The clocks will go back this weekend, meaning an extra hour of sleep, and the beginning of the winter period.
Most European countries including Romania employ Daylight Saving Time. The purpose of DST is to make better use of the light, essentially allowing an extra hour of daylight in the summer evenings.
The practise of changing the clocks goes back more than 200 years, but wasn’t widely used until World War I.
Only Belarus and Iceland don’t employ DST.
The clock change occurs on the last Sunday of October this year, October 27, in the early hours of the morning.
The clock change will mean the period of Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) and Romania will be two hours ahead of GMT. The clock change is a twice-yearly event and happens once in the autumn and once in the spring.
Earlier this year, the EU voted to scrap daylight saving time by 2021.
People who live near the equator experience day and night at nearly the same length all year round, but elsewhere the farther north or south you go, the winter is darker and summer lighter.
In the winter one of the advantages of changing the clocks is many people and businesses save energy and money as the morning is lighter.
The idea of daylight saving was first conceived by Benjamin Franklin during his visit as an American delegate in Paris in 1784, in an essay, “An Economical Project.”
