Miorița

thumb|Obverse and reverse|Reverse of a commemorative 50 [[Moldovan lei coin dedicated to Miorița|alt=A coin face featuring a shepherd sitting on the ground playing a flute. A sheep looks up to a round astral object in the sky. A curved line on the background suggests a mountain range. The word MIORIȚA in an archaic print type follows the curve of the coin edge.]] "Miorița" (ad. mioriță, lit. 'The Little Ewe Lamb'), also transliterated as "Mioritza", is an old Romanian pastoral ballad considered to be one of the most important pieces of Romanian folklore. It has numerous versions with quite different content, but the literary version by poet Vasile Alecsandri (1850) is the best known and praised. This had previously been the oldest known written text, arousing suspicion that the poet may have authored it entirely, until the discovery was made of a version from the 1790s.

== Etymology == The Romanian word mioriță, with diminutive suffix -ița, is the diminutive form of '''' meaning 'ewe lamb', therefore, the literal meaning is "little ewe lamb". Some have translated the title as "The Lambkin".