Who named Romania

The explorer

Type a fragment of a name

The field searches all 18,214 names at once. A hyphen in front looks at the ending, a hyphen at the end looks at the beginning, and without one it searches anywhere in the name. The map redraws on every keystroke, and every dot on it will tell you its name.

I · Whose

A quarter of the country carries a family's name

4,558 places have a name ending in -ești, -eni, -ani or -ăuți. None of those endings describes ground. All of them describe a group of people. Popești means Popa's people, Bogdănești means Bogdan's people, Călinești means Călin's people. English does the same thing in Reading and Hastings, where the -ing once marked the followers of a man named Read and a man named Hæsta.

The ending -ești descends from the Latin suffix -iscus, which became -esc in Romanian, with the plural -ești. A village name is grammatically a family plural, the same form a Romanian would use today to mean the Popa household. The mechanism is catalogued by Iorgu Iordan in Toponimia românească, published by the Romanian Academy in 1963 and still the standard inventory of Romanian place names.

2,630 names end in -ești, built on 1,495 distinct family names. The most productive by far is Popa, the word for a parish priest: 38 villages are called Popești, spread across 17 counties. In a great many villages the priest was the only man who could read and hold land at the same time.

The suffix -eni does the same work across 1,525 names, with one difference. Alongside families it also catches people who arrived from somewhere. Ungureni are the ones who came from the Hungarian lands, Olteni the ones from across the river Olt, Pădureni the ones from the forest. The name records where the villagers left, not where they landed.

II · Where

Ten words, ten Romanias

Romanian has no generic word for settlement to bolt onto a name, the way German has -dorf and English has -ton. It has terrain instead. 586 names begin with Valea, the valley; 132 with Poiana, a clearing in the forest; 132 with Lunca, the flat ground beside a river; 117 with Dealu, the hill; and 105 with Gura, the mouth, meaning the point where one river runs into another.

Every word draws a different country. Valea covers everything, because water runs everywhere. Gura follows the river network and thins out on the plain, where confluences are harder to see. Poiana climbs into the mountain forest, Măgura gathers where a single hill stands out of flat land, and Podu appears wherever a road had to cross water.

The tenth term in the grid describes no terrain at all. Slobozia comes from slobozie, a village released from tax for a few years to attract settlers. 56 places are named after that fiscal arrangement, and 41 of them sit in Moldova, the eastern province whose princes most often needed to repopulate emptied land.

III · The saints

The saints never crossed the mountains

102 names begin with Sân-, the old Romanian form of sfânt, saint, from Latin sanctus: Sânnicolau, Sângeorz, Sânmartin, Sânpetru, Sântimbru, Sânzieni. 99 of them lie inside the Carpathian arc, the mountain ring that encloses Transylvania.

Sânnicoară, a village outside Cluj, is the clearest case. Nicolaus turned into Nicoară through the same sound change that turned sole into soare, filum into fir and gula into gură: a Latin l between vowels becomes r, and only in words inherited directly, never in later borrowings. The village name went through that change, which places it in the oldest layer of the language.

Not every Sân- form is that old. Sântimbru comes from Emeric, a Hungarian saint, so there the route is plainly Hungarian, and philologists have spent a century divided between direct Latin inheritance and a calque on Szent-. The argument starts with Nicolae Drăganu's Românii în veacurile IX–XIV pe baza toponimiei și a onomasticei, 1933.

What is not divided is the geography. Outside the Carpathian arc there are exactly three names beginning with Sân-: Sânbotin, Sângeri, Sângeru. Two of them point to sânger, the red-stemmed dogwood that grows across the whole country, rather than to any saint. That leaves Sânbotin, in Vâlcea.

IV · The border

The suffix that stops at the Prut

-ăuți is a Slavic ending, from -ovci, and it also means the people of: Rădăuți, Pătrăuți, Șerbăuți, Milișăuți. Romania has 24 such names, nearly all of them packed into the north of Moldova. The Republic of Moldova, whose gazetteer holds a tenth as many places, has 32.

Set against the number of settlements in each gazetteer, the -ăuți family is roughly 13 times denser east of the river Prut, which has been Romania's eastern border since 1940. The family carries on beyond it: Cernăuți is now Chernivtsi, in Ukraine, the same suffix rendered in Ukrainian as -ivtsi. The suffix never stopped at the frontier. The map did.

V · Repetition

Satu Nou, 66 times over

The 18,214 places share only 13,285 distinct names. Close to four places in ten carry a name that at least one other place carries too, and the record is held by the least ambitious name available: Satu Nou, the new village.

The repetition has a plain explanation. A new village was the new village to its neighbours, and its neighbours were ten kilometres away. A name had to be clear within earshot, not unique within a country. The need to tell one from another arrived with the post, the draft and the census, and the answer was a suffix of convenience: 349 names contain de Sus, upper, 312 contain de Jos, lower, and the rest make do with Mare and Mică, big and small, or Nou and Vechi, new and old.

What comes out of all this is an administrative map drawn without an administration. Families, water, the hill, the saint and a tax exemption were, for several centuries, the only categories anyone needed in order to say where they lived.