Home › Political & Historical › Historical Regions
Bukovina
The beech-forested Carpathian land divided between Romania and Ukraine
Bukovina, the "beech land," is a small region on the eastern slopes of the Carpathians that holds two remarkable legacies. In its south stand the painted churches of Moldavia, their outer walls covered in 16th-century frescoes and listed by UNESCO. In its north stands Chernivtsi, once Czernowitz, a Habsburg provincial capital where Romanians, Ukrainians, Jews, Germans, and Poles lived side by side, and whose university occupies a former Orthodox metropolitans' residence that is also a World Heritage Site. Since 1940 a border has divided Bukovina between what are now Ukraine and Romania, and the region's mixed past survives mainly in its architecture, its cooking, and the memories of families scattered across the world.
Bukovina covers about 10,440 square kilometers between the upper Prut and Siret rivers, rising from farmland in the east to the forested ridges of the Eastern Carpathians in the west. Its southern half, around Suceava, Rădăuți, and Câmpulung Moldovenesc, lies in Romania and forms most of Suceava County. Its northern half, around Chernivtsi and Storozhynets, lies in Ukraine as the core of Chernivtsi Oblast, which also takes in a corner of northern Bessarabia and the small Hertsa district. The border between them, fixed in 1940, cuts across valleys that once belonged to a single crown land. The region lives from timber, dairy farming, and orchards, and tourism is growing around the painted churches and the mountain villages of the Romanian side.
Bukovina was part of the principality of Moldavia, whose early capital, Suceava, lay there, until Austria occupied it in 1774 and the Ottoman Empire ceded it in 1775. Vienna attached it to Galicia, then made it a separate duchy and crown land in 1849, and encouraged German-language schooling and settlement. As Austria-Hungary collapsed in 1918, a congress in Chernivtsi voted for union with Romania while Ukrainian leaders claimed the north, and the 1919 Treaty of Saint-Germain confirmed Romanian rule. In June 1940 the Soviet Union demanded and annexed the north together with Bessarabia. Romania held it again from 1941 to 1944, the 1947 peace treaty restored the 1940 line, and that line became the Romania–Ukraine border in 1991.