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Oina – Romanian baseball
Oina is a sports game dating back from the era of Dacians and Romans. Initially a verb, "oina" means to take a herd of sheep down from the mountains to the field in Fall, also known as "transhumance".
There's a theory that this is in fact a war game, as shown by the names of various elements of this sport: “Baci” (the sheppard) is the captain of the team, “bata” is the bat, the player's arrival on the pitch is known as "intrare la strunga" (entering the sheep den), "jucator la strunga" (player caught in the middle – player caught in the sheep's den), "pascari" (players who catch the ball, players who guard the sheep).
Oina is practiced throughout Romania and even outside the borders of our country, even if the word for “ball” is different in many regions: "mince" and "mice" in Tecuci, "pila" and "lapta" in Transylvania, "pulma" in Banat, "suca" in Ohrida and "topa" or "topca" in Bitolia (a Turkish word).
There's lots of uncertainty regarding the real history of oina, as fake historians have claimed it to be a Turkish or Bulgarian sport, trying to find linguistic proof, but they failed, as for their theories, they seemed valid for a while, as we had no written proof about the Romanian origins of oina. The sport started being practiced in towns from the 18th century. Some historians mention Vlaicu Voda's reign (1370) as the period when the game was first talked about, but their only source is a historic drama, "Vlaicu Voda", written in 1888 by Alexandru Davila. This is a proof of the superficiality of some historians when talking about elements of a certain culture.
The first written evidence regarding the game was found by Nicolae Iorga and mentioned in the book "Observatii si probleme banatene". It dates from 1763 and is provided by the priest Nicolae Stoica from Hateg, who claimed that he played oina with children in the church's courtyard. The game was so popular that even great figures of the 1848 revolution, like Avram Iancu relaxed by playing it, but back then the sport was known as "lopta-pila".
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vessix says:
This game is very fun, i think. In Finland we have pesäpallo, but when I was young (1970’s) we still played the old finnish game – kuningaspallo (kingball) – it’s very similar as Oina… 1920 professor Pihkala maked pesäpallo, fixed by kuningaspallo and american baseball.
I wrote much finnish baseball history to my homepage: vessix.kotisivukone.com
It’s in finnish ofcourse. There’s lot of results and stories from history 1922-93…Today’s pesäpallo is not so good as it was, because 1994 the game (9 innings) deviced periods 4+4+1 and winner is team that win most of periods.
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