December 1 cannot be compared with Easter or Soviet holiday of November 7, Marius Lazurca

“December 1 is the day when all Romanians, regardless of their whereabouts, celebrate their union, first of all spiritual and then cultural and political. The comparisons you make with Easter and November 7 seem inappropriate to me, for different reasons,” Romanian Ambassador to Moldova Marius Lazurca said, when asked by Info-Prim Neo to compare the most important holiday of his country with the two holidays that are deep-rooted in the conscience of a significant part of the people living in the host-country. The question put within the interview titled “No major political project is possible without clear ethnical conscience and powerful civic identity”, [{which was published on November 29, 2011,}] was “Is December 1 for the Romanians living in Romania an official holiday or a holiday for the heart? Do the people regard it in the same way as for example the feast of Easter or the day of November 7 in the former Soviet Union?” In this connection, the ambassador was asked to state his opinion why all the Romanians are sure about their identity, while for the population of Moldova the identity is a great problem - some people consider themselves Moldovans, while others Romanians, Russians, Gagauzians, Ukrainians, or Bulgarians, without having a common element that would unite them all. ”The identity clarity to which you refer is on the one hand, the effect of long historical sedimentation and on the other hand, the symptom of a more recent, but incontestable political maturity. The historical sedimentation gradually led to the birth, strengthening and confirmation of the national conscience of the Romanians on an area that imperfectly superposes on the territory of contemporary Romania. The word “Romanian” (or ”Rumanian” in the old language) derives from the Latin word ”romanus” and its phonetic transformation shows that this word never disappeared from the language spoken by the ancestors. Basing on this word, our ancestors – either the Ardelenians, Muntenians or Moldovans – named their language “Romanian”, realizing as Grigore Ureche that they all come from the Rome and that their common name is ‘Romanian’,” said Marius Lazurca. According to him, “without the conscience of linguistic and spiritual unity of the Romanians in Moldova, the Romanian Country and Ardeal, no events of our recent political history would have taken place – the year 1859, the Independence, the Great Union of 1918, the integration into NATO and the EU. I would say that no major political project is possible without clear ethnical conscience and powerful civic identity. The Romanian civic identity covers the Romanians of Romanian ethnicity and the Romanians of Hungarian, Roma, German, Jewish or other ethnic groups. Without denying the distinct features of every ethnic group – of the majority Romanian and of the minority ones – the Romanian political identity is based on everyone’s readiness to be loyal to the common Motherland.” Specialists say the identity problem in Moldova generates serious difficulties that are apparently not directly felt.