Israel's anthem and the Greek revolution both began in one Romanian city
The words of HaTikvah, now Israel's national anthem, were written in Iași by Naftali Herz Imber. Decades earlier, in 1821, Alexander Ypsilantis stood at a monastery in the same city and proclaimed the Greek Revolution. Romania's self-styled cultural capital has a habit of turning up at the start of other nations' stories.
Iași sits in the historic region of Moldavia in northeastern Romania and is the country's third most populous city, with 271,692 people in the city proper at the 2021 census. It served as Moldavia's capital from 1564 to 1859, when Prince Alexandru Lăpușneanu moved the court from Suceava, shared capital status in the United Principalities until 1862, and became Romania's emergency capital again from 1916 to 1918 after the Central Powers captured Bucharest. When government moved away in 1861, the assembly voted the city compensation in ten yearly instalments that were never paid. In 2018 it was officially named the Historical Capital of Romania.
Its name may trace to the Jassi, an Iranian-speaking Alanic people, and the old Hungarian name Jászvásár means Jassic Market. The first written official mention dates to 1408, a trade privilege granted to Polish merchants, though an Armenian church believed to date from 1395 shows the town is older. It suffered repeatedly, burned or looted by Tatars, Ottomans, Cossacks and Poles, and ravaged by plague, famine and fires fed by wooden buildings.
It was also a hub of learning. In 1640 Vasile Lupu opened the first school teaching in Romanian rather than Greek, and the first book printed in Moldavia appeared here in 1643. A Greek academy flourished from the 18th century. Today Iași hosts Romania's oldest university, national theatre and botanical garden, and over 60,000 students.
Jewish life shaped the city deeply. By 1899 it was around half Jewish; it produced the first Yiddish newspaper in 1855 and, in 1876, arguably the first professional Yiddish theatre, founded by Avraham Goldfaden. That world was shattered in June 1941, when Romanian forces under Ion Antonescu carried out a pogrom that killed about a third of the Jewish population. The restored Great Synagogue of 1671, the oldest surviving in Romania, reopened in 2018.
Source: Iași
