N.B. This page is under construction so it might be a bit garbled in parts…
Historical/geographical notes:
1. Bucovina became part of Romania in 1919; the northern half became part of the Soviet Union in 1944 and independent Ukraine in 1991, while the southern half has remained in Romania. Bucovina is nowadays thus partly in Romania, partly in Ukraine; of its two biggest cities, Chernivtsi is in Ukraine and Suceava in Romania.
2. What Romanians call Basarabia is now mostly the independent republic of Moldova (with a little bit in Ukraine). I’m treating it as a part of Romania not from an attack of nationalistic fervour but because in football’s early days it was Romanian territory (1919-1944).
Historical Moldavia
The Principality of Moldavia (rom:Moldova) had been an Ottoman vassal state since the mid-16th century. The Russo-Turkish Wars first deprived Moldavia of its northernmost region – ceded to Habsburg Austria as Bucovina in 1775 – and then in 1792 brought the Russian Empire to its doorstep, with the award of the Black Sea region of Yedisan to Russia (where the city of Odessa would soon be founded). Finally, in 1812, what remained of Moldavia was snipped along the river Prut, and the eastern half given to the Russian Empire. The western portion would be united with Wallachia half a century later as the prelude to an independent Romanian state.
Bucovina
Unlike Transylvania and Banat, regions ruled by the Hungarian crown, Bucovina was an Austrian province within the same Empire. Its biggest city was known in German as Czernowitz (rom:Cernăuți; ukr:Chernivtsi). It was ethnically a very mixed region, with Ruthenians (Ukrainians) and Romanians predominating in the north and south respectively, but with large Jewish and German populations in the towns, and a Polish minority in Czernowitz. The region’s population in 1910 was 800,000.
Austrian rule brought football relatively early to the distant outpost of Czernowitz, and each ethnic or linguistic group started a club. By 1908 – only a decade since Viennese teams had started participating in organised internal competitions and representative games within the Empire – there were enough teams in Czernowitz to hold a city championship. The German-speakers had got there first, founding in 1903 a club that would later be best known under the name Jahn, but there was also a Polish team (Sarmatia, later Polonia), two Jewish clubs (Hakoah and Maccabi) and, of course, a Romanian club. The latter was named Rumänischer Fußballklub (RFK) Czernowitz. When the whole of Bucovina was absorbed into the new Romanian state after the end of the First World War, RFK was renamed Dragoș Vodă Cernăuți. Dragoș was the man who, in the 14th century, had chased an aurochs and founded Moldavia.
National competition
The Bucovinean champions qualified for Romania’s new national final tournament from 1921 onwards: Polonia, Jahn, Hakoah, Maccabi and Dragoș Vodă all had a turn at being knocked out by teams from other parts of the country while clubs from Bucharest and Timisoara cleaned up. Jahn were the first to reach a semi-final, which they did two years running: in 1923-24 thanks to Braşovia Braşov not turning up for the quarter-final match, and in 1924-25 thanks partly to Fulgerul Chișinău being disqualified after beating them. Dragoș Vodă made it to the same stage in 1928-29, losing 4-3 to eventual champions Venus București.
International match
On 3 September 1922, the Romanian national team played its first home match, and the location chosen was, of all places, the Maccabi stadium in Cernăuți. The opponents were Poland, reborn as an independent country once again since 1919, whose national team had played three times. The visitors’ team – like the hosts’ – included several players of Jewish origin. The 1-1 draw began a remarkable run during which neither team has ever been beaten by the other in territory that is now part of Ukraine… (1-1 in Lwow in 1923 and 3-3 in the same city in 1934.)
Decline
The 1930-31 season saw a slight change in structure, with the national championship being contested by five regional champions, those champions determined by play-offs between the winners of the various city leagues. For two consecutive seasons, Maccabi Cernăuți finished above Jahn in the city league, then became Eastern champions by beating Concordia Iași, and then lost their only game in the national tournament, effectively a semi-final in each case.
A league format was adopted for the national championship in 1932, with no representation from Bucovina. When the second division was introduced in 1934, Jahn were involved, and Dragoș Vodă joined them the following year. Dragoș Vodă won promotion in 1936-37, but finished bottom of the top flight with eight points from eighteen games the following season and were condemned once again to Divizia B. Jahn, meanwhile, were finding their level at the foot of the second tier. The first Bucovinean team from beyond Cernăuți to appear in the league tables saw Hatmanul Luca Arbore, from Rădăuți (ukr:Radivtsi), win the Eastern League in the inaugural season of Divizia C, 1936-37; the next year they ended up in the bottom three in Series I of the second division, below Sporting Chişinău but above Jahn Cernăuți. All three were saved by the absence of relegation that year, but in 1938-39 both Cernăuți clubs succumbed to the drop, leaving only Dragoș Vodă to fly the flag for Bucovina at Divizia B level. In 1939-40, Muncitorul Cernăuți joined them, and Dragoș Vodă got through to the quarter-finals of the Romanian Cup – the best performance of any Bucovina side; although it only involved one win and one forfeit, that single victory was against the mighty Ripensia Timisoara.
Post-war, post-partition
Before you know it, war is upon us. In June 1940 the USSR absorbed northern Bucovina, including Cernăuți, into the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic. A new club, Avanhard Chernivtsi, was formed in 1958, and changed its name to Bukovyna in 1965. They muddled along until 1982, when they won the Ukrainian SSR championship (the third tier of Soviet football) for the first time. This did not, admittedly, rank them very highly in the region: Dynamo Kiev finished runners-up in the Soviet Top League, the best of five Ukrainian teams in that division, while the second tier boasted seven more teams from Ukraine. But thirteenth-best, in the football hotbed of Ukraine, was pretty good for Chernivtsi – still a distant outpost, this time from Kiev. Although they lost the promotion play-off on that occasion, and again in 1988, they hit their stride once more in 1990, when the league (and the USSR itself) was being restructured. They topped the third-tier Western League and then finished 5th in the second tier, winning promotion to the re-jigged top division of Soviet football. They never took up the place, however, competing instead in the inaugural mini-season of the Ukrainian Premier League in the spring of 1992. In 1994 they lost their seat at the top table, and the club has bounced between the second and third levels ever since.
In post-war Romania, meanwhile the most successful team from southern Bucovina was CSM Suceava, based in by far the biggest town in the region. The club played one season in Liga I in the late 1980s. In 1997 they merged with nearby Forest Fălticeni after the latter’s unexpected promotion to the top flight, in order to use the superior stadium in Suceava. Foresta spent three seasons at those dizzy heights before disappearing quickly back into obscurity and folding in 2003. A replacement club, Cetatea Suceava, dabbled in second-division life a couple of times in the 2000s before going the way of all Romanian football clubs [they withdrew from Liga II halfway through the 2009-10 season and then from Liga III just before the next season kicked off].
But perhaps the strangest Bucovinean football story is that of an army club, founded as CS Armata (Army Sports Club) in 1948 in Iaşi, in the province of Moldavia. Apparently thanks to Communist Party connections (see here), when the club achieved promotion to the second division in 1950, it was moved to a small Bucovinean lumber town 200km to the west (which also had a barracks) and renamed CA Câmpulung Moldovenesc. In the 1952 season, coached by legendary former CA Oradea player Francisc Ronnay, scorer of Romania’s first ever international goal, they managed a third-placed finish in the top flight, behind only the two Bucharest giants, CCA (the future Steaua) and Dinamo. It seems that Ronnay, a tactical innovator, implemented a 4-2-4 system in a team which featured a good number of players from CCA, the all-powerful army club. Halfway through the next season, however, the club was disbanded and its players redistributed (many back to CCA), and top-flight football has never yet returned to Câmpulung Moldovenesc (population: 16,000).
The not-dead, ice-skating World Cup star
One of early Romanian football’s most curious biographies is that of Alfred Eisenbeisser, an ethnic German midfielder born in 1908 in Cernăuți (then Czernowitz, of course). In 1930 Eisenbeisser – who was known to Romanians as Fredi Fieraru – moved from Jahn to Dragoș Vodă and, although as yet uncapped, was selected for the Romanian squad to travel to the inaugural World Cup in Uruguay. He played both of Romania’s games there: a win over Peru, and a heavy defeat against the hosts and eventual winners. As a result of a cold bath on the voyage home across the Atlantic, Eisenbeisser contracted pneumonia and almost died before reaching port in Genoa. Critically ill in an Italian hospital, word reached his family back in Bucovina (apparently from his team-mates) that he had indeed passed away. Imagine the scene: his grieving mother is preparing the funeral meal, when Alfred walks back into the house. Eisenbeisser, fully recovered, went on to win three league titles with the Venus Bucuresti team of the 1930s, and to have a parallel career as a figure skater. He participated in the 1934 and 1939 European Figure Skating Championships and the 1936 Winter Olympic competition.
Another Cernăuți native, an ethnic Pole this time, Robert Sadowski, was the goalkeeper for Romania in their disastrous defeat to Cuba at the 1938 World Cup; he won cups with Rapid and finished his career at Monaco. Norberto Höfling, a Jewish footballer from Cernăuți, played at MTK Budapest and Lazio in the ’40s, and managed Club Brugge and Feyenoord in the ’50s and ’60s.
Basarabia
Basarabia, before the 1917 Revolution, was a governorate within the Russian Empire. The region was a backwater, on the very fringe. If Chișinău (Kishinev in Russian) was known at all beyond the imperial frontiers, it was for violent pogroms in 1903 and 1905 against Jews, who made up almost half of the city’s population. The population of the governorate as a whole was roughly one million, around half of whom were Moldavians, who might tentatively be equated in modern terms with Romanian-speakers (though ethnic and linguistic data are highly contested). Due to inward migration from other parts of the country, the proportion of the populace who identified as Russian had grown steadily in the century of Russian occupation.
Just down the river Dniester, in neighbouring Kherson governorate, was the busy Black Sea port and naval base, Odessa, where local football clubs started to appear in 1907 thanks to British expat workers. However, where the game had really taken hold in Russian territory was a thousand miles away in another port city, the imperial capital, St Petersburg. Again due to German and British workers, a city league had been founded in 1901, and by 1909 it was dominated by Russians. Moscow got its own championship in 1909… but that’s another story.
According to the Moldovan football association, the first recorded football match to take place in Chișinău was on 29 August 1910, between the local Boys’ High School and High School No. 2 from Odessa. It ended in a resounding 22-0 victory for the visitors.
The first Russian imperial championship took place in 1912, in the form of a knockout cup between representative teams drawn from various cities, though only three teams played a match, St Petersburg beating Moscow in the final. The following year saw a more serious contest, with nine participating cities. Though Chișinău did not take part, Odessa, surprisingly, overcame St Petersburg in the final, held in the Black Sea city in October 1913, but were stripped of their title for fielding one too many foreigners. Only one player represented the Russian Empire national team from outside the Moscow and St Petersburg clubs: Sporting Odessa’s Grigory Bogemsky.
The next decade was a time of turmoil, as Russia endured war and revolution. The Moldavian Democratic Republic was proclaimed in December 1917, as part of the short-lived Russian Republic. The Bolsheviks entered Chișinău in January 1918; a week or so later the Romanian Army invaded and the MDR declared independence. In April the MDR declared a voluntary union with Romania, and in December Romania effectively absorbed it. So began what is nowadays known (nostalgically, to some) as Greater Romania. However, Soviet Russia treated the act as a hostile annexation, and a sliver of territory in the east, which corresponded roughly to the modern micro-non-state of Transnistria, became the Moldavian Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (ASSR). This tiny region made brief appearances in the Ukrainian regional tournament in 1932 and 1934, getting slaughtered 17-0 by Stalino (Donetsk) and 7-0 by Vinnytsia.
Football in the newly enlarged Romania restarted on a local level at first, with the first national championship taking place in 1922. The former Hungarian territories in the west and north dominated.
Basarabian teams joined the national championship in 1925. At this stage the winners of up to eleven regional leagues across the country qualified for a knock-out final competition for the Romanian championship. The Basarabian regional tournament featured five teams: Mihai Viteazul, Unitas, Sporting, Maccabi, and the Romanian Railways Regiment, aka CFR.
The railways team won that Chișinău tournament and, it seems, changed their name to Fulgerul (“Lightning”) a few months later, before the national finals. They secured two good away wins over the Craiova regional champions, Oltul Slatina, and then Jahn Cernăuți, but were disqualified for fielding an ineligible player. The following season they again represented the region and again won in Cernăuți (this time beating Hakoah), and took Juventus București to a semi-final replay before bowing out.
In 1926 Fulgerul supplied two players to the national team, the only times a Basarabian club would do so. I believe that this is due to players on military service (see Ionescu & Tudoran, p.321). Adalbert Ströck, a forward from Oradea far to the west, who was already a regular starter for Romania, having been on their ill-fated Olympic adventure in 1924, played against Bulgaria in April; and in October Iosif Killianovitz, a recent arrival from the all-conquering Chinezul Timisoara, and who two weeks earlier had played for a representative Bucharest side against a team of visiting Belgrade players, lined up against Yugoslavia. Another star who passed through Chișinău, in 1925, was Bálazs Hoksary, the left-back of the Chinezul team, a man who would finish his career with eight league titles and two cups. There are also allusions to Mihai Tänzer* and Adalbert Rech (of UD Resita) in histories of Basarabian football, but I can’t find evidence.
1927 saw the first appearance of a team from beyond Chișinău in the Basarabian competition, Sporting Tighina, and a new name on the regional trophy, Mihai Viteazul Chișinău. Mihai Viteazul, Prince Michael the Brave, was a significant figure as the man in charge the last time Moldavia, Wallachia and Transylvania were united, for a brief period in 1600. Wikipedia invites us to believe that the Viteazul club was founded in 1920 by the Vâlcov brothers, which, given that they would have been 11, 10 and 4 years old at the time, seems unlikely. In any case, after Mihai Viteazul overcame Maccabi Cernăuți in the obligatory north-eastern play-off, they drew 4-4 with Bucharest champions Unirea Tricolor but lost the replay the following day. In 1928 the goal-shy MV thrashed Concordia Iaşi 9-1, dispatched Polonia Cernăuți 5-2, but fell 6-4 to eventual champions Colţea Braşov at the semi-final stage. After a disappointing defeat to Dragoş Vodă Cernăuţi in 1929, in 1930 MV again reached the semis, losing out this time to Juventus București – who again would go on to win the title.
The greatest legend of Basarabian football is probably that of the Valcov brothers. The Valcovs were ethnic Gagauz from Bolgrad, a (then) majority-Bulgarian town which was in the Russian Empire when the boys were born, then part of Romania during their playing careers, then in the Soviet Union after World War II, and is now in Ukraine. The brothers formed a potent attacking trio for Mihai Viteazul from the mid-1920s onwards, and later for Venus’ multiple title-winning team of the 1930s. Petea would die on the eastern front in 1943, and Volodea of tuberculosis in 1952, but Colea went on to coach Steaua, Dinamo and Romania.
Things go dark in 1931, when MV fail to reach the national competition; the following year no information is available about the Basarabian championship and the eastern playoff is contested by Concordia Iași and Maccabi Cernăuți. Thus no team from the region features in the planned league structure that would be implemented in 1932-33. By now, too, Cernăuți was the base for the Eastern League representative team that took part in the Cup, and Basarabia was fading from nationwide football.
When a regionalised second tier, Divizia B, was introduced, in 1934-35, Sporting Chişinău struggled in Series IV alongside teams from Cernăuți, Galați, Iași, Bacău and Brăila. It was now harder to reach the national stage and inevitably the standard dropped off. Further league expansion came when Divizia C was created in 1936-37: Sporting narrowly avoided demotion to the third level, while the Divizia C East League featured Macabi Chișinău and Traian Tighina. Yet another reorganisation left Divizia B’s north-east series with two teams from Chişinău, Sporting and Mihai Viteazul, and Traian Tighina. None of them set the world alight. In 1939-40 Sporting has become Nistru Chișinău, playing in Serie I of the second division, while Maccabi Chișinău and Traian Tighina are in Serie IV.
In the Cupa Romaniei, instituted as a knockout tournament for clubs in 1933, Basarabian teams got through to the last sixteen on only one occasion, when, in 1936-37 Sporting Chişinău were eliminated by Venus București. Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, Spartak Tiraspol had one foray in the Odessa regional rounds of the 1938 Soviet Cup, losing 4-0 to Dzerzhinets Kremenchug.
1940 saw huge disruption to the football competitions – and much of Romanian life, to be fair. The fascist Antonescu regime banned Jewish sporting associations, removing all Maccabi and Hakoah teams at a stroke. Workers’ teams, such as CAM Timisoara and AMEF Arad, were also excluded from the top flight. What’s more, the fact that Hitler annexed the bigger part of Transylvania to Hungary in August meant that footballing powerhouses Cluj, Oradea, Targu Mures and Brasov became part of the Hungarian football system for the duration of the war (with one curious exception). Not quite so damaging for the football scene, but a longer-lasting change, was the Soviet annexation of Basarabia and northern Bucovina a few weeks earlier.
The Moldavian Soviet Socialist Republic was declared, which absorbed most of the previous ASSR. Dinamo Kishinev finished bottom of the Ukraine zone second division in 1947, with only two league wins all season. They improved by 1949, when they achieved a solid mid-table finish in the central zone series of the newly reorganised national second division, which featured teams from as far afield as Ashgabat and Tallinn. After finishing sixth in 1950 Dinamo changed their name to Burevestnik (eng:storm petrel) and had a great run in the Soviet Cup, getting as far as the fourth round before being destroyed 7-0 by the mighty Spartak Moscow. Another adventure in 1954 ended at the same stage with defeat to ODO Leningrad. The following year, after another re-zoning, Burevestnik bossed the division and won promotion to the Top League for the first time. They finished a creditable sixth in 1956 and survived at the top level, with another name change to Moldova Kishinev, and in spite of finishing bottom in 1960. 1963 saw Moldova reach the quarter-final of the Soviet Cup, losing out in a replay to Kayrat Alma-Ata. Relegation finally claimed the Basarabians in 1964, by which time Moldavian teams were competing in the Ukrainian zone of the second tier: Stroitel Beltsy, Nistrul Bendery and Luchaferul Tiraspol.
Having won the first three post-war Moldavian Cups (link:https://www.rsssf.org/tablesm/moldcuphist.html) and two out of three league titles (https://www.rsssf.org/tablesm/moldchamp.html), Dinamo/Burevestnik no longer took part in the local competition because of their involvement in the national league. This opened the way for teams from smaller towns like Bender, Bălți, Tiraspol and even Ungheni to win regional trophies in the 1950s and 1960s.
*One of the few players who represented both Hungary and Romania at football, although he was an ethnic German from Timisoara. Tanzer, known in Hungary as Mihaly Tancos, spent two years at Fulgerul in between successful spells with Chinezul Timisoara and the mighty Ferencvaros of Budapest.
The greatest Basarabian footballer?
In spite of his success on the field, Nicolae Simatoc doesn’t appear in Fotbal de la A la Z, a 1980s reference book which is otherwise rich in mini-biographies of significant Romanian footballing figures. But there’s a good reason for that, and his story is a fascinating one. He was born in 1920 to Romanian parents in a small village outside Briceni, a town then overwhelmingly populated by Jews and Ruthenians. Briceni is today in northern Moldova, only a couple of kilometres from the Ukrainian border, and closer to Cernăuți than to any significant Moldovan city, but in 1920 it was part of Basarabia, which had just been acquired by Romania.
Nicolae was supposedly spotted, aged 14, by a scout from Ripensia Timișoara, at that time the dominant force in Romanian football, and he made the 700-kilometre move to the Banat accompanied by his mother. The giant (1.95m) teenage midfielder Nicolae apparently learned German, Serbian and Hungarian in the multicultural melting pot that was Timișoara, while attempting to break into the all-conquering first team. He made it only in 1938, when they were on the wane, and moved to Carmen București in 1941, by which time he had been capped twice by the national team. The wartime situation in Romania became more difficult, and Simatoc moved across the Hungarian border to Nagyvárad (rom:Oradea) to play for NAC (formerly CA Oradea), where he was the only ethnic Romanian in the squad that would unexpectedly win the Hungarian league title in 1943-44. For a short time he lived in Budapest, playing for Vasas; he met his future wife Etel there and took the Hungarian name Szegedi Miklós. After a brief return to Carmen and to the Romanian national team (not sure why), Simatoc fled the new Communist authorities in the winter of 1947, across Yugoslavia and into Italy, earning double pneumonia and being stripped of Romanian citizenship for his troubles.
He spent two seasons with Inter but moved in 1949 to Brescia in Serie B. He then became part of László Kubala’s Hungaria team, made up of stateless central European players taking refuge in the West. Kubala had fled Hungary in 1949 and, despite a one-year ban imposed by FIFA for breaching his contract with Vasas, seems to have been attached to the Serie A club Pro Patria, just outside Milan. The Hungaria team toured Spain in the early summer of 1950 and, like Kubala, Simatoc was courted by Santiago Bernabeu’s Real Madrid but opted instead for Barcelona. He scored on his debut (an 8-2 win) and became a fan favourite after a brilliant performance in beating Madrid 7-2.
But the temptations of life in the Catalan capital led him astray. Late-night card games in nightclubs that caused him to miss training, or even matches! His Barcelona career came to an end in December 1951. After retirement he moved into coaching, but his lifestyle impeded efforts to make it as a mister. He emigrated in 1963 to Australia where, after one last name change to Nicholas Sims, he coached football teams and ran a nightclub. He died in Sydney in 1978 – of a heart attack while playing poker.
Sources:
The Accidental Groundhopper. 12 October 2013.http://theaccidentalgroundhopper.blogspot.ro/2013/10/football-in-vanished-world-bukovyna.html
Stăncioiu, Octavian. ‘Echipe din România interbelică – Dragoș Vodă Cernăuți. Românii nord-bucovineni’ [‘Teams of inter-war Romania: Dragoș Vodă Cernăuți. North Bucovinean Romanians’] Ripensia Sport Magazin. 2 April 2015. http://www.ripensia-sport-magazin.ro/istoria-fotbalului/echipe-din-romania-interbelica-dragos-voda-cernauti-romanii-nord-bucovineni/
Stăncioiu, Octavian. ‘Începuturile fotbalului bucovinean.’ [The beginnings of Bucovinean football.’] Ripensia Sport Magazin. 3 Dec 2015. http://www.ripensia-sport-magazin.ro/istoria-fotbalului/inceputurile-fotbalului-bucovinean/
Frisk, Cristi. ‘Istoria fotbalului moldovenesc, la ceas aniversar.’ [‘Moldovan football history at anniversary time.’] Sport Local. 10 Aug 2010. http://sportlocal.ro/istoria-fotbalului-moldovenesc-la-ceas-aniversar [dead link]
Ticu, Octavian. ‘Basarabenii din sportul romanesc.’ [Bessarabians in Romanian sport.] Timpul. 6 Oct 2015. https://timpul.md/articol/basarabenii-din-sportul-romanesc-1-fratii-vilcov-80100.html
Ionescu & Tudoran: Fotbal de la A la Z [green].
RSSSF
Wikipedia.
romaniaballs 
