Acta Universitatis Danubius. Relationes Internationales, Vol 8, No 2 (2015)

Abstract

The events of 1821 put an end to the Phanariot century in the Romanian Principalities. Immediately, the Romanians protested against the situation of the monasteries dedicated to the Holy Places of the Orient and especially because a quarter of the Wallachia and Moldavia, belonged to the Greek monks. Resentment of the Romanian against the Greek monks and the privileges of the Holy Places, were intensified. The Organic Regulations forced the Greek monks to pay some land taxes, especially in Wallachia, being concern to limit Greeks abuse. Then, the revolutionaries of 1848, just wanted to stop Greeks abuses. Sometimes, Turkey and Russia have sustained together the Greeks interests in Romanian Principalities and, at the Paris Conference in 1858, the Romanians did not give up of their desire to regain their rights and national dignity and, under the reign of the great ruler Alexandru Ioan Cuza, they enacted secularization of religious goods on 13th of December,1863. The Holy Places did not understood to accept any limitation on the use of the property like monastic wealth, nor their protectors in the Principalities, the Russians, could no longer support their demands. The provisions of the Organic Regulations, despite the dissatisfaction of the Holy Places, constitutes a legislative progress which determines Kiseleff to order the monasteries inventory and ordered these to state debt repayment, thereby inducing the idea of the supremacy of state authority, which Cuza Voda completes with a strong hand.