After asking Bernd why Russians claim they're the Third Rome and ROMAnians claim to be direct descendants of the Romans and getting no answer I Wikipedia'd it. The Third Rome thing is the Russian orthodox Church inheriting the leadership of orthodox Christianity after the fall of Constantinople. With orthodox people claiming they're the true inheritors of the mandate of ancient Rome which is being the first church. It sounds bizarre to westerners because when we think of Rome we think of the western italian roman empire not the Eastern Greek roman empire. With the ROMAnian thing it's because dacia (romanian province of the roman empire) was the main roman outpost in the region against foreigners so it got a lot of investment and immigration from central Rome. Eventually when they lost the province though the Romans pulled out but they language remained. Much like how even after the Romans left Britain they barely left a genetic trace though. Romanians are much like Hungarians and bulgarians where genetically they're balkanites who speak a foreign language because they were conquered. A lot of the ROMAn larping was nationalist propaganda in their fight for an independent romania too to differentiate themselves from the Hungarians, Bulgarians and slavs that claimed their clay.