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Church of Romania

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The '''Church of Romania''' is one of the [[autocephaly|autocephalous]] Orthodox churches. The majority of Romanians in Romania by a very wide margin (about 20 million , or 86.7% of the population, according to the 2002 census data) belong to it. In terms of population, the Church of Romania is second in size only to the [[Church of Russia]].
[[Image:Romanian_hieromonk.jpg|350px|thumb|A Romanian [[hieromonk]]]]
===Middle Ages===
Following the complex relationship of the Byzantine Patriarchates and Bulgarian kingdoms, Romanians adopted [[Church Slavonic]] in the [[liturgy]] since from the early 9th century. However, most of the religious texts were learned by heart by [[priest]]s who either did not understand Slavic languages or always wanted to be understood by their own community, or both. Some priest priests used to mumble (''a boscorodi'') the sermon, using certain Slavic prefixes, so at least it would sound like SlavicSlavonic.
[[Image:Turnu_Severin_church.jpg|left|300px|thumb|Foundation walls of the oldest-known Romanian Orthodox church in Turnu Severin]]
However, important Romanian language translations certainly circulated, including the ''Codicele Voroneţean'' (the Codex of Voroneţ). The Bucharest Bible (''Biblia de la Bucureşti'') was the first complete Romanian translation of the [[Holy Scripture|Bible]] in the late 17th century. It was published in 1688 during the reign of Şerban Cantacuzino in Wallachia and is considered a mature and highly developed work.
Its cultural import is not unlike that of the [[Authorized Version|King James Version]] for the English language. This could not have been achieved without much previous (and perhaps as yet unknown) anonymous translation work. For this, a wealth of Byzantine manuscripts, brought north of the Danube in the "Byzance after Byzance" movement described by famous historian Nicolae Iorga is an outstanding proof.
After this time, the importance of Church Slavonic and Greek in the Church of Romania began to fade. 1736 was the year when the last Slavonic liturgy was published in Wallachia, but only in 1863 did Romanian become officially the only language of the Romanian church.
Although most of the time under foreign suzerainty (under the[Ottoman Turks in Moldavia and Wallachia and under the Hungarian rule in Transylvania), Romanians characteristically kept their Orthodox faith as part of their national identity.
===The Uniate Church===
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