In period photographs, interwar Romania has the air of an urban Sunday, with neatly placed hats, uniforms with shiny buttons, gentlemen in stiff suits, ladies wearing gloves, serious schoolchildren, and clerks who seem to have signed ordinary documents with the same gravity with which the country’s... Read more
The history of a city marks moments when everything seems to explode at once: people arrive in waves, houses spring up like mushrooms after rain, new streets are drawn over former garbage pits with a speed that leaves you speechless, and so on. Bucharest in the interwar period experienced exactly su... Read more
Today’s Bucharest looks like a capital that has almost completely forgotten the military defense system built at the end of the 19th century. Among ring roads, industrial areas, military land, residential neighborhoods, and constructions that appeared much later, the traces of a large-scale defensiv... Read more
Bucharest hides beneath its layers of concrete and heavy traffic a number of stories worth telling out loud, especially when you are walking through the city with children and they ask you why “that” building looks strange or what the deal is with the name of the street you are on. Because, yes, kid... Read more
Present-day Bucharest, this fascinating mixture of concrete, glass and the permanent desire to get somewhere on time, hides beneath its layers of asphalt a liquid history that few people can still perceive today.If we look carefully at the city map, beyond the buildings crowding together to catch a... Read more
Bucharest has a few very clear vegetal obsessions. The linden tree, for fragrance and nostalgia. The chestnut tree, for beautiful photographs and leaves that look as if they belong in an old schoolbook. The plane tree, for wide boulevards, disciplined alignments and that impression of a European cit... Read more
In most cases, Bucharest around 1900 reaches us dressed in sepia. It has horses, carriages, stiff-brimmed hats, serious mustaches, and ladies with salon-ready gazes, all caught in a world that seems to have lived exclusively in shades of tea left forgotten on the table. Color, however, appears more... Read more
You walk through Piața Victoriei and stop at the corner where Calea Victoriei makes its solemn entrance into history. You take out your phone, check the map, get your bearings. Everything seems natural. But have you ever wondered how you would have done this in the 19th century, when streets had no... Read more
You pass by its wrought-iron fence every day, perhaps even cutting through its alleys on your way to university or the office, yet you probably ignore the fact that beneath your feet lies the former “lake of Dura the Merchant.” In the 18th century, the place where today you try to dodge pigeons was... Read more
Going to a confectionery in the Bucharest of the '70s or '80s was an act that went beyond simply satisfying a craving. It was a small escape, an incursion into a parallel universe where the ashen gray of the apartment blocks and planned daily life was replaced by the gloss of chocolate fondant, the... Read more