When was your village first written down?

Towns that celebrate the wrong birthday

A first written mention is usually a single sentence: a priest pays his tithe, a carter passes through customs, a king confirms an estate. Towns put the year of that sentence on their signs and count their anniversaries from it. A few picked the wrong one, and others have an older sentence than the one they celebrate.

Timișoara: 800 years for another castle

In 2012 Timișoara celebrated its 800th anniversary, with a commemorative stamp from Romfilatelia. The year 1212 came from a charter about castrum Themes, a castle in Pozsony county, in today's Slovakia. The mix-up had been pointed out in 1966–1969, yet Coriolan Suciu's dictionary, printed in 1968, still gives 1212. The first surviving text about Timișoara itself dates from 1266: terra castri de Tymes, the land of the castle of Timiș. The historian Sorin Forțiu goes further back, to 1177, on the evidence of a lost charter of King Béla III reconstructed by Iván Borsa in 1962; the 1177 date is still disputed.

Ploiești: a carter 93 years before Michael the Brave's charter

Ploiești counts its years from Michael the Brave's charter of 1 March 1596. Yet the Brașov customs register for 1503 records a carter, Radu, from Ploiești. The place existed, and a man from there was hauling goods across the mountains, 93 years before the act it celebrates.

Focșani has the same story. The town hall counts from a charter of January 1575 naming "the village of Focșani". The Brașov customs registers record one Harthan from "Fokschein" in 1546, probably the same place, 29 years earlier.

Bistrița: the German name came first

In 1241 a note in the Echternach codex records that the Mongols destroyed oppidum Nosa, that is Nösen, the town's German name. The name Bistrița appears only on 16 July 1264, in a letter of Pope Urban IV, and that is the date the town celebrates.

Iași: two days for one document

Two days circulate for Iași, 6 and 8 October 1408. Both belong to the same act, the trade privilege Alexander the Good granted to the merchants of Lviv; Mihai Costăchescu's edition dates it 6 October. The same privilege is also the first mention of Bacău and Tighina.

Tecuci: the year of a forgery

A very early year circulates for Tecuci, 1134, taken from a charter of Prince Ivanko Rostislavich, the "Bârlad charter". The document is a 19th-century forgery published by B. P. Hasdeu. The town's first genuine mention has no secure date yet.

A priest, a tithe, a birthday

Between 1332 and 1337 the pope's collectors gathered the tithe from the parishes of Transylvania and the Banat and entered the priests who paid in their register: sacerdos de villa Zalancha, the priest of the village of Salonta; sacerdos de Sancto Georgio, the priest of Sfântu Gheorghe. For at least 175 localities that line is the oldest known mention, among them Salonta, Sfântu Gheorghe, Gheorgheni, Cristuru Secuiesc, Dumbrăveni and Lugoj. That is why 1332 is the medieval year that appears most often on the map.

Why villages in the west have older documents

In Transylvania, the Banat, Crișana and Maramureș, 39% of the 3,276 localities dated from a scholarly source appear in a document written before 1400. In the Republic of Moldova, of the 810 towns and villages dated by the bibliographic guides published in Chișinău, none appears before 1400; the oldest mention is from 1402.

The difference lies, above all, in the chanceries. From the 11th and 12th centuries the Kingdom of Hungary drew up grants and court rulings in Latin, and villages appeared in them by name. Moldavia became a state only in the mid-14th century, and its oldest surviving acts date from the end of that century. In Wallachia the first towns appear on a tombstone usually dated 1300 (Câmpulung), in Johann Schiltberger's travel memoir, which recounts the year 1396 (Târgoviște) or in the Brașov customs registers (Ploiești, 1503).