titles it Shared Roads.

Often called a 'Romanic island in a Slavic sea', Romania and the Romanian language have been under a variety of cultural influences since their inception. Romanian, a Romance language, has absorbed a considerable number of Slavic elements – according to some estimates, as much as 20% of the Romanian vocabulary has Slavic roots.

To Polish or Slavic eyes, certain words in Romanian may look familiar:

• drag (dear) and dragoste (love) both remind us of ‘drogi’ (dear)
• glas (voice) looks similar to ‘głos’, its Polish equivalent
• a iubi (to love) has hints of the Polish word ‘lubić’, meaning ‘to like’
• rai (paradise) sounds just like the Polish word ‘raj’
• prieten (friend) has echoes of ‘przyjaciel’
• pivniță [corrected] (cellar) is very similar to ‘piwnica’
• coasă (scythe) is like an accented ‘kosa’
• plug (plow) is one letter off ‘pług’

Many were adopted early in the language’s development, likely from Old Church Slavonic and its local adaptations.

From the 15th to the early 18th centuries, Romanian (especially in so-called Moldavian-Slavonic documents) borrowed eagerly and directly from Polish. Words like pan (a noble title), zlot (gold coin), basta (tower), and a rocosi (to rebel) entered the language. However, most did not survive due to the 19th-century re-Romanisation reforms, which aimed to purge Romanian of foreign elements, replacing them with Romance neologisms.

But a handful of Polonisms from that era did survive and still remain today. According to Henryk Misterski, a professor specialising in Romania, they are komornik (bailiff), pan, stolnik (carpentry), sołtys (village mayor), szafran (saffron), and złoty (golden). Other terms, like sanie (sled) and lopată (shovel), also persist.

Meanwhile Romanians can easily recognise many Carpathian pastoral terms in Polish, such as watra (hearth) and bryndza (a type of mountain cheese). These entered Polish via the language used by Wallachian shepherds grazing their animals in the Carpathians.