Phanariot Bucharest had little in common with today’s city of boulevards, office buildings and impatient traffic lights. In the 18th century, the capital resembled a sprawling market town, crossed by wooden-paved roads and scattered with boyar estates, inns, gardens, churches and neighbourhoods that... Read more
In the political history of Bucharest, the nineteenth century has the atmosphere of a heavy room in which someone has suddenly opened the windows and let in, together with the cold air, all the anxieties of modern Europe. On one side stood old boyars, regulations, foreign consuls, Russian and Ottoma... Read more
At first glance, Bucharest seems like a city with a rather administrative relationship with water. The Dâmbovița flows obediently between concrete banks, the Colentina hides under bridges and between neighborhoods, while the lakes appear on the map as blue patches that somehow escaped the city’s obs... Read more
Communist Bucharest could sometimes be read directly in its shop windows. In the city center, the large department stores displayed their sections, the promise of a modern, orderly life, with curtains, fabrics, crystalware, electronic watches, and clothes “in the latest fashion.” In the neighborhood... Read more
Old Bucharest can be read through its palaces, inns, neighbourhoods, and churches, but Constantin C. Giurescu proposes, in The History of Bucharest, a less festive and far more honest route: through bread, meat, and water. This is where the city appears in its practical form, with the daily concerns... Read more
Whether we like to admit it or not, Bucharest has a major weakness for disappearances. It loses its houses, gardens, cinemas, old signs, shop windows, taverns, markets, passageways, trams, and sometimes even its hills, then seems genuinely surprised when someone asks where they all went. The capital... Read more
Bucharest is a city that changes its face at a speed often suspicious, like a character who keeps stepping onto the stage wearing a different hat but the same hurried air. Over the past 300 years, it has been burned, shaken, flooded, bombed, contaminated, rebuilt, redesigned, widened, demolished and... Read more
A Bucharest resident, exhausted after a week spent navigating the capital’s infernal traffic, often seeks refuge at the National Theatre, hoping for a comfortable escape from everyday life. Instead, he finds a one-way ticket to a muddy trench in Bosnia in 1993, a deeply unfriendly space where logic... Read more
The Bucharest of communist childhood turned small things into true domestic epics. A burst ball, patched with Scotch tape, could keep an entire apartment stairwell busy. A matchbox became a garage. A queue for oranges, toward the end of the eighth decade, could enter a family’s memory as a great bat... Read more
Today’s Bucharest seems built from hurried asphalt, irritable concrete, and cafés that appear overnight with a minimalist logo and European-city prices. But old Bucharest, the one described by Constantin C. Giurescu in The History of Bucharest, breathed in an entirely different way. Before the city... Read more