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Do Romanians look more like Slavs or Mediterraneans?Remus Serban nailed it: there is no “Romanian look”.A few details:There are two situations: on one hand the South (Principality of Wallachia until 1859) and East (principality of Modavia until 1859) including Dobrudgea (added to Romania in 1878), and on the other hand what is now called Transilvania (Transilvania proper plus the Saxon cities, the Székely counties, Maramureş, Partium and the Banat).Southern and Eastern Romania were a destination for immigrants for all the XIXth century and a good part of the XXth century, not necessarily because it was terribly rich but mostly because of relatively low regulations and no guilds, which allowed anyone who knew a trade to get a job and make a living so if an Austrian or German or an Italian or a French citizen got fed up with revolutions or civil war or with having to pay to be allowed to work but could not afford to buy the ticket to get to America they ended in Romania.Before the 1830s any Christian of any denomination could become a citizen by buying land or buildings and registering for tax. Greeks, Armenians, Georgians (from the Caucasus country not from US), Russians, Italians, Germans, Serbians, Bulgarian and quite a few French etc. took advantage, a lot of them prospered, all of them intermarried with the locals or other immigrants, some even got into the govermnent, such as A.I. Cuza, elected in 1859 as the first prince of united Romania, who was a second-generation citizen and of Italian-Greek descent. Anghel Saligny, the engineer who designed and built the Cernavoda bridge and designed most of the railway network in Romania, was a third generation citizen: one of his grandfathers came from the Netherlands via Germany. Russian anarchists became Conservatives soon after arriving in Romania, Russian religious firebrands arrived constantly between 1700 and 1900 only to become blazee brickmakers or fishermen, and also a steady stream of Russian political dissidents from 1874 until 1941 staffed the universities and the state-sponsored hospitals. Bulgarians took refuge regularly in Wallachia and sometimes in Moldavia up to 1877, and sometimes Wallachians took refuge in Bulgaria too fleeing sudden increases in taxation while Moldavians sometimes crossed the Dniester to Zaporozhye to become Cossacks, only to return with friends, money and guns and get themselves elected princes and enjoy eventful but short ;) reigns.All the Polish revolts of the XIXth century left their marks with refugees ending up in Romania. Amusing anecdote: in 1840s two correspondents of (if I remember well) “Edinburgh Review” doing their Grand Tour ended in Wallachia and in a letter made great fun of the supposed snobbishness of a Romanian family who imitated western habits in everything including teaching their girls how to play the piano. The amusing part was the suspected snobs were Poles. Another anecdote: in 1864 a regiment of Poles crossed into Romania and the Romanian government presented this excuse for not forcing them go back to Russia: “by mistake we bought the wrong caliber ammunition for our army, have nothing with which to force them go back”.There was a solid wave of immigration from Anatolia and Greece in the XVIIIth century, some following Greek princes appointed from Istanbul but most of them looking for commerce or to practice their trade. In the XVIIth century the Romanians in Moldova elected two christianized Tartars as princes, in the XVIth century one Armenian, quite a few Greeks (first or second generation), one Gypsy, a few Albanians, most of them originally merchants or tradesmen.In the XVth century Hungarian-speaking Hussites found refuge in Moldavia and Armenians started arriving.Muslims were not allowed to settle or to own land or houses, though at the end of the XIVth century a bunch of dissident Muslims were accepted in Wallachia but merged with the rest of the locals after their fighting men were killed in a failed expedition against the Ottomans. Muslims were not accepted until 1878 in order to avoid creating legal precedents of Muslim law being applied locally. In the 1840s there are documented expulsions of Muslim seasonal workers. After 1878 this restriction was lifted and around 1900 Bulgarian and Turkish immigrant dock workers were fighting for the control of the docks in Galatz and Brăila.Jews were mentioned in the XVth century as one of the groups of settlers who were allowed to settle Moldavia after the Mongols were chased away and are documented since the second half of the XIVth century. Could own urban property but not agricultural land, had a say in urban governance until the mid-XIXth century but no citizenship until 1919 unless they converted to a Christian denomination or managed to get a law passed for each candidate to citizenship (that applied to all the other candidates to citizenship, no matter what religion they practiced or language they spoke).A special situation in Moldavia and Wallachia were the slaves.The nomad Gypsies (now rather called Roma) were considered “slaves of the state”, had no civil rights, no right to own land or houses, had to pay a per capita tax etc. Richer Gypsies sometimes got baptized and assimilated and became citizens, poorer citizens sometimes joined the Gypsies.The chattel slaves were initially prisoners of war but later were bought from (and quite probably sometimes sold back) Crimean and Ottoman slave markets, and originated from all over around the Black Sea, Caucasus and the Middle East. There are clues that early XIXth century slave owners suspected some of their slaves might have been brought from as far as Sudan tough I suspect more Northern sources were preferred due to the very harsh winters in Romania. Slaves being baptized, freed and granted land are mentioned since the XVth century. It went both ways: some locals being enslaved by the Crimeean Tartars or Ottomans during wars then sold in the markets of Caffa or Istanbul converted, were freed, prospered as Muslims.In the 1850s the citizenship laws became very restrictive, so restrictive that ethnic Romanians from Transylvania were regularly denied citizenship even through marriage, and most of the immigrants arriving after that became only legal residents without any civil rights and even their children born in Romania were denied citizenship unless the father was a Romanian citizen. This happened because the local elite suspected the rather intense immigration was a deliberate attempt at colonizing and taking over the country by Germans or Austrians. The third article of the constitution of 1866 was about forbidding colonization of foreign nationals. Immigration continued unabated though until 1914–1916, and slowed down after that until the Second World War when it stopped completely.An unintended consequence of this restrictive citizenship policy was that after a survey paid by the Romanian Socialist Party around 1898 discovered that out of about 1 million large industrial labour force almost all did not have the citizenship and were first or second generation immigrants, almost half of them Italians, then Germans, then Jews, with a healthy dose of Russians, Bulgarians, Hungarians etc.. As a result of that survey the Socialist party elite (PSDMR, Partidul Social-Democrat al Muncitorilor din Romania - The Social-Democratic Party of the Workers of Romania) decided they have no chance in hell of winning elections any time soon and disbanded. When some of them recreated the Social-Democratic party in 1905 they were puzzled that the local (that is having citizenship) workers did not care much about 8-hours days or anything else, but wanted a restriction on immigration (Panait Istrati wrote about this).The Jews bore the brunt of the “colonization” panic: because the Germans, the Austrians or the Italians could not be publicly accused the public debate about immigration and citizenship rights was made to be about Jews, ignoring the fact that the Jewish immigrants came only in third place after Italians and Germans. Despite this before 1941 there was a strong “Asimilist” (assimilationist) movement among the Jews of Romania resulting in frequent conversions to a Christian denomination, and for the period between 1900 and 1906 around 10% of their marriages were with a Romanian citizen (or at least the Asimilists claimed that).After Romania entered World War I in 1916 the Antantist journalists at New York Times were panicking about the large number of soldiers and officers of German origin in the Romanian army, but their panic proved unfounded: the only notable desertion was of a colonel whose family was in Romania since at least the XVIth century and whose ancestors were elected as princes a few times.Transylvania is a bit different: the Hungarian kings then the Transylvanian princes after the fall of Hungary and before 1919 the Austrians colonized groups from all over Europe: Saxons, Frisians, Suabians, Italians, Bohemians, Slovaks, Serbians etc. and the Austrians allowed documented immigration from the Balkans (Vlachs, Albanians, Serbians) or from the Caucasus and Anatolia (Armenians). Some of them left for Moldavia and Wallachia during the religious persecutions of the XVth century (Hungarian-speaking Hussites went to Moldavia for example when persecuted) and during the Europeans Wars of Religion. After 1848, in the context of growing competition between those that self-identified themselves as Romanians and those that self-identified themselves as Hungarians, the smaller ethnic groups were pushed to pick a side and most of the rural population merged with either one of those two groups (in my opinion this is why Romanians ended with such a large majority in Transylvania: the Hungarians preferentially adopted the rich among the smaller linguistic groups, the Romanians got the rest). Only the privileged urban Saxons and the Jews preserved their identity until the 1980 when most emigrated.All the residents of Romania received citizenship in 1919. Some had it contested in 1938 (Goga government, he did not survive long) being accused of having arrived illegally in Romania after 1919. In 1945 was passed the first law forbidding investigating the ethnic origin of a Romanian citizen, repeated in the 1960s. Even now in Romania it is forbidden to investigate the ethnic origin of somebody else though I think you can do it for yourself.So, to say that Romania is a melting pot is putting it very lightly.If I am not mistaken according to the law you can declare yourself to be any ethnicity you want, though nobody yet claimed to be a Klingon.