The «New Dacians» and Crypto-Orthodoxy at the Dawn of Rational Historicism (I)
The «New Dacians» and Crypto-Orthodoxy at the Dawn of Rational Historicism (I)

Summary/Abstract: The Dacian Village of Năeni made the headlines as being an attempt to bring back resurrect the long-lost lifestyle of the Dacians, commonly regarded as the ancestors of modern-day Romanians. The so-called village, which hosted no more than five people, intrigued the Romanian audience, which remained somewhat torned between two camps, one that seemed to applaud it and to regard it as a brave attempt to bring back to life «Romanianism» in its purest form, and another one that ridiculed it and pointed out the logical cracks that can be found in the narrative that stirred up everything. In the following lines we will give a short analysis on the numerous peculiarities that characterize the Dacian Village from the Carpathian foothills of Buzău County, attempting to map a wider social phenomenon that become rooted in the Romania during the era of Ceaușescu’s nationalist communism. Even so, it became even more radicalized from the ‘90s to the present-day, even though it is still to a certain extent it is becoming increasingly more marginalized within the mainstream academia which made in recent years some notable attempts to demystify writings on issues regarding national history. This paper mainly focuses on mapping certain evolutions, and subsequent anomalies, that marked post-1989 Romania, with a strong emphasis on the influence that Orthodox Christianity had on the crystallization of a few peculiar crypto-religious movements that were heavily fueled by pseudo-science and over-the-top claims made on behalf of the unity of the Romanian nation.

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