Five Pogoane in a Single One

A pogon was not a pogon

In theory, the stânjen was a simple unit: the span between the fingertips of a man with both arms outstretched, fixed by a wooden or iron standard rod kept at court. In practice, every prince of Wallachia could redefine that standard as he pleased. Șerban Cantacuzino's stânjen, official in the late seventeenth century, measured 1.9665 metres. Constantin Brâncoveanu's, used in the early eighteenth, was 2.7 percent longer: 2.02 metres. That difference held until 1844, when the Wallachian administration dropped Brâncoveanu's stânjen for good and went back to the older, shorter one of Șerban Vodă, the only version still in force by the 1864 metric reform.

Moldavia kept its own stânjen, independent of Wallachia's: 2.23 metres, 13.4 percent longer than Șerban Vodă's. Across the Carpathians, under Austro-Hungarian rule, the Transylvanian stânjen was built from six Viennese feet and came out to just 1.90 metres, the shortest of every variant used on the territory of Romania today. The gap between the Moldavian and the Transylvanian stânjen, close to 17.6 percent, looks small on paper. Squared into area, where a length difference compounds, it grows to nearly 38 percent: ten "equal" stânjeni covered, on either side of the mountains, plots a third larger or smaller than one another.

The stânjen, laid next to itself

The instrument below places the five historical variants of the stânjen side by side, to scale. The gap on paper is small. Multiplied across dozens or hundreds of stânjeni on the ground, it becomes a full hectare, and the boundary between two estates shifted, on paper, with every change of ruler.

Four names for land

Every region built its own area unit from its own stânjen, each with a different shape and name. Wallachia's pogon ran 72 stânjeni long and 18 wide, 1,296 square stânjeni of Șerban Vodă's: 5,012 square metres. Moldavia's falce, a different shape entirely, 240 by 12 Moldavian stânjeni, reached 14,300 square metres, nearly three Wallachian pogoane. In Transylvania, the Austrian cadastral yoke measured 5,755 square metres, but it coexisted with a second yoke, the Hungarian one, at just 4,316 square metres, a third smaller, under the same name, in the same province.

Furthest from all of them was Dobruja, under Ottoman administration until 1878. There, land was measured in donums, sometimes still called "pogoane" in local speech, at only 919 square metres. A Dobrujan donum fit 5.45 times inside a Wallachian pogon: the same everyday name, for plots of land five times smaller.

A law and a reform, 32 days apart

This wasn't just an antiquarian curiosity. On 14 August 1864, Alexandru Ioan Cuza signed the rural law, making the clăcași, peasants bound to labour service, owners of the land they had worked for their landlord. Just 32 days later, on 15 September 1864, backed in parliament by Mihail Kogălniceanu, the prince signed the law adopting the metric system. The two laws solved, in effect, the same problem from opposite directions: one said who owned the land, the other tried to fix, once and for all, how large a piece of land actually was.

The metric reform did not take hold overnight. Conversion tables between the old units and the metre were published only in January 1865, in the official gazette. An implementation law followed in 1875, setting a timetable: the metric system became mandatory in transactions from 1 January 1879 and across the entire territory from 1 January 1881, more than sixteen years after Cuza had signed the original law. For a generation of newly landed peasants, title deeds stayed written in pogoane and fălci whose exact equivalents had to be memorised or calculated by hand.

A third system, arriving late

Dobruja joined Romania only in 1878, through the Treaty of Berlin, in the very years the metric system was gradually taking full effect across the rest of the country. The newly acquired province brought neither the Wallachian pogon nor the Moldavian falce, but a third set of units entirely, inherited from Ottoman administration: the donum, the arshin, the endeze. Romania had barely finished reconciling two regional systems for measuring land when a third arrived, carrying its own rules.