Nicolae Densușianu

Nicolae Densușianu (; 18 April 1846 – 24 March 1911) was a Romanian ethnologist and collector of Romanian folklore. He was a corresponding member of the Romanian Academy, with a specialty in history. In Dacia Preistorică Densușianu combined the studies of folklore and comparative religion with archaeology to construct a theory about the Prehistoric cultures of Dacia. The work has drawn criticism for unprofessionalism and evidence of nationalism, and for standing at the source of Dacianism. Mainstream scholars regarded his book as fanciful and unscientific.

His works hypothesize the existence of a Dacian-centered "Pelasgian Empire", created in the 6th millennium BC, and which, he claimed, was governed by Uranus and Saturn and comprised all of Europe. Densușianu, who believed that Latin was a dialect of Dacian, also argued that the Dacians migrated to the Italian Peninsula in the Antiquity, where they laid the foundations of Ancient Rome. Densușianu and Eminescu were acquainted in Sibiu, where the latter was living in extreme poverty.

In 1885 his Monuments for the history of the country of Fogaras compared the ancient history of the Romanians of Transylvania to their repressed situation under Austro-Hungarian rule.

Densușianu, who was planning to start researching his Dacia Preistorică, and, to this end, left for Italy in 1887. Along the route, he visited the Academy of Agram, where he studied manuscripts regarding the Vlach population settled in the valley of the Kupa (in present-day Croatia); in Istria, he collected material in local villages where the Istro-Romanian language was spoken. At Dubrovnik in Dalmatia, he studied the archives of the Ragusan Republic. After reaching Italy, he spent seven months in the Vatican Archives and traveled through the Mezzogiorno before returning home.

Between 1887 and 1897 six volumes appeared of his Documents regarding the History of Romanians, 1199-1345, and in 1893 he wrote the study The religious independence of the Romanian Metropolitan Church of Alba-Iulia. He also contributed a collection of folklore (Vechi cîntece și tradiții populare românești: texte poetice din răspunsurile la "Chestionarul istoric", published in 1893–1897). In 1894, he retired to finish his large-scale work.

In 1902, Nicolae Densușianu was named a corresponding member of the Romanian Geographical Society. Two years later, he published a study about the development of the Romanian language, which, he claimed, traced its origins back to prehistorical times. Articles on Romanian military history appeared sporadically during the long years he spent readying his major work for the printer. It was almost complete at the time of his death.

Assessments and legacy Densușianu was the target of much criticism for his approach to Romanian history and to the science of history in general. Among his earliest critics was Titu Maiorescu, leader of the conservative literary society known as Junimea, who strongly reacted against amateurism and Romantic nationalist discourse in the works of Romanian intellectuals of his day. In 1893, writing to geographer Simion Mehedinți, Maiorescu spoke against what he defined as "phantasmagoria" in the works of Densușianu, Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu, and Alexandru Dimitrie Xenopol.

Part of Densușianu's thesis was adopted by several official historians during the late years of Nicolae Ceaușescu's communist regime, serving as inspiration for a new discourse, one autarkic and nationalist in tone.

Vasile Pârvan stated: "Nicolae Densusianu wrote his fantastic novel Prehistoric Dacia, full of mythology and absurd philology, which at its appearance (posthumously: 1913) aroused an admiration and a boundless enthusiasm for archaeology among lay Romanians". In other words, Pârvan and Xenopol have rejected his book "as a dilettantish and chauvinist fantasy".

Nicolae Iorga chastised him "for his 'more than odd' hypotheses."

Eugen Ciurtin stated "a minimal contact with the bibliography of the subject leaves one hopeless: nobody reads him any longer" (meaning no serious scholar has written peer-reviewed articles about Densușianu's Dacia Preistorică for a long time). Others have stated "Densusianu's fancy was too bold which made the historians ignore him". Dan Alexe stated that the book is "mystical delirium", and called its author "an occultist notary without schooling in history and linguistics" and "a clinical case of self-delusion".