title: Billie Burke

text: Burke was signed for the movies and made her cinematic debut in the title role of "Peggy" (1915). Her success was phenomenal, and she was soon earning what was reputedly the highest salary of any film actress up to that time. She followed her first feature with the 15-part serial "Gloria's Romance" (1916), another popular and critically acclaimed vehicle. By 1917, she was a favorite with silent-movie fans, rivaling Mary Pickford, Lillian Gish, Clara Kimball Young and Irene Castle. She starred primarily in provocative society dramas and comedies, similar in theme to "The "Mind-the-Paint" Girl", her most successful American play. Her girlish charm rivaled her acting ability, and as she dressed to the hilt in fashionable gowns, furs and jewelry, her clothes sense also won her the devotion of female audiences. Among the films in which she appeared during this period were "Arms and the Girl" (1917), "The Mysterious Miss Terry", "Let's Get a Divorce" (1918), "Good Gracious, Annabelle" (1919), "Away Goes Prudence" (1920) and "The Frisky Mrs. Johnson" (1920). As a nod to himself for his wife appearing for Zukor and Lasky, Ziegfeld insisted on promotions for each of the films to carry the tag 'By Special Arrangement with Florenz Ziegfeld'.


title: Billie Burke

text: Burke's beauty and taste made her a major trendsetter throughout the 1910s and 20s. As early as 1909, following her Broadway performance in "My Wife" (1909), department stores began carrying the "Billie Burke Dress" with a signature flat collar and lace trim. During this time, much of Burke's on- and off-screen wardrobe was provided by the leading European couturier Lucile (in private life, Lady Duff Gordon), whose New York branch was the fashion Mecca of socialites and entertainment celebrities. Burke reflected on her reputation as "a new kind of actress, carefree, and red-headed, and I had beautiful clothes."


title: Billie Burke

text: Despite her success in film, Burke eventually returned to the stage, appearing in "Caesar's Wife" (1919), "The Intimate Strangers" (1921), "The Marquise" (1927) and "The Happy Husband" (1928).


title: Billie Burke

text: Burke made her Hollywood comeback in 1932, when she starred as Margaret Fairfield in "A Bill of Divorcement", which was directed by George Cukor. She played Katharine Hepburn's mother in the film, which was Hepburn's debut. Despite the death of her husband Florenz Ziegfeld during the film's production, she resumed acting shortly after his funeral.


title: Billie Burke

text: In 1933, Burke was cast as Millicent Jordan, a scatterbrained high-society woman hosting a dinner party in the comedy "Dinner at Eight", directed by George Cukor, co-starring with Lionel Barrymore, Marie Dressler, John Barrymore, Jean Harlow and Wallace Beery. The movie was a great success and revitalized her career. She subsequently starred in many comedies and musicals, typecast as a ditzy, feather-brained upper-class matron, with her high-pitched voice.


title: Billie Burke

text: In 1936, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer filmed a biopic of Florenz Ziegfeld ("The Great Ziegfeld"), a film that won Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Actress (Luise Rainer as Ziegfeld's common-law wife, Anna Held). William Powell played Ziegfeld and Myrna Loy played Burke; this infuriated Burke, who was under contract to the studio and believed she could have played herself, however, MGM considered her too old to cast in the part of her younger self.


title: Billie Burke

text: Burke appeared in "Topper" (1937) in which she played the twittering and puritanical Clara Topper, who is married to a man haunted by socialite ghosts played by Cary Grant and Constance Bennett. She returned to the role in the film's sequels. Her next performance as Emily Kilbourne in "Merrily We Live" (1938) resulted in her only Oscar nomination. In 1938, she was chosen to play Glinda the Good Witch of the North in the musical "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), directed by Victor Fleming, starring Judy Garland. She had previously worked with Garland in the film "Everybody Sing", in which she played Judy's histrionically hysterical actress-mother. Director George Cukor offered her the role of Aunt Pittypat in "Gone With the Wind" (1939), but she declined and it was played by Laura Hope Crews, a character that Cukor wanted to be played in a "Billie Burke-ish manner" with "the same zany feeling". Another successful film series followed with "Father of the Bride" (1950) and "Father's Little Dividend" (1951), both directed by Vincente Minnelli and starring Spencer Tracy, Joan Bennett, and Elizabeth Taylor. Burke also portrayed Mrs. Ernest (Daisy) Stanley in the 1942 film "The Man Who Came to Dinner".


title: Billie Burke

text: Burke wrote two autobiographies, both with Cameron Shipp, "With a Feather on My Nose" (Appleton 1949) and "With Powder on My Nose" (Coward McCann, 1959).


title: Billie Burke

text: On CBS Radio, "The Billie Burke Show" was heard on Saturday mornings from April 3, 1943, until September 21, 1946. Sponsored by Listerine, this situation comedy was initially titled "Fashions in Rations" during its first year. Portraying herself as a featherbrained Good Samaritan who lived "in the little white house on Sunnyview Lane," she always offered a helping hand to those in her neighborhood. She worked often in early television, appearing in the short-lived sitcom "Doc Corkle" (1952). She was a guest star on several TV and radio series, including "Duffy's Tavern".


title: Billie Burke

text: On television, Burke starred in her own talk show, "At Home With Billie Burke", which ran on the DuMont Television Network from June 1951 through the spring of 1952. She was one of the first female talk show hosts, after the hostesses of the earlier DuMont series "And Everything Nice" (1949–50) and "Fashions on Parade" (1948–49) which both included some talk show segments.


title: Billie Burke

text: Billie Burke starred in an adaptation of "Dr. Heidegger's Experiment" on the TV version of "Lights Out" on November 20, 1950.


title: Billie Burke

text: Burke tried to make a comeback on the New York stage. She starred in two short-lived productions: "This Rock" and "Mrs. January and Mr. X". Although she got good reviews, the plays did not. She also appeared in several plays in California, although her mind became clouded, and she had trouble remembering lines. In the late 1950s, her failing memory led to her retirement from show business, although her explanation at the time was, "Acting just wasn't any fun anymore."


title: Billie Burke

text: Burke made her final screen appearance in "Sergeant Rutledge" (1960), a western directed by John Ford.


title: Billie Burke

text: In 1910, Burke bought the Kirkham estate on Broadway in Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, and renamed the mansion, "Burkeley Crest".


title: Billie Burke

text: In 1921, Burke retired to raise her daughter Patricia, but resumed work after the Wall Street Crash of 1929.


title: Billie Burke

text: Burke died in Los Angeles of natural causes on May 14, 1970, at the age of 85, and she was interred beside


title: Billie Burke

text: For many years, Burke's framed photo was displayed above the exit staircase at New York City's Ziegfeld Theatre, but it disappeared after renovations. An opening-night program bearing a picture of her from her 1912 triumph "The Mind The Paint Girl" (Sir Arthur Wing Pinero) is displayed in the lobby of the Lyceum Theatre in Manhattan.


title: Billie Burke

text: For her contributions to the film industry, Burke was inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame in 1960 with a motion pictures star at 6617 Hollywood Boulevard.


title: Billie Burke

text: The Academy Film Archive houses the Florenz Ziegfeld-Billie Burke Collection, which consists primarily of home movies.


title: Billie Burke

text: On November 4, 2015, the crater Burke, near the north pole of the planet Mercury, was named after Billie Burke.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Sir Lindsay Harvey Hoyle (born 10 June 1957) is a British politician who has served as Speaker of the House of Commons since 2019 and as Member of Parliament (MP) for Chorley since 1997. Before his election as Speaker, he was a member of the Labour Party.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: As a Labour MP, Hoyle served as Chairman of Ways and Means and Deputy Speaker to John Bercow from 2010 to 2019, before being elected as Speaker on 4 November 2019. Hoyle was unanimously re-elected as Speaker five days after the 2019 general election on 17 December.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: The son of former Labour MP Doug Hoyle (now Baron Hoyle) (born 1930) and Pauline Spencer (died 1991), Hoyle was born and raised in Adlington, Lancashire. He went to Anderton County Primary School in Adlington and Lord's College in Bolton. Prior to being elected as an MP, he ran his own textile and screen printing business.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: In the 1980 United Kingdom local elections, Hoyle was elected as the Labour Chorley Borough Councillor for the Adlington ward, defeating the sitting Conservative. He was re-elected four times, and served as Deputy Leader from 1994 to 1997. After being elected as an MP in 1997, he ended his time on the council as the annual Mayor before stepping down at the local election in 1998.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: In February 1996, Hoyle was chosen to stand as the Labour candidate for the Chorley constituency at the 1997 general election. He won the election with a majority of 9,870, becoming the first Labour MP for Chorley in eighteen years.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: In the days after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, in August 1997, Hoyle asked for a new national children's hospital to be built as a memorial to her. A few days later, Hoyle wrote to airport operator BAA, operators of London Heathrow Airport, urging them to change the airport's name to Diana, Princess of Wales Airport. Neither proposal was carried out.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Hoyle served as a member of the Trade and Industry Committee (later the Business Committee) from 1998 to 2010 and as a member of the European Scrutiny Committee from 2005 to 2010. He is currently the President of the All-Party British Gibraltar Group in Parliament (of which his father is the Treasurer) and a Vice Chair of the All-Party British Virgin Islands Group.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Hoyle clashed with then Prime Minister Tony Blair over issues such as Gibraltar and tuition fees. Regarding those clashes, Hoyle would say "I'm not anti-Tony; he made us electable and won three times. But there are principles and promises you don't break".


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Hoyle voted against the Lisbon Treaty in 2008. Hoyle is one of the few MPs who have not revealed whether they voted Leave or Remain in the 2016 referendum.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Hoyle was elected Deputy Speaker of the House of Commons and Chairman of Ways and Means on 8 June 2010, the first time this appointment had been made by ballot of MPs, rather than by nomination of the Leader of the House. He was appointed to the Privy Council in January 2013.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: On 20 March 2013, Hoyle won wide public acclaim for his handling of the Budget proceedings, which were frequently interrupted by jeering MPs.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: In February 2017, Hoyle scolded SNP MPs for singing the European Anthem during the vote for the Brexit bill in the House of Commons, stating that he did not want parliament to turn into a sing-off. The same night, he had a clash with former Scottish First Minister, Alex Salmond, in a heated exchange over whether he had cut off an SNP MP while speaking.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: In March 2017, Hoyle called on social media companies to take swifter action to crack down on offensive posts, arguing it deters Jewish and Muslim women from becoming MPs.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Hoyle was in the Speaker's Chair during the terrorist attack in Westminster on 22 March 2017, and the subsequent suspension and lockdown of the Commons.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Hoyle was appointed a Knight Bachelor in the 2018 New Year Honours for parliamentary and political services.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: On 4 November 2019, Hoyle entered the election for Speaker to replace John Bercow. In the days leading up to the election, Hoyle was consistently seen by the media as the front runner. Hoyle maintained a substantial lead in the first, second, and third ballots of the election, but without reaching the 50% required to win.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Hoyle was elected Speaker on the fourth ballot, defeating Chris Bryant and winning 325 votes out of a total of 540 cast. Hoyle then duly received royal approbation in the House of Lords. In accordance with convention, following the election Hoyle rescinded his Labour Party membership.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: In his acceptance speech, Hoyle stated that "this House will change, but it will change for the better", and stated that he would be a "transparent" Speaker, also pledging to take the welfare of House of Commons staff seriously. He was unanimously confirmed as Speaker after the 2019 election.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Hoyle became the first Speaker since Sir Harry Hylton-Foster and only the third Speaker of the British House of Commons to possess a knighthood at the point of his election.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: On 16 October 2021, Hoyle accompanied Boris Johnson, Sir Keir Starmer and Priti Patel in laying wreaths at the church in Leigh-on-Sea, Essex where MP David Amess was murdered the day before.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: In September 2022, Hoyle described the state funeral of Queen Elizabeth II as "the most important event the world will ever see". Hoyle's comments received criticism. Graham Smith, CEO of the republican campaign group Republic, responded by saying that it was "one of the most stupid things the world has ever heard". Writing in "Indy100", Liam O'Dell highlighted Hoyle was ignoring current issues like the ongoing cost of living crisis and war in Ukraine.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Hoyle lives in Adlington, Lancashire. As Speaker of the House of Commons he has an official residence at Speaker's House, at the northeast corner of the Palace of Westminster, which is used for official functions and meetings and which has private accommodation in a four-bedroom apartment upstairs.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Hoyle has been married twice and has had two daughters. He was married from 1974 to Lynda Anne Fowler; they divorced in 1982. In June 1993, Hoyle married Catherine Swindley, who succeeded him as the Labour Councillor for Adlington in May 1998. He has also employed his wife as his part-time constituency secretary. Hoyle's elder daughter, Emma, used to work at his constituency office, in which capacity she represented him at Chorley Borough Council.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Hoyle and Conservative Maldon District Councillor Miriam Lewis also had a daughter, Natalie Lewis-Hoyle, who was found hanged in her bedroom, in December 2017, at the age of 28. Hoyle said he was "truly devastated" by her death. An inquest subsequently returned an open verdict as to the cause of death.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: Away from politics, he is a supporter of his local football league team, Bolton Wanderers, and Rugby league team Warrington Wolves.


title: Lindsay Hoyle

text: From his father's ennoblement in 1997 he was entitled to the style of The Honourable. He gained the style of The Right Honourable when sworn into the Privy Council on 12 February 2013. Hoyle was appointed as the Chancellor of the University of Gibraltar in 2020.


title: Helen Skelton

text: Helen Elizabeth Skelton (born 19 July 1983) is an English television presenter and actress. She co-presented the BBC children's programme "Blue Peter" from 2008 until 2013, and since 2014 has been a presenter on "Countryfile". She also co-presented two series of the BBC One programme "Holiday Hit Squad" alongside Angela Rippon and Joe Crowley. She also presented the daytime series "The Instant Gardener" that ran for two series.


title: Helen Skelton

text: Skelton was born on 19 July 1983, in Carlisle, Cumbria, England, and brought up on a dairy farm in the village of Kirkby Thore. She attended its local Primary School, and then Appleby Grammar School, ultimately graduating from Cumbria Institute of the Arts, where she gained a BA degree in journalism. During her time at college, she worked as an extra on "Coronation Street" and "Cutting It."


title: Helen Skelton

text: Skelton has said that if she was not a broadcaster, she would be a teacher. Her brother Gavin was a professional footballer and has also been a player-manager.


title: Helen Skelton

text: After briefly working in public relations, Skelton decided to concentrate on journalism. She worked in the newsroom at CFM Radio, and was involved with various programmes at Border Television, before becoming a breakfast presenter on BBC Radio Cumbria in 2005, one of the youngest breakfast slot presenters on the BBC network at that time. She was then a reporter and occasional presenter on children's news programme "Newsround" and its weekend sports-based version, "Sportsround".


title: Helen Skelton

text: Skelton was revealed as a presenter on "Blue Peter" on 28 August 2008, replacing Zöe Salmon and becoming the 33rd presenter for the programme. In a challenge for the series, Skelton took an uncredited role in the BBC production of "Merlin". In August 2013, she announced her departure from the show; she was replaced by Radzi Chinyanganya. Skelton worked on other projects during her time on "Blue Peter", mainly correspondent-based; these included reporting from the Championships, Wimbledon.


title: Helen Skelton

text: After her departure from "Blue Peter", Skelton became a presenter of live FA Women's Super League football matches for the BT Sport channel, as well as retaining her BBC reporter roles. She has occasionally presented segments of "Countryfile" since 2008, and also presented two series of "Holiday Hit Squad" in 2013/14 alongside Angela Rippon and Joe Crowley. In 2014/15, she presented the "London Marathon Highlights" show on the BBC. She was replaced by Ore Oduba in 2016.


title: Helen Skelton

text: In December 2012, Skelton took part in a Christmas Special edition of the BBC One programme "Strictly Come Dancing". Since 2015, Skelton has co-presented daytime BBC One series "The Instant Gardener" alongside Danny Clarke. In early 2016, she presented "Tonight: Kids V Career".


title: Helen Skelton

text: Skelton also hosted coverage of the 2016 European Swimming Championships with Mark Foster and Rebecca Adlington. She worked for the BBC at the 2016 Summer Olympics presenting swimming coverage alongside Rebecca Adlington, Adrian Moorhouse, Andy Jameson and Mark Foster. In October that year, Skelton guest presented five editions of "Lorraine" on ITV, plus further five in February 2017. She also co-presented two editions of "Walks with My Dog" on More4 in 2017; in the same year, Skelton returned to host the swimming coverage on the BBC during the 2017 World Aquatics Championships with Adlington and Foster.


title: Helen Skelton

text: Skelton appeared in Celebrity Antiques Road Trip (series 8 episode 14) with her friend and ex-co-presenter Rebecca Adlington.


title: Helen Skelton

text: From 24 September 2022, Skelton competed in the twentieth series of "Strictly Come Dancing", partnered with professional dancer Gorka Marquez.


title: Helen Skelton

text: On Saturday 22nd October Skelton danced the Charleston with professional partner Gorka Marquez on 'Strictly Come Dancing' to the Blue Peter theme tune as a part of the celebrations of BBC's 100th Anniversary. Skelton, jointly achieved top leader position on week 7 of 'Strictly Come Dancing' for her Jive, on Saturday 5 November. She easily made it through week 8, by dancing the Salsa, on the 12 November competition evening, to reach Blackpool's heralded Extravaganza scheduled for 19 November 2022.


title: Helen Skelton

text: Skelton hosts a weekly slot on BBC Radio 5 Live on Sundays from 3pm to 6pm and acts as temporary co-host on BBC Radio 5 Live Drive Time with Tony Livesey. From 14 August 2022, Skelton will replace Laura Whitmore in presenting BBC Radio 5 Live's new-look morning show, every Sunday between 10am-12pm.


title: Helen Skelton

text: In December 2008, Skelton entered and won the Malta Open Dance Competition with a 16-year-old wheelchair user as her partner, defeating 100 other dancers.


title: Helen Skelton

text: In April 2009, Skelton became only the second woman ever to finish the Namibian ultra marathon. She completed the run in 23 hours and 45 minutes – just 15 minutes under the time limit of one day. She told "Newsround": 'It was a gruelling experience, but one I'll never forget. There were tough times but also amazing times.' Skelton has also completed the London Marathon on three occasions; 2009, 2014 and 2019.


title: Helen Skelton

text: In early 2010, Skelton kayaked the entire length of the River Amazon for Sport Relief 2010. She kayaked on a solo journey from Nauta in Peru on 20 January, to Almeirim, Brazil on 28 February. She achieved two entries in the Guinness World Records: the longest solo journey by kayak, and the longest distance in a kayak in 24 hours by a woman.


title: Helen Skelton

text: Nigel Evans, the member of parliament for the Ribble Valley, tabled an Early Day Motion in the House of Commons after her Amazon challenge:


title: Helen Skelton

text: Skelton walked a 150-metre tightrope between chimneys at Battersea Power Station, 66 metres above ground, to raise money for Comic Relief on 28 February 2011. "Blue Peter" created two specials about her walk.


title: Helen Skelton

text: In 2012, Skelton raised more money for Sport Relief by becoming the first person to reach the South Pole using a bicycle. The bike was custom built for her trip, with wide tyres. She also used skis and a kite to help her pull a sled containing 82 kg of supplies.


title: Helen Skelton

text: Skelton covered by kite ski, 103 by bike and 68 by cross-country ski. She is also the first person to claim a world record for the fastest 100 km by kite ski, in seven hours 28 minutes, which was set during the trip. "Guinness World Records" commentated on the award, saying: 'We are aware of explorers who have achieved longer distances, but Helen Skelton’s application was the first that "Guinness World Records" had received specifically for the 100-kilometre distance.' "Blue Peter" also made five six-episode specials for this event.


title: Helen Skelton

text: In April 2013, wanting to inspire "Blue Peter" viewers to do something to support Comic Relief, Skelton took on seven challenges set by Comic Relief while breaking one world record. She called this series of challenges her "Magnificent 7", a reference to the 1960 Western "The Magnificent Seven":


title: Helen Skelton

text: In March 2018, Skelton took part in a celebrity boxing match defeating Camilla Thurlow via unanimous decision after three 2-minute rounds for the BBC's Sport Relief


title: Helen Skelton

text: In December 2013, Skelton married England national rugby league team player Richie Myler, and gave birth to their first child, a boy, on 19 June 2015. After Myler joined the Catalans Dragons club, they moved to France in September 2015. He currently plays for the Yorkshire club Leeds Rhinos. Their second son was born in April 2017 and their first daughter was born on 28 December 2021.


title: Helen Skelton

text: Skelton announced via her Instagram account 25 April 2022, that she and Myler were no longer a couple, as he had left the family home. It was later revealed on Instagram that his new girlfriend, heiress, Stephanie Thirkill, was pregnant with their first child.


title: Eponym

text: An eponym is a person, a place, or a thing after whom or which someone or something is, or is believed to be, named. The adjectives which are derived from the word eponym include "eponymous" and "eponymic".


title: Eponym

text: The term "eponym" functions in multiple related ways, all based on an explicit relationship between two named things. A person, place, or thing named after a particular person share an eponymous relationship. In this way, Elizabeth I of England is the eponym of the Elizabethan era. When Henry Ford is referred to as "the "eponymous" founder of the Ford Motor Company", his surname "Ford" serves as the eponym. The term also refers to the title character of a fictional work (such as Rocky Balboa of the "Rocky" film series), as well as to self-titled works named after their creators (such as the album "The Doors" by the band the Doors). Walt Disney created the eponymous Walt Disney Company, with his name similarly extended to theme parks such as Walt Disney World. Medical eponymous terms are often called medical eponyms although that usage is deprecable.


title: Romanians

text: The Romanians (, ; dated exonym "Vlachs") are a Romance-speaking ethnic group. Sharing a common Romanian culture and ancestry, and speaking the Romanian language, they live primarily in Romania and Moldova. The 2011 Romanian census found that just under 89% of Romania's citizens identified themselves as ethnic Romanians.


title: Romanians

text: In one interpretation of the 1989 census results in Moldova, the majority of Moldovans were counted as ethnic Romanians. Romanians also form an ethnic minority in several nearby countries of Central and Eastern Europe.


title: Romanians

text: Estimates of the number of Romanian people worldwide vary from 24 to 30 million, in part depending on whether the definition of the term "Romanian" includes natives of both Romania and Moldova, their respective diasporas, and native speakers of both Romanian and other Balkan Romance languages. Other speakers of the latter languages are the Aromanians, the Megleno-Romanians, and the Istro-Romanians, which may be considered Romanian subgroups or separated yet related ethnicities.


title: Romanians

text: Inhabited by the ancient Dacians, part of today's territory of Romania was conquered by the Roman Empire in 106, when Trajan's army defeated the army of Dacia's ruler Decebalus ("see Dacian Wars"). The Roman administration withdrew two centuries later, under the pressure of the Goths and Carpi.


title: Romanians

text: Two theories account for the origin of the Romanian people. One, known as the Daco-Roman continuity theory, posits that they are descendants of Romans and Romanized indigenous peoples living in the Roman Province of Dacia, while the other posits that the Romanians are descendants of Romans and Romanized indigenous populations of the former Roman provinces of Illyricum, Moesia, Thracia, and Macedonia, and the ancestors of Romanians later migrated from these Roman provinces south of the Danube into the area which they inhabit today.


title: Romanians

text: According to the first theory, the Romanians are descended from indigenous populations that inhabited what is now Romania and its immediate environs: Thracians (more specifically the Dacians and Getae) and Roman legionaries and colonists. In the course of the two wars with the Roman legions, in 101 through 102 AD and 105 through 106 AD respectively, the emperor Trajan succeeded in defeating the Dacians and the greatest part of Dacia became a Roman province.


title: Romanians

text: The colonisation with Roman or Romanized elements, the use of the Latin language and the assimilation of Roman civilisation as well as the intense development of urban centres led to the Romanization of part of the autochthonous population in Dacia. This process was probably concluded by the 10th century when the assimilation of the Slavs by the Daco-Romanians was completed.


title: Romanians

text: According to the south-of-the-Danube origin theory, the Romanians' ancestors, a combination of Romans and Romanized peoples of Illyria, Moesia and Thrace, moved northward across the Danube river into modern-day Romania. Small population groups speaking several versions of Romanian (Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian and Istro-Romanian) still exist south of the Danube in Greece, Albania, Macedonia, Bulgaria and Serbia, but it is not known whether they themselves migrated from more northern parts of the Balkans, including Dacia. The south-of-the Danube theory usually favours northern Albania and/or Moesia (modern day Serbia and Northern Bulgaria) as the more specific places of Romanian ethnogenesis.


title: Romanians

text: Small genetic differences were reportedly found among Southeast European (Greece, Albania) populations and especially those of the Dniester–Carpathian (Romania, Moldova, Ukraine) region. Despite this low level of differentiation between them, tree reconstruction and principal component analyses allowed a distinction between Balkan–Carpathian (Romanians, Moldovans, Ukrainians, Macedonians, and Gagauzes) and Balkan Mediterranean (Greeks, Albanians, Turks) population groups. The genetic affinities among Dniester–Carpathian and southeastern European populations do not reflect their linguistic relationships. According to the report, the results indicate that the ethnic and genetic differentiations occurred in these regions to a considerable extent independently of each other.


title: Romanians

text: During the Middle Ages Romanians were mostly known as Vlachs, a blanket term ultimately of Germanic origin, from the word Walha, used by ancient Germanic peoples to refer to Romance-speaking and Celtic neighbours. Besides the separation of some groups (Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, and Istro-Romanians) during the Age of Migration, many Vlachs could be found all over the Balkans, in Transylvania, across Carpathian Mountains as far north as Poland and as far west as the regions of Moravia (part of the modern Czech Republic), some went as far east as Volhynia of western Ukraine, and the present-day Croatia where the Morlachs gradually disappeared, while the Catholic and Orthodox Vlachs took Croat and Serb national identity.


title: Romanians

text: Because of the migrations that followed – such as those of Slavs, Bulgars, Hungarians, and Tatars – the Romanians were organised in agricultural communes (obști), developing large centralised states only in the 14th century, when the Danubian Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia emerged to fight the Ottoman Empire.


title: Romanians

text: During the Middle Ages the Bulgarian Empire controlled vast areas to the north of the river Danube (with interruptions) from its establishment in 681 to its fragmentation in 1371–1422. These lands were called by contemporary Byzantine historians Bulgaria across the Danube, or Transdanubian Bulgaria. Original information for the centuries-old Bulgarian rule there is scarce as the archives of the Bulgarian rulers were destroyed and little is mentioned for this area in Byzantine or Hungarian manuscripts. During the First Bulgarian Empire, the Dridu culture developed in the beginning of the 8th century and flourished until the 11th century. It represents an early medieval archaeological culture which emerged in the region of the Lower Danube. In Bulgaria it is usually referred to as Pliska-Preslav culture.


title: Romanians

text: During the late Middle Ages, prominent medieval Romanian monarchs such as Bogdan of Moldavia, Stephen the Great, Mircea the Elder, Michael the Brave, or Vlad the Impaler took part actively in the history of Central Europe by waging tumultuous wars and leading noteworthy crusades against the then continuously expanding Ottoman Empire, at times allied with either the Kingdom of Poland or the Kingdom of Hungary in these causes.


title: Romanians

text: Eventually the entire Balkan peninsula was annexed by the Ottoman Empire. However, Moldavia and Wallachia (extending to Dobruja and Bulgaria) were not entirely subdued by the Ottomans as both principalities became autonomous (which was not the case of other Ottoman territorial possessions in Europe). Transylvania, a third region inhabited by an important majority of Romanian speakers, was a vassal state of the Ottomans until 1687, when the principality became part of the Habsburg possessions. The three principalities were united for several months in 1600 under the authority of Wallachian Prince Michael the Brave.


title: Romanians

text: Additionally, in medieval times there were other lands known by the name 'Vlach' (such as Great Vlachia, situated between Thessaly and the western Pindus mountains, originally within the Byzantine Empire, but after the 13th century autonomous or semi-independent; White Wallachia, a Byzantine denomination for the region between the Danube River and the Balkans; Moravian Wallachia, a region in south-eastern Czech Republic).


title: Romanians

text: Up until 1541, Transylvania was part of the Kingdom of Hungary, later (due to the conquest of Hungary by the Ottoman Empire) was a self-governed Principality governed by the Hungarian nobility. In 1699 it became a part of the Habsburg lands. By the end of the 18th century, the Austrian Empire was awarded by the Ottomans with the region of Bukovina and, in 1812, the Russians occupied the eastern half of Moldavia, known as Bessarabia.


title: Romanians

text: In the context of the 1848 Romanticist and liberal revolutions across Europe, the events that took place in the Grand Principality of Transylvania were the first of their kind to unfold in the Romanian-speaking territories. On the one hand, the Transylvanian Saxons and the Transylvanian Romanians (with consistent support on behalf of the Austrian Empire) successfully managed to oppose the goals of the Hungarian Revolution of 1848, with the two noteworthy historical figures leading the common Romanian-Saxon side at the time being Avram Iancu and Stephan Ludwig Roth.


title: Romanians

text: On the other hand, the Wallachian revolutions of 1821 and 1848 as well as the Moldavian Revolution of 1848, which aimed for independence from Ottoman and Russian foreign rulership, represented important impacts in the process of spreading the liberal ideology in the eastern and southern Romanian lands, in spite of the fact that all three eventually failed. Nonetheless, in 1859, Moldavia and Wallachia elected the same ruler, namely Alexander John Cuza (who reigned as "Domnitor") and were thus unified "de facto", resulting in the United Romanian Principalities for the period between 1859 and 1881.


title: Romanians

text: During the 1870s, the United Romanian Principalities (then led by Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen Domnitor Carol I) fought a War of Independence against the Ottomans, with Romania's independence being formally recognised in 1878 at the Treaty of Berlin. Although the newly founded Kingdom of Romania initially allied with Austria-Hungary, Romania refused to enter World War I on the side of the Central Powers, because it was obliged to wage war only if Austria-Hungary was attacked. In 1916, Romania joined the war on the side of the Triple Entente.


title: Romanians

text: As a result, at the end of the war, Transylvania, Bessarabia, and Bukovina were awarded to Romania, through a series of international peace treaties, resulting in an enlarged and far more powerful kingdom under King Ferdinand I. As of 1920, the Romanian people was believed to number over 15 million solely in the region of the Romanian kingdom, a figure larger than the populations of Sweden, Denmark, and the Netherlands combined.


title: Romanians

text: During the interwar period, two additional monarchs came to the Romanian throne, namely Carol II and Michael I. This short-lived period was marked, at times, by political instabilities and efforts of maintaining a constitutional monarchy in favour of other, totalitarian regimes such as an absolute monarchy or a military dictatorship.


title: Romanians

text: During World War II, the Kingdom of Romania lost territory both to the east and west, as Northern Transylvania became part of Hungary through the Second Vienna Award, while Bessarabia and northern Bukovina were taken by the Soviets and included in the Moldavian SSR, respectively Ukrainian SSR. The eastern territory losses were facilitated by the Molotov-Ribbentrop Nazi-Soviet non-aggression pact.


title: Romanians

text: After the end of the war, the Romanian Kingdom managed to regain territories lost westward but was nonetheless not given Bessarabia and northern Bukovina, the aforementioned regions being forcefully incorporated into the Soviet Union. Subsequently, the Soviet Union imposed a Communist government and King Michael was forced to abdicate and leave for exile. Nicolae Ceaușescu became the head of the Romanian Communist Party in 1965 and his severe rule of the 1980s was ended by the Romanian Revolution of 1989.


title: Romanians

text: The 1989 revolution brought to power the dissident communist Ion Iliescu (backed by the FSN). He remained in power as head of state until 1996, when he was defeated by CDR-supported Emil Constantinescu at the 1996 general elections, the first in post-Communist Romania that saw a peaceful transition of power. Following Constantinescu's only term as president from 1996 to 2000, Iliescu was re-elected in late 2000 for another term of four years. In 2004, Traian Băsescu, the PNL-PD candidate, was elected president. Five years later, Băsescu was narrowly re-elected for a second term at the 2009 presidential elections.


title: Romanians

text: In 2014, the PNL-PDL candidate Klaus Iohannis won a surprise victory over former Prime Minister and PSD-supported contender Victor Ponta in the second round of the 2014 presidential elections. Thus, Iohannis became the first Romanian president stemming from an ethnic minority of the country (as he belongs to the Romanian-German community, being a Transylvanian Saxon). In 2019, the PNL-supported Iohannis was re-elected for a second term as president after a second round landslide victory at the 2019 Romanian presidential election.


title: Romanians

text: In the meantime, Romania's major foreign policy achievements were the alignment with Western Europe and the United States by joining the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) back in 2004 and the European Union three years later, in 2007.


title: Romanians

text: Modern Romanian historiography blends European historical traditions of imperialism with Christianity, mostly emphasizing the Europeaness of Romanians in the mythology of their ethnogenesis (and de-emphasizing the collective histories of the Ottoman past). This is similar to the role of Hellenism in Greek historiography, although it begins about one century earlier than Hellenism. Since the 17th century, the Latin origins of the Romanian people have been central in Romanian historiography, to an extent described as "a constant, and even obsessive, preoccupation". The roots of this Latin historical tradition lie with Trajan's Dacian Wars, which either annihilated or fully assilimiated the indigenous Dacians that lived in modern Romania.


title: Romanians

text: The origins of the Romanian language, a Romance language, can be traced back to the Roman colonisation of the region. The basic vocabulary is of Latin origin, although there are some substratum words that are sometimes assumed to be of Dacian origin.


title: Romanians

text: During the Middle Ages, Romanian was isolated from the other Romance languages, and borrowed words from the nearby Slavic languages (see Slavic influence on Romanian). Later on, it borrowed a number of words from German, Hungarian, and Turkish. During the modern era, most neologisms were borrowed from French and Italian, though the language has increasingly begun to adopt English borrowings.


title: Romanians

text: The Moldovan language, in its official form, is practically identical to Romanian, although there are some differences in colloquial speech. In the de facto independent (but internationally unrecognised) region of Transnistria, the official script used to write Moldovan is Cyrillic.


title: Romanians

text: Since 2013, the Romanian Language Day is celebrated on 31 August in Romania. A similar holiday also exists in Moldova on the same day since 1990. It is known as "Limba noastră".


title: Romanians

text: As of 2017, an Ethnologue estimation puts the (worldwide) number of Romanian speakers at approximately 24.15 million. The 24.15 million, however, represent only speakers of Romanian, not all of whom are necessarily ethnic Romanians. Also, this number does not include ethnic-Romanians who no longer speak the Romanian language.


title: Romanians

text: Many Romanian surnames have the suffix "-escu" or (less commonly) "-așcu" or "-ăscu" which corresponds to the Latin suffix "-iscus" and means "belonging to the people". For example, "Petrescu" used to be "Petre's kin". Similar suffixes such as "-asco", "-asgo", "-esque", "-ez", etc. are present in other Latin-derived languages. Many Romanians in France changed this ending of their surnames to "-esco", because the way it is pronounced in French better approximates the Romanian pronunciation of "-escu".


title: Romanians

text: Another widespread suffix of Romanian surnames is "-eanu" (or "-an", "-anu"), which indicates the geographical origin. Some examples are: Moldoveanu/Moldovan/Moldovanu, from the region of Moldavia or from river Moldova, Munteanu 'from mountains', Jianu 'from Jiu river region', Prut"eanu", meaning 'from the Prut river', Mureș"anu", meaning 'from the Mureș river', and Petr"eanu" (meaning 'the son of Petre').


title: Romanians

text: Other suffixes are "-aru" (or "-oru", "-ar", "-or"), which indicates an occupation (like "Feraru" (meaning 'smith' or "Morar" meaning 'miller'), and "-ei", usually preceded by "A-" in front of a female name, which is a Latin inherited female genitive, like in "Amariei" (meaning "of Maria"), "Aelenei" (meaning "of Elena"). These matrilineal-rooted surnames are common in the historical region of Moldavia.


title: Romanians

text: In English, Romanians are usually called Romanians and very rarely Rumanians or Roumanians, except in some historical texts, where they are called Roumans or Vlachs.


title: Romanians

text: The name "Romanian" is derived from Latin "romanus", meaning "Roman". Under regular phonetical changes that are typical to the Romanian language, the name over the centuries transformed into . An older form of was still in use in some regions. Socio-linguistic evolutions in the late 18th century led to a gradual preponderance of the spelling form, which was then generalised during the National awakening of Romania of early 19th century. Until the 19th century, the term Romanian denoted the speakers of the Daco-Romanian dialect of the Romanian language, thus being a much more distinct concept than that of Romania, the country of the Romanians. Prior to 1859, the Romanians were part of different state entities, with the Moldavians and the Wallachians being split off and having shaped separate political identities, possessing states of their own, while the rest of the Romanians were part of other states. However, eventually they retained their Romanian cultural and ethnic identity up to today. Some authors argue that the Romanians, with the exception of the Rhaeto-Romance-speaking peoples, are the only ones that have designated themselves as "Romans" since the fall of the Roman Empire.


title: Romanians

text: Several historical sources show the use of the term "Romanian" among the medieval or early modern Romanian population. One of the earliest examples comes from the "Nibelungenlied", a German epic poem from before 1200 in which a "Duke Ramunc from the land of Vlachs (Wallachia)" is mentioned. "Vlach" was an exonym used almost exclusively for the Romanians during the Middle Ages. It has been argued by some Romanian researchers that "Ramunc" was not the name of the duke, but a name that highlighted his ethnicity. Other old documents, especially Byzantine or Hungarian ones, make a correlation between the old Romanians as Romans or their descendants. Several other documents, notably from Italian travelers into Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania, speak of the self-identification, language and culture of the Romanians, showing that they designated themselves as "Romans" or related to them in up to 30 works. One example is Tranquillo Andronico's 1534 writing that states that the Vlachs "now call themselves Romans". Another one is Francesco della Valle's 1532 manuscripts that state that the Romanians from Wallachia, Moldavia and Transylvania preserved the name "Roman" and cites the sentence ""Sti Rominest?"" ("?", "do you speak Romanian?"). Authors that travelled to modern Romania who wrote about it in 1574, 1575 and 1666 also noted the use of the term "Romanian". From the Middle Ages, Romanians bore two names, the exonym (one given to them by foreigners) "Wallachians" or "Vlachs", under its various forms ("vlah", "valah", "valach", "voloh", "blac", "olăh", "vlas", "ilac", "ulah", etc.), and the endonym (the name they used for themselves) "Romanians" (/).


title: Romanians

text: Other researchers have expressed a different point of view and have doubted or denied the continuity of the ethonym "Romanian" from "Roman", at least on an ethnic sense. For example, Onoriu Colăcel considers that the terms "Romania" and "Romanian" would only have appeared during the 19th century. According to Vladimír Baar and Daniel Jakubek, typically pro-Russian authors in Moldova tend to argue that "Romanian" as an ethnonym is only a mere recent product from Romanian nationalist historical myths despite the attestation of this name in old documents. Examples of this would include Petr Shornikov, Mikhail Guboglo and Valentin Dergachev. According to Tomasz Kamusella, at the time of the rise of Romanian nationalism during the early 19th century, the political leaders of Wallachia and Moldavia were aware that the name "România" was identical to "Romania", a name that had been used for the former Byzantine Empire by its inhabitants. Kamusella continues by stating that they preferred this ethnonym in order to stress their presumed link with Ancient Rome and that it became more popular as a nationalistic form of referring to all Romanian-language speakers as a distinct and separate nation during the 1820s. Raymond Detrez asserts that , derived from the Latin , acquired at a certain point the same meaning of the Greek ; that of Orthodox Christian. Wolfgang Dahmen claims that the meaning of "romanus" (Roman) as "Christian", as opposed to "pagan", which used to mean "non-Roman", may have contributed to the preservation of this word as an ethonym of the Romanian people, under the meaning of "Christian".


title: Romanians

text: To distinguish Romanians from the other Romanic peoples of the Balkans (Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, and Istro-Romanians), the term Daco-Romanian is sometimes used to refer to those who speak the standard Romanian language and live in the former territory of ancient Dacia (today comprising mostly Romania and Moldova), although some Daco-Romanian speakers can be found in the eastern part of Central Serbia (which was part of ancient Moesia).


title: Romanians

text: The name of "Vlachs" is an exonym that was used by Slavs to refer to all Romanized natives of the Balkans. It holds its origin from ancient Germanic—being a cognate to "Welsh" and "Walloon"—and perhaps even further back in time, from the Roman name Volcae, which was originally a Celtic tribe. From the Slavs, it was passed on to other peoples, such as the Hungarians ("Oláh") and Greeks ("Vlachoi") (see the Etymology section of Vlachs). Wallachia, the Southern region of Romania, takes its name from the same source.


title: Romanians

text: Nowadays, the term Vlach is more often used to refer to the Romanized populations of the Balkans who speak Daco-Romanian, Aromanian, Istro-Romanian, and Megleno-Romanian.


title: Romanians

text: These are family names that have been derived from either "Vlach" or "Romanian". Most of these names have been given when a Romanian settled in a non-Romanian region. Examples: Oláh (37,147 Hungarians have this name), Vlach, Vlahuta, Vlasa, Vlasi, Vlašic, Vlasceanu, Vlachopoulos, Voloh, Volyh, Vlack, Flack, and Vlax.


title: Romanians

text: Most Romanians live in Romania, where they constitute a majority; Romanians also constitute a minority in the countries that neighbour Romania. Romanians can also be found in many countries, notably in the other EU countries, particularly in Italy, Spain, Germany, the United Kingdom and France; in North America in the United States and Canada; in Israel; as well as in Brazil, Australia, Argentina, and New Zealand among many other countries. Italy and Spain have been popular emigration destinations, due to a relatively low language barrier, and both are each now home to about a million Romanians. With respect to geopolitical identity, many individuals of Romanian ethnicity in Moldova prefer to identify themselves as Moldovans.


title: Romanians

text: The contemporary total population of ethnic Romanians cannot be stated with any degree of certainty. A disparity can be observed between official sources (such as census counts) where they exist, and estimates which come from non-official sources and interested groups. Several inhibiting factors (not unique to this particular case) contribute towards this uncertainty, which may include:


title: Romanians

text: For example, the decennial US Census of 2000 calculated (based on a statistical sampling of household data) that there were 367,310 respondents indicating Romanian ancestry (roughly 0.1% of the total population).


title: Romanians

text: The actual total recorded number of foreign-born Romanians was only 136,000. However, some non-specialist organisations have produced estimates which are considerably higher: a 2002 study by the Romanian-American Network Inc. mentions an estimated figure of 1,200,000 for the number of Romanian-Americans. Which makes the United States home to the largest Romanian community outside Romania.


title: Romanians

text: This estimate notes however that "...other immigrants of Romanian national minority groups have been included such as: Armenians, Germans, Gypsies, Hungarians, Jews, and Ukrainians". It also includes an unspecified allowance for second- and third-generation Romanians, and an indeterminate number living in Canada. An error range for the estimate is not provided. For the United States 2000 Census figures, almost 20% of the total population did not classify or report an ancestry, and the census is also subject to undercounting, an incomplete (67%) response rate, and sampling error in general.


title: Romanians

text: Romanians have played and contributed a major role in the advancement of the arts, culture, sciences, technology and engineering.


title: Romanians

text: In the history of aviation, Traian Vuia and Aurel Vlaicu built and tested some of the earliest aircraft designs, while Henri Coandă discovered the Coandă effect of fluidics. Victor Babeș discovered more than 50 germs and a cure for a disease named after him, babesiosis; biologist Nicolae Paulescu was among the first scientists to identify insulin. Another biologist, Emil Palade, received the Nobel Prize for his contributions to cell biology. George Constantinescu created the theory of sonics, while mathematician Ștefan Odobleja has been claimed as "the ideological father behind cybernetics" – his work "The Consonantist Psychology" (Paris, 1938) was supposedly the main source of inspiration for N. Wiener's "Cybernetics" (Paris, 1948). Lazăr Edeleanu was the first chemist to synthesize amphetamine and also invented the modern method of refining crude oil.


title: Romanians

text: In the arts and culture, prominent figures were George Enescu (music composer, violinist, professor of Sir Yehudi Menuhin), Constantin Brâncuși (sculptor), Eugène Ionesco (playwright), Mircea Eliade (historian of religion and novelist), Emil Cioran (essayist, Prix de l'Institut Français for stylism) and Angela Gheorghiu (soprano). More recently, filmmakers such as Cristi Puiu and Cristian Mungiu have attracted international acclaim, as has fashion designer Ioana Ciolacu.


title: Romanians

text: In sports, Romanians have excelled in a variety of fields, such as football (Gheorghe Hagi), gymnastics (Nadia Comăneci, Lavinia Miloșovici etc.), tennis (Ilie Năstase, Ion Țiriac, Simona Halep), rowing (Ivan Patzaichin) and handball (four times men's World Cup winners).


title: Romanians

text: Count Dracula is a worldwide icon of Romania. This character was created by the Irish fiction writer Bram Stoker, based on some stories spread in the late Middle Ages by the frustrated German tradesmen of Kronstadt (Brașov) and on some vampire folk tales about the historic Romanian figure of Prince Vlad Țepeș.


title: Romanians

text: Almost 90% of all Romanians consider themselves religious. The vast majority are Eastern Orthodox Christians, belonging to the Romanian Orthodox Church (a branch of Eastern Orthodoxy, or Eastern Orthodox Church, together with the Greek Orthodox, Orthodox Church of Georgia and Russian Orthodox Churches, among others). Romanians form the third largest ethno-linguistic group among Eastern Orthodox in the world.


title: Romanians

text: According to the 2011 census, 93.6% of ethnic Romanians in Romania identified themselves as Romanian Orthodox (in comparison to 81% of Romania's total population, including other ethnic groups). However, the actual rate of church attendance is significantly lower and many Romanians are only nominally believers. For example, according to a 2006 Eurobarometer poll, only 23% of Romanians attend church once a week or more. A 2006 poll conducted by the Open Society Foundations found that only 33% of Romanians attended church once a "month" or more.


title: Romanians

text: Romanian Catholics are present in Transylvania, Banat, Bukovina, Bucharest, and parts of Moldavia, belonging to both the Roman Catholic Church (297,246 members) and the Romanian Greek-Catholic Catholic Church (124,563 members). According to the 2011 census, 2.5% of ethnic Romanians in Romania identified themselves as Catholic (in comparison to 5% of Romania's total population, including other ethnic groups). Around 1.6% of ethnic Romanians in Romania identify themselves as Pentecostal, with the population numbering 276,678 members. Smaller percentages are Protestant, Jews, Muslims, agnostic, atheist, or practice a traditional religion.


title: Romanians

text: There are no official dates for the adoption of religions by the Romanians. Based on linguistic and archaeological findings, historians suggest that the Romanians' ancestors acquired polytheistic religions in the Roman era, later adopting Christianity, certainly by the 4th century CE when decreed by Emperor Constantine as the official religion of the Roman Empire. Like in all other Romance languages, the basic Romanian words related to Christianity are inherited from Latin, such as "God" ("Dumnezeu" < ), "church" ( < ), "cross" ( < , -), "angel" ( < ), "saint" (regional: < ), "Christmas" ( < , -), "Christian" ( < ), "Easter" ( < ), "sin" ( < ), "to baptise" ( < ), "priest" ( < ), "to pray" ( < ), "faith" ( < ), and so on.


title: Romanians

text: After the Great Schism, there existed a Catholic Bishopric of Cumania (later, separate bishoprics in both Wallachia and Moldavia). However, this seems to be the exception, rather than the rule, as in both Wallachia and Moldavia the state religion was Eastern Orthodox. Until the 17th century, the official language of the liturgy was Old Church Slavonic. Then, it gradually changed to Romanian.


title: Romanians

text: According to a survey that took place in 2011, despite 94% of respondents answered positively for believing in God, 42% support the vision of Christian dogma that there is a God incarnated into a human being. While 34% of respondents said that there is only one true religion, 38% believe that there is one true religion and that other religions contain some basic truths, according to 18% there is one true religion and all major world religions contain some fundamental truths. 88% of Romanians believe in the existence of a soul, 87% believe in sin and the existence of heaven, 60% believe in an "evil eye", 25% believe in horoscopes and 23% in aliens. According to a 2004 survey, 80% consider themselves not superstitious and the same amount believe in angels, about 40% believe they have had dreams that became deja vu and 19% believe in ghosts.


title: Romanians

text: In addition to the colours of the Romanian flag, each historical province of Romania has its own characteristic symbol:


title: Romanians

text: The closest ethnic groups to the Romanians are the other Romanic peoples of Southeastern Europe: the Aromanians (Macedo-Romanians), the Megleno-Romanians, and the Istro-Romanians. The Istro-Romanians are the closest ethnic group to the Romanians, and it is believed they left Maramureș, Transylvania about a thousand years ago and settled in Istria, Croatia. Numbering about 500 people still living in the original villages of Istria while the majority left for other countries after World War II (mainly to Italy, United States, Canada, Spain, Germany, France, Sweden, Switzerland, Romania, and Australia), they speak the Istro-Romanian language, the closest living relative of Romanian. On the other hand, the Aromanians and the Megleno-Romanians are Romance peoples who live south of the Danube, mainly in Greece, Albania, North Macedonia and Bulgaria although some of them migrated to Romania in the 20th century. It is believed that they diverged from the Romanians in the 7th to 9th century, and currently speak the Aromanian language and Megleno-Romanian language, both of which are Balkan Romance languages, like Romanian, and are sometimes considered by traditional Romanian linguists to be dialects of Romanian.


title: Romanians

text: According to a triple analysis – autosomal, mitochondrial and paternal — of available data from large-scale studies, the whole genome SNP data situates Romanians are most closely related to Bulgarians, Macedonians and, to some extent, Greeks, followed by other European populations, which form a coherent cluster among worldwide populations.


title: Romanians

text: The prevailing Y-chromosome in Wallachia (Ploiești, Dolj), Moldavia (Piatra Neamț, Buhuși), Dobruja (Constanța), and northern Republic of Moldova is recorded to be Haplogroup I. On the basis of 361 samples, Haplogroup I occurs at 32% in Romanians. The frequency of I2a1 (I-P37) in the Balkans today is owed to indigenous European hunter-gatherers tribes, and was present before the Slavic expansion.


title: Romanians

text: According to an Y-chromosome analysis of 335 sampled Romanians, 15% of them belong to R1a. Haplogroup R1a among Romanians is entirely from the Eastern European variety Z282 and may be a result of Baltic, Thracian or Slavic descent. R1a-Z280 outnumbers R1a-M458 among Romanians, the opposite phenomena is typical for Poles, Czechs and Bulgarians. 12% of the Romanians belong to R1b, the Alpino-Italic branch R1b-U152 is at 2% per 330 samples, a lower frequency recorded than other Balkan peoples. The branches R1b-U106, R1b-DF27 and R1b-L21 make up 1% respectively. The eastern branches R1b-M269* and L23* (Z2103) make up 7% and outnumber the Atlantic branches, they prevail in parts of east, central Europe and as a result of Greek colonisation – in parts of Sicily as well. 8% of the Romanians belong to E1b1b1a1 (E-M78) per 265 samples. Other studies analyzing the haplogroup frequency among Romanians came to similar results.


title: Romanians

text: Showing the importance of geography, a 2017 paper concentrated on the mtDNA, and showed how Romania has been "a major crossroads between Asia and Europe" and thus "experienced continuous migration and invasion episodes"; while stating that "previous studies" show Romanians "exhibit genetic similarity with other Europeans" and "another study pointed to possible segregation within the Middle East populations". The paper also mentions how "signals of Asian maternal lineages were observed in all Romanian historical provinces, indicating gene flow along the migration routes through East Asia and Europe, during different time periods, namely, the Upper Paleolithic period and/or, with a likely greater preponderance, the Middle Ages", at low frequency (2.24%). It concludes that "our current findings based on the mtDNA analysis of populations in historical provinces of Romania suggest similarity between populations in Transylvania and Central Europe," on one hand, and between Wallachia, Moldavia, and Dobruja and the Balkans on the other, "supported both by the observed clines in haplogroup frequencies for several European and Asian maternal lineages and MDS analyses."


title: Romanians

text: According to an autosomal DNA analysis of various eastern Europeans and adjacent populations, the Romanians are most closely related to Bulgarians and Macedonians. Most West Slavs, Hungarians, and Austrians were found to share as many identical by-descent segments with South Slavs as with Romanians, Torbeshi and Gagauzes. While Romanians display close relationship to surrounding European populations, they display some substructure in respect to geographic patterns. Romanians display a slightly higher affinity for Anatolian and Middle Eastern populations, compared to other Eastern Europeans.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough ( ) is a town on the southern bank of the River Tees in North Yorkshire, England. It is near the North York Moors national park and the main town of its local council and borough. The town is located between Redcar, Stockton on Tees and Thornaby on Tees. It is also located between the cities of York, Sunderland, Durham, Newcastle upon Tyne and Hull.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Until the early 1800s, the area was rural farming land. By 1830, a new industrial town and port started to be developed, driven by the coal and later ironworks. Steel production and ship building began in the late 1800s, remaining associated with the town until post-industrial decline occurred in the late twentieth century. Trade (notably through ports) and digital enterprise sectors contemporarily contribute to the local economy, Teesside University and Middlesbrough College to local education.


title: Middlesbrough

text: In 1853, it became a town. The motto ("We shall be" in Latin) was adopted, it reflects ("We have been") of the Bruce clan which were Cleveland's mediaeval lords. The town's coat of arms is three ships representing shipbuilding and maritime trade and an azure (blue) lion, the latter also from the Bruce clan. In 1889, the North Riding of Yorkshire became an administrative county, the town's municipal borough also became a county borough. From 1968 until 1974, some boroughs and parishes both from the rest of the county and County Durham formed the County Borough of Teesside. A star replaced the middle ship (from Captain James Cook's arms) in the recreated namesake borough's arms, with Cleveland becoming non-metropolitan county in 1974 which was abolished in 1996 with the borough council becoming a unitary authority in North Yorkshire.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The borough had an estimated population of in 2019, the most populous district of England. At the 2011 census, the Middlesbrough subdivision of the Teesside built-up area had a population of 174,700, the population is larger due to an area outside the council area known as Greater Eston. The built-up area, of which Middlesbrough forms the largest part, had a population of 376,633.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough started as a Benedictine priory on the south bank of the River Tees, its name possibly derived from it being midway between the holy sites of Durham and Whitby. The earliest recorded form of Middlesbrough's name is "Mydilsburgh". The name literally means "middle fortress".


title: Middlesbrough

text: In 686, a monastic cell was consecrated by St. Cuthbert at the request of St. Hilda, Abbess of Whitby. The manor of Middlesburgh belonged to Whitby Abbey and Guisborough Priory. Robert Bruce, Lord of Cleveland and Annandale, granted and confirmed, in 1119, the church of St. Hilda of Middleburg to Whitby. Up until its closure on the Dissolution of the Monasteries by Henry VIII in 1537, the church was maintained by 12 Benedictine monks, many of whom became vicars, or rectors, of various places in Cleveland.


title: Middlesbrough

text: After the Angles, the area became home to Viking settlers. Names of Viking origin (with the suffix meaning "village") are abundant in the area; for example, Ormesby, Stainsby and Tollesby were once separate villages that belonged to Vikings called Orm, Steinn and Toll that are now areas of Middlesbrough were recorded in the Domesday Book of 1086.


title: Middlesbrough

text: In 1801, Middlesbrough was a small farm with a population of just 25; however, during the latter half of the 19th century, it experienced rapid growth. In 1828 the influential Quaker banker, coal mine owner and Stockton and Darlington Railway (S&DR) shareholder Joseph Pease sailed up the River Tees to find a suitable new site downriver of Stockton on which to place new coal staithes. As a result, in 1829 he and a group of Quaker businessmen bought the Middlesbrough farmstead and associated estate, some of land, and established the Middlesbrough Estate Company.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Through the company, the investors set about a new coal port development (designed by John Harris) on the southern banks of the Tees. The first coal shipping staithes at the port (known as "Port Darlington") were constructed with a settlement to the east established on the site of Middlesbrough farm as labour for the port, taking on the farm's name as it developed into a village.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The port was linked to the S&DR on 27 December 1830 via a branch that extended to an area just north of the current railway station.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The success of the port meant it soon became overwhelmed by the volume of imports and exports, and in 1839 work started on a dock to the east of Middlesbrough. The first water for the dock was let in on 19 March 1842, the formal opening took place on 12 May 1842.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Iron dominated the Tees area since 1841 when Henry Bolckow in partnership with John Vaughan, founded the Vulcan iron foundry and rolling mill. Vaughan introduced the new "Bell Hopper" system of closed blast furnaces developed at the Ebbw Vale works. The new system and nearby abundant supply of Ironstone in the Eston Hills in 1850, made the works a success with the area becoming known as the "Iron-smelting centre of the world" and Bolckow, Vaughan & Co., Ltd the largest company in existence at the time.


title: Middlesbrough

text: By 1851 Middlesbrough's population had grown from 40 people in 1829 to 7,600. Pig iron production rose tenfold between 1851 and 1856 and by the mid-1870s Middlesbrough was producing one third of the entire nations Pig Iron output. It was during this time Middlesbrough earned the nickname "Ironopolis".


title: Middlesbrough

text: On 21 January 1853, Middlesbrough received its Royal Charter of Incorporation, giving the town the right to have a mayor, aldermen and councillors. Henry Bolckow became mayor, in 1853.


title: Middlesbrough

text: In the latter half of the 19th century, Old Middlesbrough was starting to decline and was overshadowed by developments built around the new town hall, south of the original town hall.


title: Middlesbrough

text: On 15 August 1867, a Reform Bill was passed, making Middlesbrough a new parliamentary borough, Bolckow was elected member for Middlesbrough the following year. In 1900, Bolckow, Vaughan & Co had become the largest producer of steel in Great Britain.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The town's rapid expansion continued throughout the second half of the 19th century (fuelled by the iron and steel industry), the population reaching 90,000 by the dawn of the 20th century.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough was the first major British town and industrial target to be bombed during the Second World War. The steel making capacity and railways for carrying steel products were obvious targets. The Luftwaffe first bombed the town on 25 May 1940, when a lone bomber dropped 13 bombs between South Bank Road and the South Steel plant. More bombing occurred throughout the course of the war, with the railway station put out of action for two weeks in 1942.


title: Middlesbrough

text: By the end of the war over 200 buildings had been damaged or destroyed within the Middlesbrough area. Areas of early and mid-Victorian housing were demolished and much of central Middlesbrough was redeveloped. Heavy industry was relocated to areas of land better suited to the needs of modern technology. Middlesbrough itself began to take on a completely different look.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Post war industrial to contemporary un-industrial Middlesbrough has changed the town, multiple buildings replaced and roads built. The A66 road was built through the town in the 1980s; Middlesbrough's Royal Exchange building was demolished to make way for the road.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough F.C.'s modern Riverside Stadium opened on 26 August 1995 next to Middlesbrough Dock. The club moved from their previous home in the town for 92 years, Ayresome Park.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The original St.Hilda's area of Middlesbrough, after decades of decline and clearance, was given a new name of "Middlehaven" in 1986 on investment proposals to build on the land. Middlehaven has since had new buildings built there including Middlesbrough College and Middlesbrough FC's Riverside Stadium amongst others. Also situated at Middlehaven is the "Boho" zone, offering office space to the area's business and to attract new companies, and also "Bohouse", housing. Some of the street names from the original grid-iron street plan of the town still exist in the area today.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The expansion of Middlesbrough southwards, eastwards and westwards continued throughout the 20th century absorbing villages such as Linthorpe, Acklam, Ormesby, Marton and Nunthorpe and continues to the present day.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The area of Yorkshire, where the town is now, was once part of the North Riding and the Langbaurgh Wapentake, the latter also known as Cleveland.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough was incorporated as a town and municipal borough in 1853. It extended its boundaries in 1866 and 1887, becoming a county borough under the Local Government Act 1888. A Middlesbrough Rural District was formed in 1894, covering a rural area to the south of the town. It was abolished in 1932, partly going to the county borough and mostly going to the Stokesley Rural District.


title: Middlesbrough

text: In the latter half of the 20th century Middlesbrough was affected by three reforms: in 1968, Middlesbrough became part of the Teesside County Borough; in 1974, it became the county town of the Cleveland non-metropolitan county until its abolition and in 1996, the Borough of Middlesbrough became a unitary authority of North Yorkshire. In 2011 a local enterprise partnership was formed from the former Cleveland boroughs and the borough of Darlington called Tees Valley, in 2016 the area appointed a combined authority mayor.


title: Middlesbrough

text: They are two constituencies with the town's name in. The Middlesbrough constituency is represented by Andy McDonald for Labour in the House of Commons. He was elected in a by-election held on 29 November 2012 following the death of previous Member of Parliament Sir Stuart Bell, who was the MP since 1983. Middlesbrough has been a traditionally safe Labour seat. The first Conservative MP for Middlesbrough was Sir Samuel Alexander Sadler, elected in 1900.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Middlesbrough South and East Cleveland constituency is represented by Simon Clarke of the Conservative Party, who won the seat off Labour in the 2017 general election. Prior to Clarke's election, the seat had always been Labour since it was created in 1997.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough is south of the River Tees with heavy industry and nature reserves on the opposite bank. Some open spaces in the town are off the B1380 road (Ladgate Lane): Sandy Flatts, Middlesbrough Municipal Golf Course, Stewart Park and Ormesby Hall's grounds.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The town centre is approximately from the coast, from Roseberry Topping in the North York Moors National Park and from the Yorkshire Dales National Park. It is one of the Tree Cities of the World; Bradford, Hull, Leeds and Sheffield also have the title.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough is within the Teesside built-up area, which is centred around the River Tees; it includes nearby towns such as Stockton and Redcar.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The following list shows the wards that correspond to the Middlesbrough built-up area subdivision; those in bold have correspondingly-named parishes.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Being sheltered from prevailing south-westerly winds by the Lake District and Pennines to the west, and the Cleveland Hills to the south, Middlesbrough is in one of the relatively dry parts of the country, receiving on average of rain a year. Temperatures range from mild summer highs in July and August typically around , to winter lows in December and January falling to around .


title: Middlesbrough

text: Seasonal variations are small and both the mild summers and cool winters are far removed from the average climates of the latitude (54.5°N). This is mainly due to the British Isles being a relatively small land mass surrounded by water, the mild south-westerly Gulf Stream air that dominates the British Isles, and the propensity for cloud cover to limit temperature extremes. In nearby Scandinavia, more than ten latitudes farther north, there are coastal Bothnian climates with warmer summers than Middlesbrough; and winters in Middlesbrough can be less cold than those at lower latitudes in mainland Europe.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough has four shopping centres accessible from Linthorpe road: Cleveland Centre, Hill Street, Captain Cook Square and Dundas. Gateway Retail Park is near the Riverside Stadium and the Parkway Centre is in Coulby Newham. Cleveland retail park (South Bank) and the retail part of Teesside Park (between Thornaby and Middlesbrough) are on the council's outskirts.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The leisure part of Teesside Park is in the council area, including a cinema and bowling alley. Middlesbrough Leisure Park is located at the eastern edge of the town centre: it has restaurants, a cinema, a golf shop and a gym. Captain Cook Square, with the Future High Streets Fund, transitioned from majority retail sector to having a hospitlaity sector; mini-golf, indoor go-kart track, e-sport venue and bowling alley.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Industry in the town was once dominated by steelmaking, shipbuilding and chemical industries. Since the late 20th century and into the 21st century, demise of much of the heavy industry in the area, newer technologies (such as the digital sector) have emerged.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough also remains a stronghold for engineering based manufacturing and engineering contract service businesses. To help support this, the new TeesAMP advanced manufacturing park is designed to accommodate businesses associated with advanced manufacturing and emerging technologies. Announced in September 2020, TeesAMP will be the location of the UK's first hydrogen transport centre.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Teesport, owned by PD Ports, is a major contributor to the economy of Middlesbrough and the port owners have their offices in the town. The port is from the North Sea and east of Middlesbrough, on the River Tees. In 2019 it handled over 4,350 vessels each year and around 27 million tonnes of cargo with the estate covering approximately 779 acres. Steel, petrochemical, agribulks, manufacturing, engineering and high street commerce operations are all supported through Teesport, in addition to the renewable energy sector, in both production and assembly facilities.


title: Middlesbrough

text: In 1875, Bolckow, Vaughan & Co opened the Cleveland Steelworks in Middlesbrough, beginning the transition from iron production to steel and, by the turn of the century, the area had become one of the major steel centres in the country and possibly the world. In 1900, Bolckow, Vaughan & Co had become the largest producer of steel in Great Britain. In 1914, Dorman Long, another major steel producer from Middlesbrough, became the largest company in Britain, employing a workforce of over 20,000, and by 1929 it was the dominant steel producer on Teesside after taking over Bolckow, Vaughan & Co and acquiring its assets. It was possibly the largest steel producer in Britain at the time.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The steel components of the Sydney Harbour Bridge (1932) were engineered and fabricated by Dorman Long of Middlesbrough. The company was also responsible for the New Tyne Bridge in Newcastle.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Several large shipyards also lined the Tees, including the Sir Raylton Dixon & Company, which produced hundreds of steam freighters including the infamous SS Mont-Blanc, the steamship which caused the 1917 Halifax Explosion in Canada.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The area is still home to the nearby large Wilton International industrial site which until 1995 was largely owned by Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI). The fragmentation of that company led to smaller manufacturing units being owned by multinational organisations. The last part of ICI itself completely left the area in 2006 and the remaining companies are now members of the Northeast of England Process Industry Cluster (NEPIC).


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Middlesbrough Mela is an annual, multi-cultural festival attracting an audience of up to 40,000 to enjoy a mix of live music, food, craft and fashion stalls. It began in Middlesbrough's Central Gardens, now Centre Square, and is either held there or in Albert Park.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough also has a healthy musical heritage. A number of bands and musicians hail from the area, including Paul Rodgers, Chris Rea, and Micky Moody.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough Town Hall is the pre-eminent theatre venue in Middlesbrough. It has two concert halls: the first is a classic Victorian concert hall with a proscenium stage and seating 1,190; the second, under the main hall, is called the Middlesbrough Crypt and has a capacity of up to 600. The venue is run by Middlesbrough Council and is funded, in part, by Arts Council England as a National Portfolio Organisation specialising in music. It was refurbished with the assistance of the National Lottery Heritage Fund and reopened in 2018.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Middlesbrough Theatre (formerly the Little Theatre) is in the suburb of Linthorpe. It was designed by architects Elder & De Pierro and was the first purpose designed theatre to be erected in post-war England when it was opened on 22 October 1957 by Sir John Gielgud.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The town has three art galleries. Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, known locally as mima, is a purpose built contemporary art gallery which opened in January 2007. It replaced the Cleveland Gallery (closed 1999), and Cleveland Crafts Centre (closed 2003).


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Middlesbrough Art Weekender is a contemporary art festival organised by the Auxiliary that has been held in central Middlesbrough since 2017. In 2019, it was held over the weekend of 26–29 September and included the works of artists such as Emily Hesse and Karina Smigla-Bobinski. The Auxiliary Warehouse space, which was opened also as part of the 2019 Middlesbrough Art Weekender, is a recent addition to the contemporary art community.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Platform A Gallery is a contemporary art space at the end of platform 1 of Middlesbrough Railway Station.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The South Tees Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust has the James Cook University Hospital in the town. It adds to the economy through innovative projects; such as South Tees bio-incubator which acts as a launch-pad for research, innovation and collaboration between health, technology and science. It is a facility used by GlycoSeLect (UK) Ltd. as a client of the trust in strategic partnership with The Northern Health Science Alliance which has contributed £10.8 billion to the UK economy.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Roseberry Park Hospital, operated by Tees, Esk and Wear Valleys NHS Foundation Trust (TWEV), is north of James Cook Hospital. The hospital is psychiatric orientated and replaced St Luke's Hospital. Acklam Road Hospital is operated by Cumbria, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear NHS Foundation Trust which took over from TWEV. During the transition it was renamed from West Lane to its current name.


title: Middlesbrough

text: There is also the Middlesbrough One Life Medical Centre and North Ormesby Health Village in town. Ramsey Health operate the private Tees Valley Hospital in Acklam.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Albert Park was donated to the town by Henry Bolckow in 1866. It was formally opened by Prince Arthur on 11 August 1868, and comprises a site. The park underwent a considerable period of restoration from 2001 to 2004, during which a number of the park's landmarks saw either restoration or revival.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Stewart Park was donated to the people of Middlesbrough in 1928 by Councillor Thomas Dormand Stewart and encompasses Victorian stable buildings, lakes and animal pens. It is also home to the Captain Cook Birthplace Museum. During 2011 and 2012, the park underwent major refurbishment. It hosted the BBC Radio 1's Big Weekend in the summer of 2019.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Newham Grange Leisure farm in the suburb of Coulby Newham has operated continuously in this spot since the 17th century, becoming a farm park and conservation centre farm with the first residential development of the suburb in the 1970s.


title: Middlesbrough

text: There are multiple libraries serving Middlesbrough. A notable library is the Middlesbrough Central Carnegie library which dates from 1912.


title: Middlesbrough

text: there are 129 listed buildings in the council area. Acklam Hall is the only one at grade I, and 11 are at grade II*, including the town hall and the Transporter Bridge.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The terraced Victorian streets surrounding the town centre are elements of Middlesbrough's social and historical identity, and the vast streets surrounding Parliament Road and Abingdon Road a reminder of the area's wealth and rapid growth during industrialisation.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The outer areas of the town have multiple country halls, most are of Victorian origin. Former halls include Marton Hall (on the grounds of Stewart Park), Gunnergate Hall (Coulby Newham), Tollesby Hall and Park End House. They are multiple halls that are still in existence such as Newham Hall, Nunthorpe Hall, Grey Towers, and Coulby Manor. The oldest domestic building is Acklam Hall of 1678. Built by Sir William Hustler, it is also the only Grade I listed building in Midddlesbrough. Within a mile of the council area there are Normanby Hall, Upsall Hall and the Grade I listed Ormesby Hall.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough Town Hall, designed by George Gordon Hoskins and built between 1883 and 1889 is a Grade II* listed building used for municipal purposes and as an entertainment venue. The Middlesbrough Empire, built in 1897 as a theatre, is a nightclub (since 1993) designed by Ernest Runtz. The first artist to perform in building as a Music Hall was Lillie Langtry. It became an early nightclub (1950s), then a bingo hall and is now once again a nightclub. In Linthorpe, is the Middlesbrough Theatre opened by Sir John Gielgud in 1957; it was one of the first new theatres built in England after the Second World War.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Dorman Long office on Zetland Road, constructed between 1881 and 1891, is the only commercial building ever designed by Philip Webb, the architect who worked for Sir Isaac Lowthian Bell.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Via a 1907 Act of Parliament, Sir William Arrol & Co. of Glasgow built the Tees Transporter Bridge (1911) which spans the river between Middlesbrough and Port Clarence. It is a Grade II* listed building. Some of the film "Billy Elliot" was filmed on the bridge. At long and high, it is one of the largest of its type in the world. Since reopening after restoration and flood protection work in 2013 and 2015 the bridge has been closed for long periods due to safety concerns. In August 2022, the Mayor of Middlesbrough announced that one of the legs is sinking, and that the estimated costs of repairs have been increasing: the bridge's future remains under consideration.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Tees Newport Bridge opened further up the river in 1934. Newport bridge still stands and is passable by traffic: it formerly lifted vertically in the centre.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Temenos sculpture, designed by sculptor Anish Kapoor and designer Cecil Balmond, is a steel structure near to the north west side of the Riverside Stadium. The sculpture stands approximately 110 m long and 50 m high and is held together by steel wire. It was unveiled in 2010 at a cost of £2.7 million.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The town includes the UK's only public sculpture by Claes Oldenburg, the "Bottle O' Notes" of 1993, which relates to Captain James Cook. Based alongside it today in the town's Central Gardens is the Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art (mima). Away from the town centre, at Middlehaven stands the Temenos sculpture, designed by sculptor Anish Kapoor and designer Cecil Balmond. The steel structure, consisting of a pole, a circular ring and an oval ring, stands approximately 110 m long and 50 m high and is held together by steel wire. It was unveiled in 2010 at a cost of £2.7 million.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough is served by public transport. Locally, Arriva North East and Stagecoach provide the majority of bus services, with National Express and Megabus operating long-distance coach travel from Middlesbrough bus station.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough is served by a number of major roads. The A19 (north–south) lies to the west of the town, the A66 (east–west) runs through the northern part of the town centre and the A171, A172 and A174 are other main routes linking the town. The A19 / A66 major interchange lies just to the west of the town.


title: Middlesbrough

text: railway station is the fourth busiest in the North East England region, according to an Office of Rail and Road statistics during the 2019–20 period. It opened in 1877, at its current site, and is in the Gothic architectural style. It is the Esk Valley line's northern terminus, the Durham Coast line's southern terminus and is on the Tees Valley line. There are three train services operators for the station: LNER operates limited rail services to , and ; Northern operates rail services to , , , and while TransPennine Express provides direct rail services to , York, and .


title: Middlesbrough

text: There are also , , and (the latter operates near James Cook University Hospital) stations in Middlesbrough on the Esk Valley line. South Bank station is in the Middlesbrough subdivision on the Tees Valley Line.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The town formerly had electric tramway services, the Middlesbrough Corporation Tramways operated the tramways between 1921 and 1934.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Dorman Memorial Museum, which was founded by Sir Arthur Dorman and specialises in social and local history.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Captain Cook Birthplace Museum, which was opened on 28 October 1978 in celebration of the 250th anniversary of Captain James Cook's birth in nearby Marton.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Though just outside the boundary of Middlesbrough, within a joint preservation area with Redcar and Cleveland, Ormesby Hall is an 18th-century palladian mansion, once owned by the Pennyman family; it is now a National Trust property


title: Middlesbrough

text: In July 2000 the Transporter Bridge Visitor Centre was opened to commemorate the building of the Middlesbrough Transporter Bridge.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Teesside University traces back to 1930 at the opening of Constantine Technical College, located on Borough Road, in the town centre. The then college expanded through acquiring adjacent buildings, such as Middlesbrough High School, and by building Middlesbrough Tower. It became "Teesside Polytechnic" in 1969.


title: Middlesbrough

text: In 1992, the polytechnic gained university status, becoming the "University of Teesside". Extramural classes had previously been provided by the University of Leeds Adult Education Centre on Harrow Road, from 1958 to 2001. It was rebranded, in 2009, to "Teesside University". It further expanded in size and courses available, until, student numbers increased to approximately 20,000 studying at the university.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The university is a major presence in the town. It has a growing reputation for developing digital businesses particularly in the field of digital animation and for hosting the Animex festival. The Boho zone in the town now houses a large number of these start-up digital businesses. The university has 18,000 students, 2,400 staff and operates a £250,000,000 campus in Middlesbrough town-centre. The university campus has benefited from approx £250 million of investment in recent years, including the £30 million Campus Heart scheme.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Teesside University supports a total of 2,570 full-time jobs across the Tees Valley, North East and UK economies per annum. The university contributes additional wealth to the local, regional and national economies as measured by Gross Value Added (GVA). It is estimated this contributes a total of £124 million GVA per annum. The total direct, indirect and induced spending impacts associated with full-time international students and UK students from outside of the North East is approximately £18.9 million per annum. It is estimated this spending supports 158 full-time jobs per annum in Tees Valley and contributes additional wealth of £9.3 million per annum to the local economy.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Current university departments include: business, arts-and-media, computing, health-and-life-sciences, Science-and-Engineering and Social-Sciences-and-Law. In addition to teaching computer animation and games design, it co-hosts the annual Animex International Festival of Animation and Computer Games. The university has links with James Cook University Hospital in the town.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The town's largest college is Middlesbrough College, with 16,000 students. Others include Trinity Catholic College in Saltersgill, Macmillan Academy on Stockton Road and Askham Bryan College which has a site in Stewart Park.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Northern School of Art (established in 1870) is also based in Middlesbrough, it has another site in Hartlepool. It is one of only four specialist art and design further education colleges in the United Kingdom.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Church of England Middlesbrough deanery is in the Archdeaconry of Cleveland with Stokesley (west), Guisborough (east), Whitby (south east) and Northern Ryedale (south) and Mowbray (south west). It is in the Diocese of York and Province of York.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough is the seat of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Middlesbrough, created on 20 December 1878 from the Diocese of Beverley. St. Mary's Cathedral is diocese's mother-church, it is in Coulby Newham as a replacement to the original St Mary's in the town centre. The present bishop is the Right Reverend Terence Patrick Drainey, 7th Bishop of Middlesbrough, who was ordained on Friday 25 January 2008. Churches of the Sacred Heart, St Bernadette's and St Clare of Assisi are also in the town.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Ashkenazi Jews started to settle in Middlesbrough from 1862 and formed Middlesbrough Hebrew Congregation in 1870 with a synagogue in Hill Street. The synagogue moved to Brentnall Street in 1874 and then to a new building in


title: Middlesbrough

text: Editions of the "Jewish Year Book" record the growth and decline of Middlesbrough's Jewish population. It was about 100 in 1896–97 and peaked at 750 in 1935. It then declined to 30 in 1998, in which year the synagogue in Park Road South was ceremonially closed.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Islamic community is represented in several mosques in Middlesbrough. Muslim sailors visited Middlesbrough from about 1890. and, in 1961, Azzam and Younis Din opened the first Halal butcher shop. The first mosque was a house in Grange Road in 1962. The Al-Madina Jamia Mosque, on Waterloo Road, the Dar ul Islam Central Mosque, on Southfield Road, and the Abu Bakr Mosque & Community Centre, which is on Park Road North.


title: Middlesbrough

text: The Sikh community established its first gurdwara (temple) in Milton Street in 1967. After a time in Southfield Road, the centre is now in Lorne Street and was opened in 1990.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough has featured in many television programmes, including "The Fast Show", "Inspector George Gently", "Steel River Blues", "Spender", "Play for Today" ("The Black Stuff"; latterly the drama "Boys from the Blackstuff") and "Auf Wiedersehen, Pet".


title: Middlesbrough

text: Film director Ridley Scott is from the North East and based the opening shot of "Blade Runner" on the view of the old ICI plant at Wilton. He said: "There's a walk from Redcar … I'd cross a bridge at night, and walk above the steel works. So that's probably where the opening of "Blade Runner" comes from. It always seemed to be rather gloomy and raining, and I'd just think "God, this is beautiful." You can find beauty in everything, and so I think I found the beauty in that darkness." It has been claimed that the site was also considered as a shooting location for one of the films in Scott's "Alien" franchise.


title: Middlesbrough

text: In the 2009 action thriller "The Tournament" Middlesbrough is that year's location where the assassins' competition is being held. In November 2009, the mima art gallery was used by the presenters of "Top Gear" as part of a challenge. The challenge was to see if car exhibits would be more popular than normal art.


title: Middlesbrough

text: In 2010, filmmaker John Walsh made the satirical documentary "ToryBoy The Movie" about the 2010 general election in the Middlesbrough constituency and sitting MP Stuart Bell's alleged laziness as an MP.


title: Middlesbrough

text: In March 2013, Middlesbrough was used as a stand in for Newcastle 1969 in BBC's "Inspector George Gently" starring Martin Shaw and Lee Ingleby; the footage appeared in the episode "Gently Between The Lines" (episode 1 of series 6).


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough FC is a Championship football team, owned by local haulage entrepreneur Steve Gibson and managed by Michael Carrick. The 34,000 capacity Riverside Stadium is owned and host to home games by the club since 1995, when they left Ayresome Park. Founder members of the Premier League in 1992, Middlesbrough won the Football League Cup in 2004, and were beaten finalists in the 2005-06 UEFA Cup. In 1905, they made Britain's first £1,000 transfer when they signed Alf Common from local rivals Sunderland. Middlesbrough Ironopolis FC was briefly based in the town during the late 19th century, it later dissolved. They have players such as Zack Steffen, Marcus Forss and Matt Crooks.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough RUFC, founded in 1872 having have played their home games at Acklam Park since 1929, and Acklam RUFC are in Durham/ Northumberland Division One. Both are members of Yorkshire Rugby Football Union.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough hosts multiple road races through the year, including the annual Middlesbrough 10k (formerly Tees Pride 10k) road race. First held in 2005, the one-lap circuit event and associated fun runs were held in the Acklam area of the town before being moved to the town centre in 2021.


title: Middlesbrough

text: On 1 May 2016, Middlesbrough hosted the start of Stage 3 to the 2016 Tour de Yorkshire. The stage and race ended in Scarborough.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Middlesbrough Cricket Club have played at Acklam Park since 1930 and play in North Yorkshire and South Durham Cricket League. Yorkshire have played 45 County Championship games in Middlesbrough. The most recent being in 1996.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Speedway racing was staged at Cleveland Park Stadium from 1928 until the 1990s, with the Middlesbrough Bears.


title: Middlesbrough

text: Tees Valley Mohawks and Teesside Lions basketball teams play in the NBL Division 3. Athletics has two local clubs serving Middlesbrough and the surrounding area, Middlesbrough-and-Cleveland Harriers and Middlesbrough AC (Mandale). Training facilities at the Middlesbrough Sports Village opened in 2015, replacing Clairville Stadium. Notable athletes to train at both facilities are World and European Indoor Sprint Champion Richard Kilty, British Indoor Long Jump record holder Chris Tomlinson. The sports village includes a running track with grandstand, an indoor gym and café, football pitches, as well as a cycle circuit and velodrome. Next to the sports village is a skateboard park and Middlesbrough Tennis World.


title: TNT (American TV network)

text: TNT (originally an abbreviation for Turner Network Television) is an American basic cable television channel owned by the Warner Bros. Discovery Networks unit of Warner Bros. Discovery that launched on October 3, 1988. TNT's original purpose was to air classic films and television series to which Turner Broadcasting maintained spillover rights through its sister station TBS. Since June 2001, the network has shifted its focus to dramatic television series and feature films, along with some sporting events (including "NBA", "NHL", the "NCAA Division I men's basketball tournament" and professional wrestling show "AEW Rampage"), as TBS shifted its focus to comedic programming.


title: TNT (American TV network)

text: , TNT was received by approximately 89.573 million households that subscribe to a subscription television service throughout the United States.