Romania's twin towns: 322 places, 1,092 recorded twinnings

Your town: who is it twinned with?

Type the name or tap its dot on the map of Romania. The result says how many twins it has, in how many countries, the oldest recorded start year, and how far away the farthest twin sits. Twinning (înfrățire in Romanian) is an agreement between two local councils.

Which country holds the most threads?

Hungary, by a wide margin: 268 links, against 135 for Moldova and 110 for France. Of the 268 links with Hungary, 200 start in four counties — Harghita (90), Covasna (44), Mureș (37) and Bihor (29), in the centre and west of the country. Hungary stays first when only cities and towns are counted, leaving out communes and villages. Direct neighbours — Hungary, Moldova, Ukraine, Serbia and Bulgaria — together hold 501 links, 46% of all foreign links.

The place with the most twins is not the capital. Siret, a border town in Suceava county, holds 38 links in 26 countries. Bucharest holds 25.

A typical thread runs 641 km (the median over links with coordinates at both ends). The longest recorded thread joins Cluj-Napoca to Valdivia (Chile), 13,560 km away. The shortest crosses the river Tisa: Sighetu Marmației — Solotvyno (Ukraine), 4 km.

How did the map change by decade?

Only 29% of links carry a recorded start year, and the share differs widely by country: 50% of links with Moldova, 38% of those with France, but only 18% of those with Hungary. Among dated links, those begun up to 1999 (104) most often point to France: 28 links, or 27%. Among those begun from 2000 on (214), most point to Moldova: 64 links (30%), while France falls to 7%. Links with Moldova cannot predate 1991, the year it became independent.

The register cannot say who led after 2000, though. If each country's undated links split between periods the way its dated ones do, Hungary would have about 125 links begun after 2000 and Moldova about 127: practically a tie.

The table counts only links with a recorded year. Two links also carry a recorded end year; the absence of an end year does not show that a twinning is still in use.

Does twinning follow where Romanians live?

Not much. Across 17 European countries with at least three links and Eurostat counts of Romanian citizens resident on 1 January 2024, the ranking by links matches the ranking by residents at 0.29 (a rank correlation: 1 would be a perfect match, 0 none). Closeness does not explain it much better: against the distance from Bucharest to each country's capital the match is -0.35 (the minus sign says nearer countries hold more links). With so few countries the gap between the two means little: add the countries with one or two links and residents come out ahead (0.47 against -0.31); keep only those with five or more and distance pulls ahead (0.26 against -0.46).

What is clear is the gap with the diaspora. Spain is home to 620,463 Romanian citizens but holds only 11 links. Germany, with 776,424, holds 28. Italy, with 1,073,196 Romanian citizens, holds 90 links, fewer than France, where 161,220 live and 110 links point. The figure counts citizenship, not birthplace: Romanians who have taken their host country's citizenship do not appear in it. Eurostat has no 2024 figure for Moldova, Ukraine, Serbia, Greece, Poland, North Macedonia and the United Kingdom, so they sit outside the comparison.

Method and sources

Links are those recorded in Wikidata under property P190 (twinned administrative body), with start years (P580) and end years (P582) where present, opened 8–10 November 2026. Each pair counts once even when recorded from both sides, and counts too when it is recorded only on the foreign town's entry. When a commune and its seat village (two entries with the same name) carry the same twin, the link counts once; county-level twinnings are left out. Romanian places are those in present-day Romania; 18 places now in Bulgaria, Moldova and Ukraine that carry a historical record of belonging to Romania (Dobrich, Cahul, Hertsa and others) count as foreign twins. Distances are straight-line, between recorded coordinates. Link codes in addresses are SIRUTA codes (the National Institute of Statistics locality register) where the match was certain (305 of 322); otherwise the address uses the register identifier.

The Wikidata register is not complete. For 33 of the 42 county seats, the Romanian Wikipedia article carries a twin list; of the 349 names on those lists, at least 246 are found in Wikidata (matched by name), while Wikidata holds 405 links for the same towns. Neither source holds everything, and some Wikipedia lists include looser partnerships. A record shows that a twinning was declared, not how often it is used.

One year recorded as 1900 (Salonta — Túrkeve) was set aside as undated: it predates town twinning as a practice. Years recorded only as a decade or a century were not read as exact years.

• Wikidata — properties P190 (twinned administrative body), P580, P582, P625, P17, P31 and P131, opened 8–10 November 2026 (wikidata.org).
• Eurostat — migr_pop1ctz, resident population by citizenship, citizenship RO, all ages and sexes, 2024 (ec.europa.eu/eurostat), opened on 8 November 2026.
• National Institute of Statistics (INS) — SIRUTA locality register, first semester 2026, via the shared data store, for address codes.
• Romanian Wikipedia — twinning sections of the county-seat and Bucharest articles, 8 November 2026.
• Country outlines — Natural Earth, the public country-outline set, opened on 8 November 2026.