Romania

Romania stands on the lower Danube north of the Balkans and on the Black Sea's northwestern shore, between Ukraine, Hungary, Serbia, Bulgaria and Moldova, nineteen million people in the twelfth country of Europe by area, with Bucharest its capital and Cluj, Iași, Timișoara and Constanța its other cities. Dacia fell to Trajan and was Romanised before Slavs, Magyars and Ottomans washed over the principalities; the modern state dates to 1859, when Moldavia and Wallachia united under Cuza, won independence from the Sultan in 1877, and crowned Carol I king of Romania in 1881. The First World War doubled the kingdom: Transylvania, Banat, Bukovina and Bessarabia came in to make Greater Romania at its widest. Antonescu's war beside Germany cost the 1940 cessions to Hungary, Bulgaria and Russia, until the King's Act of 23 August 1944 turned the guns round and Bucharest finished on the Allied side, regaining northern Transylvania at Paris. Soviet tanks then forced Michael's abdication into a socialist republic.