Christianity reached Dacia with the extension of the Roman Empire, as many colonists moved here to avoid the persecution of the Roman authorities. By the 9th century, the Romanians adopted the Slavonic liturgy, but ecclesiastical metropolitanates of the Romanian provinces were only created in the 14th century. The religious texts were to be kept in Old Church Slavonic, until the 16th century when the first partial translations were made, and only in the 19th century the whole scripture was translated to Romanian.
Although Romanians were most of the time under foreign suzerainty (under the Ottoman Turks in Moldavia and Wallachia and under the Hungarian rule in Transylvania), the Romanians kept their Orthodox faith as part of the national identity.
In 1698 in Transylvania, a small part of the Orthodox church granted the papal authority, but kept their rites, in order to obtain the equality to the Catholics, becoming the "Greek-rite Roman Catholics" church.