Modernization Struggles in Interwar Romania: Old Calendarists, Church and Government in Bessarabia in the 1930s

Abstract

In this article, I address the challenges the Romanian state faced in Bessarabia, a former region of the Russian Empire, after 1918. Of all the measures to integrate the new province into state structures, the replacement of the church calendar in 1924 was the most controversial. What had been intended as a symbolical modernization reform was associated by Orthodox believers with the Catholic Church and the modern Western world. Protestors against the calendar reform became organized under the Old Calendarist movement, which by 1935 had increased to over one million adherents, most of whom were Romanian-speaking peasants in northern Bessarabia. By focusing on one of the many skirmishes between the Old Calendarists and the rural gendarmes, I ask why the movement entered into a violent phase in the 1930s, and what this phase says about the character of the Old Calendarist phenomenon.