Abstract
On the occasion of the centenary of King Ferdinand and Queen Mary’s coronation in Alba-Iulia, on October, 15, 1922, following the Great Union of 1918 which placed Romania within the borders of nowadays (except for Bessarabia and Northern Bukovina, provinces lost in 1944), we are bringing to light the testimonies of those who participated during the First World War in the battles of Mărășești and Oituz, in the summer of 1917, recorded and preserved in the folklore archive. At the same time, the impact of the war on the collective consciousness determined the creation of songs which evoke war stories. The soldier’s song, known as “The song of the one dying on the front”, which evokes the soldier who fought both in the Balkans, in 1877, and in the Carpathians, in 1916, represents the leitmotif of these lament songs, folk and erudite creations with powerful patriotic accents. The most popular songs of the kind date back to the First World War. The battles of the Second World War were evoked in folk songs, such as the battles on the Dniester, of Odessa or Stalingrad, but failed to be published and were subject to the ideological censorship of the Communist regime, still being preserved in the collections and the recordings of the folklore archive.