"Let us join hands, all of us with a Romanian heart." Today marks 164 years since the union of the two Principalities — Moldavia and Wallachia — under the rule of Alexandru Ioan Cuza.
It is one of the few dates in history that can be explained to a primary-school child without effort, because the idea behind it is plain: two neighbours who speak the same language and share the same customs choose to go on together, under a single ruler. The rest — the electoral assemblies, the double election of January 1859, the ingenious way a prohibition was sidestepped — comes later, at the age when details start to make sense.
The song plays its part too. "Hora Unirii", written to Vasile Alecsandri's verses, is danced in a circle, hands joined, and that shape says by itself what happened back then: no one leads, no one is left outside, and the circle holds only if everyone holds on to everyone else. A child who has danced the hora has already understood half the lesson.
Happy anniversary, Romania.
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