In January 1821, several thousand men from Oltenia, today a province in south-western Romania, led by Tudor Vladimirescu, a former officer in the tsarist army, were marching towards Bucharest. That was the Romanian response to the national movement of freeing the Greeks of Eteria, a Greek national organization seeking to free Greece from the Ottoman rule and build a nation state. Vladimirescu thus answered the aspirations of the nationalist Wallachian boyars, who wanted, just like the Greeks, to free their country from the Ottomans. Personalities like Dinicu Golescu, Eufrosin Poteca and others made up the first generation of Romanian nationalist elites, who started to separate themselves from the Greeks in terms of ideas, attitude and language, in spite of their profoundly Greek education. The Greek and Romanian national ideas at the beginning of the 19th century had common roots. The Phanariot period, which had started a century before, had formed a Greek-Romanian symbi