# What Is Still Standing *Marius Comper · 7 September 2026 · [Interactive edition](https://mariuscomper.uk/ce-a-ramas-in-picioare/en/) · [Română](https://mariuscomper.uk/ce-a-ramas-in-picioare/index.md)* The Romanian state keeps a list of everything it considers a historic monument: 30,197 entries, of which 17,956 are buildings, and 17,637 of those carry a year, or at least a century, of construction. Drawn on a map in the order they went up, they show a country that has survived unevenly. Of the 1,197 buildings older than 1500, 1,008 stand between the Carpathians and the Tisza. ## The Middle Ages survived beyond the Carpathians In all of Muntenia, the list has 65 buildings older than 1500; in Oltenia, 24; in Moldavia, 99; in Dobrogea, one. Transylvania alone has 942. Together with Crișana, the Banat and Maramureș, the provinces west of the Carpathians hold 1,008 of the country's 1,197 medieval buildings, or 84.2%. Before 1300 the ratio is 280 out of 292. For each of the 4,199 localities with at least one dated building, I kept the oldest thing still standing. In half the localities west of the Carpathians, that thing predates 1701; in half of those east and south, it predates 1805. In a Transylvanian locality, the chance that the oldest building predates 1700 is 49.5%; in Muntenia it is 14.8%; in Oltenia, 9.6%. Median year of dated buildings by province: Transylvania 1722, Crișana 1801, Maramureș 1801, Moldavia 1812, Oltenia 1840, Banat 1851, Muntenia 1876, Dobrogea 1896. The explanation has three layers. Stone: the Saxons and the Catholic parishes of the Hungarian kingdom built in stone and brick, and of the 708 masonry churches older than 1500, 624 are west of the Carpathians. Wood: south and east of the mountains the village built in wood, and wood gets replaced, so it enters the list with the year of the last church raised on that spot. The nineteenth century: it rebuilt the towns of the Old Kingdom almost from the ground. The list also has a limit of its own: it records what was surveyed and classified, and the inventories were made county by county, with different research traditions. ## Wood entered the list with the year of the last church The list classifies 1,238 wooden churches. Half are newer than 1772, and 684 were raised in the eighteenth century. Only 132 predate 1700. Transylvania has 368, Oltenia 276, Moldavia 276, Muntenia 112, Maramureș 88, Crișana 88, the Banat 29 and Dobrogea one. ## Half the list is newer than 1827 The median year of the 17,637 dated buildings is 1827. The nineteenth century alone left 7,707, more than every century up to 1800 put together (6,508). In Muntenia, 69.7% of listed buildings date from after 1850; in Transylvania, 19.5%. Bucharest has 2,049 dated buildings, with a median of 1876, and 2,674 entries in all. Dated buildings by century: 13th 280, 14th 288, 15th 636, 16th 693, 17th 1,140, 18th 3,456, 19th 7,707, 20th 3,419; before the thirteenth century, 15. ## Underground The list also holds 9,672 archaeological sites, of which 7,930 have a period noted: Palaeolithic and Mesolithic 187, Neolithic and Chalcolithic 940, Bronze Age 1,237, Hallstatt 571, La Tène 1,013, Roman and Roman-Byzantine 1,870, Migration period 670, Medieval 1,442. ## What the list does not say The list contains what the state has classified, with the last full edition in 2015 and updates by ministerial order. The dating is the list's own, taken at the earliest phase: “14th–19th c.” becomes 1301, “late 19th c.” becomes 1876. For 8,854 buildings the list gives an exact year and for 179 an approximate one, for 4,228 a quarter or half century, for 4,376 only the century; 319 have no dating. 7,512 entries have their own coordinates; 22,626 are placed at the point of their locality; 59 could not be placed. ## Method and sources The source is the transcription of the List of Historic Monuments on Romanian Wikipedia (), after the official 2015 edition of the National Heritage Institute () and later classification orders; 241 pages read on 7 September 2026. Localities were matched to the GeoNames gazetteer (), and county outlines come from geoBoundaries (). The photographs in the interactive edition are from Wikimedia Commons, under the licences noted in the captions.