Romania is an overwhelmingly Orthodox Christian country. At the 2021 census, 73.6% of respondents identified as Orthodox, almost all of them (73.42%) members of the Romanian Orthodox Church; Protestants made up 6.22%, Roman Catholics 3.89% and Greek Catholics 0.61%, while about 14% did not state a religion at all. The state itself is secular: the constitution guarantees freedom of religion, there is no state religion, and the government recognises 18 religions and denominations. The main minority faiths are Protestantism and Catholicism among the Hungarian and German communities of Transylvania, a Sunni Muslim community of Tatars and Turks on the Black Sea coast in Dobruja, and a small Jewish community that numbered 728,115 people in 1930 but only 2,708 in 2021. How that pattern formed is a story that runs from Roman Dacia through Ottoman rule, Habsburg Transylvania and four decades of communism.
Zalmoxis, Roman Dacia and the First Christians (Before 400 AD)
Before Christianity, the Getae of the Lower Danube held a religion centred on the immortality of the soul and on the god Zalmoxis, whom ancient writers described followers reaching through human sacrifice. Rome brought new gods. Dobruja, the land between the Danube and the Black Sea, was annexed to the province of Moesia in 46 AD, and in 106, after Trajan's wars, Banat, Oltenia and Transylvania became the province of Dacia Traiana. Around 73% of the inscribed monuments from this period are dedicated to Graeco-Roman gods.
Christian communities appear at least from the 3rd century. Archaeologists have found more than a hundred Christian sites from the 3rd and 4th centuries on Romanian territory, including vessels marked with crosses and fish from Ulpia Traiana, Porolissum and Apulum, a Good Shepherd gem from Potaissa, and a funerary altar at Napoca (modern Cluj-Napoca) whose pagan inscription later had a cross carved inside the letter O. In Dobruja, which became the province of Scythia Minor in 297, many Christians were martyred at the end of the 3rd century. The church's own tradition goes further back: Hippolytus of Rome recorded in the early 3rd century that Saint Andrew preached in "Scythia", and if that means Scythia Minor, Romanian Christianity would be of apostolic origin. Andrew is today honoured as the protector of Romania.
Language preserves this early layer. The core Romanian words of the faith come straight from Latin: a boteza (to baptise), cruce (cross), preot (priest) and Paște (Easter), while biserică (church) comes from basilica and Dumnezeu (God) from Domine Deus. Historians still debate where the Romanians' ancestors were Christianised, north of the Danube in former Dacia or south of it after Christianity was legalised in 313, but all agree the faith reached the region in Roman times.
Wallachia and Moldavia: Orthodox Principalities from the 1300s
In the following centuries Romanians took the Slavonic liturgy used in the First Bulgarian Empire, which is why words such as duh (spirit), rai (paradise) and slujbă (church service) are of South Slavic origin. The oldest proof of an Orthodox hierarchy among Romanians north of the Danube is a papal bull of 1234. When the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia formed in the 14th century, each received a metropolitan see under the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople; Moldavia's dispute with the patriarch over its first metropolitan was settled only in 1401.
Monasticism shaped both lands. Monks fleeing the Ottomans founded Moldavia's earliest monastery at Neamț in 1407, while houses such as Cozia in Wallachia and Bistrița in Moldavia became centres of Slavonic writing. Wallachian princes sponsored the monasteries of Mount Athos, and the consecration of the cathedral of Curtea de Argeș in 1517, attended by the Ecumenical Patriarch, showed how important Wallachia had become in the Orthodox world. In Moldavia, Stephen the Great (ruled 1457–1504) and his successors built the churches whose outer walls are covered in frescoes. Eight of these churches in Suceava County were listed by UNESCO in 1993, and Sucevița was added in 2010.
Romanian gradually replaced Slavonic in church. It entered the liturgy under Matei Basarab in Wallachia (1632–1654) and Vasile Lupu in Moldavia (1634–1652); a pan-Orthodox synod met at Iași in 1642, and a complete Romanian Bible appeared in 1688. Monasteries were also great landowners, and many owned Romani and Tatar slaves, who were freed only in 1844 in Moldavia and 1847 in Wallachia. Islam, meanwhile, has a tradition of some 700 years in Dobruja, which was part of the Ottoman Empire from around 1420 to 1878, and that long period left the Muslim community that still lives on the coast.
Transylvania's 1568 Diet of Turda and the 1698 Union with Rome
West of the Carpathians the story was different. Transylvania belonged to the Kingdom of Hungary, which established Roman Catholic dioceses there in the 11th century, at Alba Iulia, Oradea and Cenad, and Orthodoxy was for centuries only tolerated. The Reformation then arrived quickly. A royal letter of 1524 shows Lutheran ideas already followed in Sibiu; the Saxon towns adopted Lutheranism in 1544; Calvinist preachers were active in Oradea by the early 1550s; and in the 1560s Cluj became the centre of Unitarianism. In 1568 the Diet of Turda recognised four "received religions", Catholic, Calvinist, Lutheran and Unitarian, an early grant of religious toleration that still excluded the Orthodox Romanian majority.
After the Habsburgs took Transylvania in 1687, Metropolitan Atanasie Anghel and part of the Orthodox clergy entered communion with Rome under the Act of Union of 1698, formalised by a synod on 4 September 1700. The new Greek Catholic Church kept the Byzantine rite but recognised the Pope. Its seat moved from Alba Iulia to Făgăraș in 1721 and to Blaj in 1737, which became a centre of learning and Romanian national awakening; Bishop Inocențiu Micu-Klein petitioned for Romanians to be recognised as a political nation of the province. Orthodox resistance continued, and in 1761 the Habsburg government allowed an Orthodox diocese at Sibiu. Under Andrei Șaguna, bishop from 1848, it became an independent Orthodox Metropolis in 1864. These centuries explain today's map: the Reformed and Unitarian churches hold their services almost entirely in Hungarian, and Hungarians make up the largest share of Romania's Latin Catholics.
From Cuza's Reforms to the 1925 Patriarchate
Wallachia and Moldavia united under Alexandru Ioan Cuza (1859–1866), and the new state took the name Romania in 1862. Cuza nationalised monastic estates in 1863, backed Romanian in the liturgy, replaced the Cyrillic alphabet and in 1865 legislated the church's independence from Constantinople. The two metropolises merged into the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1872, and after Romania's independence was recognised in 1878, Patriarch Joachim IV acknowledged its autocephaly in 1885.
After 1918 the enlarged kingdom took in Transylvania, Bukovina and Bessarabia, and with them their churches. The 1923 constitution named the Orthodox Church the dominant denomination and gave the Greek Catholic Church priority over others, while the 1928 Law of Cults fully recognised seven more, including the Roman Catholic, Reformed, Lutheran and Unitarian churches. The head of the Orthodox Church became a patriarch in 1925, the same year it adopted the revised calendar, prompting traditionalists to form the Old Calendar Romanian Orthodox Church. The interwar years also had a darker side: antisemitism spread in politics and in some church writing, and the Wiesel Commission's 2004 report concluded that between 280,000 and 380,000 Jews were murdered or died as a result of the deliberate policies of Romanian civilian and military authorities during the Holocaust.
1948 to 1989: Abolition, Control and Survival
The 1948 Law on Religious Denominations formally upheld freedom of religion but bound clergy to the regime's idea of public order; priests who spoke against communism could lose their state salaries. It recognised fourteen denominations, including Baptists, Adventists and Pentecostals, and abolished one. On 21 October 1948, the 250th anniversary of the union with Rome, Decree 358/1948 transferred the Greek Catholic Church's members, more than 1.5 million people, to the Orthodox Church. All 12 of its bishops were deposed, and its four cathedrals were given to the Orthodox Church. Bishop Alexandru Todea, secretly consecrated in 1950, was sentenced to life in prison and released only in 1964. Jehovah's Witnesses were banned from 1948 to 1989.
The Greek Catholic Church was legalised again on 31 December 1989, days after the revolution. Restitution has been slow: the church estimated its membership at 488,000 in 2022, against 150,593 counted in the 2011 census, and many former churches are still claimed by the Orthodox Church.
The 2021 Census and Faith in Romania Today
Since 1989 about fourteen Orthodox theology faculties and seminaries have opened, monasteries have reopened, and the Holy Synod has canonised Stephen the Great. Patriarch Daniel has led the church since he was elected on 12 September 2007. Its new seat, the People's Salvation Cathedral beside the Palace of Parliament in Bucharest, was consecrated on 25 November 2018; at 127 metres it is the tallest Orthodox church building in the world, and it is dedicated to the Ascension and to Saint Andrew.
The 2021 census found 14,025,064 people in the Romanian Orthodox Church, down from 16,307,004 (81.04%) in 2011. Part of that fall reflects a shrinking population, and the census also had 2,658,165 people who did not state a religion: about 9% refused and about 5% were counted indirectly without the question. Protestants, at about 6%, are divided by language. Hungarians form most of the Reformed Church, the largest Protestant body with some 495,000 members and services only in Hungarian, as well as the Unitarians; Germans form most of the Augsburg Confession Lutherans; Romanians form most Pentecostals, Baptists and Adventists. Romania is the only country with two separate Jehovah's Witness organisations, after a group split away in 1992.
Islam has roughly 80 mosques. About 97% of Romanian Muslims live in Constanța and Tulcea counties, and most are Tatars and Turks. The Carol I Mosque in Constanța, built between 1910 and 1913 on the order of King Carol I, is one of the largest, and the community is represented by a mufti.
Belief is high but practice is lighter. In an INSCOP poll of July 2015, 37.8% of religious Romanians said they went to church only on major holidays, 25.4% once a week and just 0.9% daily. In the 2011 census only about 21,000 people declared themselves atheists, one of the lowest levels of irreligion in Europe. Many minority churches sit close to the capital's centre, as our guide to Bucharest, Romania's capital shows, and the constitutional framework behind the church-state relationship is set out in our explainer on the government of Romania.