Bukovinian deputation in Iași

On 29 November 1918 (16 November in the Julian calendar, which Romania still used at the time) in Iași King Ferdinand I received a deputation from Bukovina, which brought him the resolution on the country’s union with Romania. The delegation had left Czernowitz immediately after the General Congress of Bukovina had voted for union the day before. This is how Romanian studies date the ceremony; some authors give 30 November. The British chronology of the war records the arrival in Iași of a deputation of the Bukovinian National Council only under 7 December.

The congress elected a fifteen-member delegation. It was headed by the president of the congress and of the National Council, Iancu Flondor, and the Orthodox Metropolitan of Bukovina, Vladimir de Repta. Its members included the historian Ion Nistor, Dionisie Bejan, Eudoxiu Hurmuzachi, Radu Sbiera and the lawyer Vasile Bodnărescu, who had earlier travelled to Iași to ask for troops to be sent to Bukovina, as well as a representative of the Bukovinian Poles, the physician Stanisław Kwiatkowski.

The ceremony took place in the Army Corps Command palace in Iași, where Queen Marie lived. It was the day on which the monarch was leaving for liberated Bucharest, where he was to make his ceremonial entry on 1 December. The Liberal politician Ion Gheorghe Duca later recalled “a moving ceremony on the very day of the sovereigns’ departure for Bucharest”. Flondor thanked the King for the “unconditional and everlasting union of Bukovina within its historical borders with the Kingdom of Romania” and asked him to take its land under his “protecting sceptre”, tying anew the thread that had been severed by force a century and a half earlier. This referred to 1775, when Bukovina, taken from Moldavia, passed under Habsburg rule.

The acceptance of the act in Iași was symbolic, but legally the union was sealed only by the royal decree of 31 December (18 December Old Style), countersigned by Prime Minister Ion I. C. Brătianu. On the same day Flondor and Nistor joined the government as ministers without portfolio for Bukovina. Most of the Bukovinian Ukrainians, who had boycotted the congress in Czernowitz, did not recognise its resolution.