In the block neighborhoods built during the 1970s, a playground usually meant a swing made from welded pipe, a slide with rusting rails, and a climbing frame built for durability rather than for children. The sand around it mixed with dirt within a season, and the paint chipped off in the first year... Read more
Over the past few months, a handful of new restaurants have opened in Bucharest that break the usual mold. What ties them together is the story behind each one: an old building, a chef with an international track record, a team that already knows how to build a successful venue. Merlin26 is one of t... Read more
In Constanța, an apartment listed for sale sits on the market for 78 days, on average, before finding a buyer. In Brașov, slightly less, 72. Bucharest, by contrast, is the only city that drops below the two-month mark, even though prices there run higher than the rest of the country on average. One... Read more
A Bucharest woman in 1850 gave birth at home, with the neighborhood midwife beside her, no alternative on the table. Hospitals existed, but there were few of them, reserved for serious cases — birth remained, for most women, a family matter rather than a medical procedure. Today, a few hundred meter... Read more
A locomotive engineer, one of the best-paid workers in interwar Bucharest, earned around 850 lei a month. A sought-after prostitute from the same period could take home more than double that in a single good night. A month's wages against a few hours of work: that comparison says more about the econ... Read more
In 1993, a group of young musicians gathered in Bucharest for a classical music competition called the Jeunesses Musicales International Festival. It had none of the energy of a summer festival — it was an academic affair, all juries and recitals, built for a narrow audience of specialists and music... Read more
On July 25, 1937, the newspaper România wrote about a summer day that turned the capital into an oven: the pavement went scorching hot, the city's walls soaked up heat, and residents, according to the reporter, spent the hours in outright misery. The mercury climbed steadily from dawn on, and by noo... Read more
Alongside the emotions that came with every family's individual result, the 2026 National Assessment (Evaluarea Națională) also produced a broader picture of how Bucharest's schools performed as a group. According to calculations by the BacPlus platform, based on data published by the Ministry of Ed... Read more
The General Council voted on Tuesday, June 30, to approve a programme to remove graffiti and illegal posters from Bucharest's protected zones. The vote was nearly unanimous — 43 in favour, none against, two abstentions — a sign that, administratively, the issue is no longer up for debate. The harder... Read more
The past few summers have made one thing clear: European cities need to learn how to handle huge volumes of water in increasingly short periods of time. Extreme weather events are no longer the exception — they're the trend, and Bucharest is no different from the rest of Europe's major capitals. It... Read more