Pantheon(s) of National Heroes: A Content Analysis of History Textbooks in Post/Socialist Romania and the Republic of Moldova

ABSTRACT

This article examines the construction of national pantheons of heroes in two Eastern European kin states—Romania and the Republic of Moldova—whose pantheonic fields are not organized around central monumental mausolea. It conceptualizes national pantheons as pantheonic fields constituted across multiple sites of memory and mnemonic media, with textbooks as a privileged site for reconstructing hero canons. Drawing on a quantitative content analysis of 58 history textbooks, the study introduces an Index of Pantheonic Status (IPS) to measure the prominence of historical figures embedded within didactic narratives. The findings reveal both a transnational convergence of heroic canons between the two countries and a remarkable continuity across Romania's socialist and postsocialist mnemonic regimes. By linking nation‐building to the politics of remembering, the paper contributes a transferable framework for investigating how modern states codify their heroic heritage through dispersed yet institutionally structured pantheonic fields.