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
A heatwave doesn't just change Bucharest's temperature. It changes the way people inhabit the city. They walk slower, talk less, instinctively seek shade, and seem to burn through their patience faster than at any other time of year. After a few days of nearly 40 degrees, the same intersection, the... Read more
Every summer, Bucharest sends tens of thousands of people into fields, forests and old aristocratic estates on the outskirts of the city. They pay a few hundred lei, spend three or four days in the heat, sleep very little and return to work on Monday morning with their voices gone. Then they do it a... Read more
There's a sound that replaced another one. The old one was the sound of summer through an open window: voices, cars, footsteps on asphalt, neighborhood dogs, sometimes a radio. The new one is a mechanical hum, constant, coming from outside — the compressors of outdoor air conditioning units, mounted... Read more
The story of Romania's longest-lived confectionery brand begins not in Bucharest, but in Timișoara, in a small candy workshop opened in 1890.If you grew up in communist Romania, you know exactly the taste we're talking about: bitter chocolate with rum-flavored cream filling, a tricolor wrapper with... Read more