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anybody have more information on this? Eliade mentions Dobrogea being colonized by "Bulgarian gardeners". A is putting the smack down (talk) 22:37, 20 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

I'm asking because one line of my family traces to Bulgarian gardeners who became Romanianized and adopted the Romanian surname "Grǎdinaru". Probably many with that surname have some Bulgarian gardener ancestry. A is putting the smack down (talk) 23:42, 20 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Hmmm, interesting read. I don't have any info on this particular matter, though I find it amusing. I'm not sure if those Bulgarians came from Bulgaria proper or from Southern Dobruja. What I know for sure is that the Bulgarian word for gardener is "градинар"/"gradinar" (surprisingly) and your name might as well come from it (mind I don't know the Romanian word for gardener) --Laveol T 00:11, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Note: I double checked (google-translated rather) - your word is the same "grădinar" (again surprisingly) so there's nothing more to add myself. You might wanna ask TodorBozhinov - he's a bit more familiar with such issues. Cheers. --Laveol T 00:16, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, the Romanian word for gardener is "grǎdinar" (masculine), the Romanian word for garden is "grǎdina" (a loanword from Slavic). That line was of Bulgarian "gardener" origin and adopted that surname at some point. I already knew this and then I googled "Bulgarian gardeners in Romania" to research and found that link above. I think many with that surname (it is not my surname, it was a maternal line of my family) in Romania have Bulgarian gardeners in their ancestry. I would like to know more about these Bulgarian gardeners in Romania. Why gardeners?A is putting the smack down (talk) 00:24, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
From my understanding, most Romanian farmers were plugari (ploughmen): they focused their agricultural production on cereals, especially wheat, rye and millet (which was replaced with maize a few centuries ago). Raising animals was also important, while gardening has just a marginal role. It's possible that the Bulgarians were seen by the Romanians as giving more importance to garderning, instead of focusing on cereals.
About the words: nearly all the Romanian words related to cereal agriculture are Latin, but many words related to gardening are Old Slavic or Bulgarian. (castravete, morcov, gulie, prăşi etc) In some cases, the Bulgarian words almost completely replaced the Latin words.
BTW, in Dâmboviţa County, the people in some villages are known as "Sârbi" and they're famous for their gardening products, too. bogdan (talk) 12:33, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

Word of caution: Eliade's statements there are a xenophobic rant, which commentators have traditionally discussed only as a sign that the man was abiding by the most unreasonable avatars of Romanian nationalism, and thus one of the first steps in a trip that led Eliade and all his cronies in the warm embrace of the Iron Guard. So, no, that text is not something to take into consideration when deciding who was "colonized" by whom and where (if what he says in that text doesn't convince you, then perhaps you would be interested in his claim that "the Hungarians are the second most imbecilic people on earth, surpassed only by the Bulgarians").

Now, I haven't looked this up recently, but I do recall that Bulgarians came voluntarily to southern Romania, sometimes brought over by Russian troops (when fearing Ottoman reprisals). The cliche north and south of the Danube is that Bulgarians are supreme gardeners - generalization aside, it is true that many were able to make a living by practicing a skill Romanians were not interested in, and that the gardens in Bucharest and other cities were almost exclusively owned by Bulgarians in the 1800s. This may answer why Bulgarians in Bulgaria are so amused by the fact that Romanians eat mămăligă (and, for God's sake, they're right: the food is okay, but imagine what happens to people who eat that and only that every single day of the year, which is what most rural Romanians were doing at the time; incidentally, the Romania where Bulgarians made fortune as gardeners, practicing something that nobody else thought of doing, is also the country where malnutrition and related diseases were sweeping villages with the regularity of clockwork). Dahn (talk) 00:33, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

That's useful historical/sociological information. If sourced it should be mentioned in this article. A is putting the smack down (talk) 00:39, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Hopefully not all of it ;). But, yes, I'll look it up myself - it goes beyond word of mouth, and has been discussed in a couple of books by now, so I'll see what I can come up with. I've covered something about the Bulgarian arrivals in Bucharest here, but that article too needs to be revamped. I'm sure there are other Ro editors who can also help tracking down more and more article-adequate info on this, if it should take me too long (I'm prioritizing other articles for now). Dahn (talk) 00:45, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
For readers unfamiliar with Romanian, surnames ending in -aru in Romanian usually indicate a family trade or profession (Cojocaru, Grădinaru, Păcuraru, etc.), deriving from or parellel to the Latin suffix -arius (petrarius In Latin means "stone-worker". etc.). A Bulgarian version of the surname would be "Gradinarski", which I found in a google search. However in most cases I think the Bulgarians had a completely different surname and adopted "Grădinaru" later as they became Romanianized. A is putting the smack down (talk) 03:05, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Quite possible. The two versions are "Gradinarov" and "Gradinarski" and they both suggest someone in the line of was a gardener. I have to say this issue seems more and more interesting. From the book I got the impression this happened in the interwar period when the whole Dobruja was within Romania. If this is the case it could mean they simply switched their location within the same country. The prior Bulgaria immigrants to Romania did come during Ottoman time especially after the Crimean war. --Laveol T 11:47, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
First and foremost, if we're talking about Bulgarian immigrant gardeners, one has to note that this is not a trend only to be seen among Bulgarian immigrants to Romania: Bulgarians were also known, pre-WWII, as very able gardeners in most of Austria-Hungary and practically dominated that business in Hungary, Slovakia, parts of Serbia, Slovenia, Croatia, Austria, southern Germany and the Czech Republic. Bulgarian gardeners went as far as Argentina. I've got Bulgarian gardeners on my to-do list exactly because of that: it's a very significant trend of immigration in the 19th and early 20th century. I've got a book source in Колев, Йордан (2005). Българите извън България (in Bulgarian). София: Тангра ТанНакРа. pp. pp. 305-316, 348–349, 429. ISBN 954-9942-73-2. {{cite book}}: |pages= has extra text (help): although the book has some nationalist attitude in some respects, it has a well-cited treatment of the gardener immigration process.
As for the surname Grǎdinaru, your ancestors may have had a different surname, but may have, in a sense, not. "Professional family names" are among most popular types of family names in Europe, so your ancestors may have been Gardinarski, Gradinarovi or something along those lines, which is one step away from Romanianization by substituting the Slavic one with a native Latinate suffix. Of course, grǎdina and grǎdinar are obviously Bulgarian loans: the Vlachs were I believe a people of the mountains, so many elements of agriculture were introduced by the Slavic tribes living in those lands (the same that went on to form the Bulgarian people when they moved south of the Danube). The same thing happened in Albania, as the locals were also mountaineer herds and not farmers like the Slavs, and adopted a lot of terminology related to agriculture and the like.
I'm not sure whether the Bulgarian colonists in Dobruja were famous farmers: I know the people from around Tarnovo were the main emigrant gardeners. Dobruja was mainly colonized in the 19th century (one might say re-colonized) by speakers of the Balkan dialects. For more, I'll need to check up.
But to summarize my suggestion, I'd make an educated guess that your Bulgarian ancestor (because gardeners didn't often bring their wives with them and married in their new country instead) was a 19th or early-20th-century immigrant instead of a member of a traditional Bulgarian minority and lived near one of Romania's big cities, where he worked for or owned a garden supplying the market with groceries :) If I'd have to make a guess about his geographic origin, I'd say the region of Tarnovo, but that's hard to know exactly. Todor→Bozhinov 11:52, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
Laveol, I's afraid I have to challenge your impression: Eliade seems to be talking about Dobruja in general (with Southern Dobruja at its core, presumably), and perhaps even Romania in general. Compare with what he says about the Jews in the same place: the only truthful details in his rant would indicate that he is conflating the 1800s and the 1900s, and talking about how Romanians were "invaded" by minorities, to the point where Romania was "mongrelized" etc. So it is entirely possible that he is also talking about Bulgarians in Wallachia during the 19th century (post- or even pre-Crimean War); if he is not entirely making up the "colonization" aspect, then he is possible talking about how the Russians helped bring over Bulgarian refugees (which they did, and there ain't nothing wrong with that). I find Eliade's entire argument relevant only as a good measure of native Romanian prejudice, to be compared with the other common perception among Romanians - that Bulgarians have really thick napes (the latter cliche started with a xenophobic poem by Eminescu, and even he may have actually referred to some Romanian politicians of [real or imagined] Bulgarian origin, and not wanted to name then so as not to have to meet them in court).
Oh, btw, guys: you may find more on the perception and the "gardener" stuff here - an article I had I created a while back (I had forgotten that it refers to the cliche specifically). Dahn (talk) 12:06, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
I don't mind detailing some information about my maternal great-grandmother (my mother's maternal grandmother) of Bulgarian origin, as an example of Romanians of Bulgarian origin in Romania in the late 19th, early 20th century. She was from the sat of Cetăţuia (satul Cetăţuia) in the commune of Puieşti, Vaslui. She passed away almost ten years before I was born, I never met a person from that line. My mother met her and she does not recall her speaking any Bulgarian, she may have spoke only Romanian. However it was known that her family (Grǎdinaru, meaning "gardener") was of Bulgarian origin, maybe her parents spoke Bulgarian. She was born about 1894 probably in satul Cetăţuia where she and her parents lived. My great-grandfather was from Puieşti (a nearby village) and met her at a hram, a celebration in honor of a local Patron Saint. She was well-off and was also considered one of the prettiest girls in her village when my great-grandfather met her: long blond hair, blue eyes, a lot of land, a fountain on her property, gypsy's who worked her land, etc. There were a lot of young men hoping to marry her in that village, my great-grandfather succeeded in marrying her. Young men in that village would sometimes literally fight (with fists, etc.) my great-grandfather when he came to her village to court her (they also didn't like him because he was from another village, from Puieşti, it was like gangs of young men in each village). Anyway he married her and they had six children, one of them being my maternal grandmother. I asked my mother why there were Bulgarians in that village (I don't know what other Bulgarian families there were in that area) and she has some theories off-hand, but we don't really know. It would be interesting to see how many Grǎdinaru's are in that area to this day, and other surnames and lines of Bulgarian origin, and in what part of Romania the surname is most common and how much Bulgarian heritage is attached/remembered in connection with the surname among people who have it. There are also the surnames Grǎdinarescu and Grǎdinescu. The Romanian word for garden ("grǎdinǎ") is from Bulgarian. With the word "grǎdinar" it is interesting that the suffix -ar is native to such nouns in Romanian (arǎmar, alviţar, from Latin -arius) and in Slavic (vrtlar, gospodar, gradinar, etc.). Anyway, I don't have any wider historical information about Bulgarians in Romania in the 19th century and it was very informative reading what you guys wrote. Bulgarian gardeners will be interesting. A is putting the smack down (talk) 20:14, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There's at least one family with the last name "Grădinaru" in Puieşti commune, according to the phone book, the landline being registered on the name "Florica Grădinaru". bogdan (talk) 20:27, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
The only person I found in Wikipedia with that surname is Nicoleta Grasu. A is putting the smack down (talk) 20:34, 21 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]
There was a lot of land (mostly farmland) left after my great-grandfather and great-grandmother passed away. I suppose all the children got a share. Some sold their plots. The plot that went to my grandmother is still in the family. I don't know if it is being cultivated, I may ask. My great-grandfather acquired more land in addition to what my great-grandmother had. He grew tobacco, grapes, had extensive walnut groves, all in all the plot must've been pretty big. I don't have contact with any of the Grǎdinaru's there. I know this is getting off-topic so no need to remind me. A is putting the smack down (talk) 00:59, 22 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

By the way. -- Biruitorul Talk 01:42, 22 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, if anyone comes across this talk page and has more info about the Grǎdinaru families let me know on my talk page maybe. A is putting the smack down (talk) 00:32, 23 October 2008 (UTC)[reply]


In what other period except the Middle Ages has Bulgarian culture influenced Romanian culture? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 86.34.230.127 (talk) 10:53, 18 May 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Estimate of Bulgarians by ancestry

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According to one estimate, Romanian citizens of Bulgarian origin number around 250,000.

Is this estimate for people who have at least one ancestor from Bulgaria or how? The Bulgarians integrated (and assimilated) very well in the Romanian society, so there are a lot of people who have just one Bulgarian great-grandparent or a great-great-grandparent and the rest are Romanians. If that would be the definition of a "Romanian citizens of Bulgarian origin", the number could be even higher. bogdan (talk) 19:48, 24 December 2012 (UTC)[reply]

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