Romania’s National Anthem Day (Jul 29, 2005)

Initially published in www.romania-report.ro – Jul 29, 2005

Bucharest, July 29 – This day, Romanians are celebrating the National Anthem -- “Awaken Thee, Romanian”. The lyrics of the national anthem belong to Andrei Muresan (1816-1863) – Romantic poet, journalist, translator, and an authentic tribune of the times marked by the 1848 Revolution.

The music was composed by Anton Pann (1796-1854) – poet and ethnographer, a man of great culture, singer and author of music textbooks. Andrei Muresan’s poem “Un rasunet” (“An Echo”), written and published during the 1848 Revolution, found the right music within a few days, as the anthem was sung for the first time on June 29, 1848 at Ramnicu Valcea (in Wallachia the revolution had broken out on June 11).

The poem became an anthem under the title “Desteapta-te romane” (“Awaken Thee, Romanian”) and spontaneously earned recognition due to its energetic and mobilising message. Since 1848, “Desteapta-te romane” has become a song dear to the Romanians, giving them courage in the crucial moments, such as the Independence War (1877-1878) or the World War I.

In the crisis moments after August 23, 1944 when, following King Mihai I coup d’état, Romania turned against Hitler’s Germany and then participated in the war along with the Allies, this anthem was spontaneously sung by everyone and was aired on the national radio, keeping the whole country on alert. The same happened on December 22, 1989, during the anti-Communist revolution; the anthem rose from the streets, accompanying huge masses of people, dispelling the fear of death and uniting a whole people in the lofty feelings of the moment. Thus, its institution as a state anthem came by itself, upon the tremendous pressure of the demonstrators.

The message of the anthem “Desteapta-te romane” is social and national at the same time; social because it imposes a permanent state of vigil meant to secure the passing to a new world; national because it gears this awakening to the historical tradition. Romania’s national anthem has several stanzas, of which the first four are sung on ceremonial occasions.


“Awaken Thee, Romanian!”:
Awaken thee, Romanian, shake off the deadly slumber
The scourge of inauspicious barbarian tyrannies
And now or never to a bright horizon clamber
That shall to shame put all your nocuous enemies.
It’s now or never to the world we readily proclaim
In our veins throbs and ancestry of Roman
And in our hearts for ever we glorify a name
Resounding of battle, the name of gallant Trajan.
Do look imperial shadows, Michael, Stephen, Corvinus
At the Romanian nation, your mighty progeny
With arms like steel and hearts of fire impetuous
It’s either free or dead, that’s what they all decree.
Priests, rise the cross, this Christian army’s liberating
The word is freedom, no less sacred is the end
We’d rather die in battle, in elevated glory
Than live again enslaved on our ancestral land.