Ed

I hadn't wanted to leave Bucharest during the NATO summit (2-4 April, 2008). Why should I have left? I'd have left after and not before it. To me Bucharest seems to be now exactly how it should be all the time. Less traffic in the center, more traffic on the outskirts

As I was translating with much esteem Mr. Vintila Mihailescu's text entitled Neo-Western-Supremacism, it suddenly dawned on me: the inyourpocket presentation he discusses, one fascinated with primitive Romania, shows an attitude somewhat similar to that of Englishman

Born in Botosani (then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire) in 1850, Mihai Eminescu is widely regarded as Romania's finest romantic writer, and is recognized as both Romania and Moldova's national poet. Most Romanians can recite line after line of his work, the

Just another day in Bucharest, in the year 2006, in summer. My friend, an architect, who accompanies me on my visit to a “bedroom suburb”, feels shivers down his spine. Maybe it is because he doesn’t like “the poetry of concrete”. Or maybe he has a problem with

They used to call it little Paris for its French-style buildings and atmosphere. But now Bucharest looks like a little globalization of various epochs. The trouble is that you do not have to dig vertically for those epochs like archeologists, because builders have amassed

Revolution Square Last time when Bucharest was flooded, when in some districts the water rose as high as half of the Dacia car parked on the sidewalk, none of the Romanian reporters or newscasters failed to draw a comparison between our capital and a “European” one.

Unlike Poles, Czechs or Hungarians, most Romanians were left with something after communism: a home in an apartment building or a house with a front yard, a villa if your father worked for the Securitate (the Romanian secret services), a piece of land or just some land in

Clockwise from top left: Revolution Square, Maniu statue, Coposu bust, Hilton Athenee Palace, Kretzulescu Church, University Library, Ataturk bust, Carol I equestrian statue. Post-revolutionary administrators of the capital city have managed to turn the birth place of the

Athenaeum and CEC Palace on Calea Victoriei We like to refer to the “exterior” whenever we analyze local problems and the present day situation in our country can only prove us right. Starting with the ambition of political Europeanization and ending with the famous

Gregor von Rezzori has never been part of Romanian-German literature, a fact regretted even beyond his death. The writer, who was born in 1914 in Czernowitz and died in 1998 in his home in Florence, would have, nonetheless, met some of the conditions for qualification. But,

clockwise from top left (see also What's old in Gallery): The Athenaeum, The National Bank, The Palace of Justice, CEC Bank, Romanian Peasant Museum, Domnita Balasa Church, Gheorghe Lazar School, University (detail). (Lucrări publice din vremea lui Carol I. Acte

Cismigiu gardens, Icoanei park, Kiseleff park (see also The green within in Gallery). Many of Bucharest’s gardens and parks, which no longer exist because of extensive urban reorganising, were shaped as the aristocracy tastefully redesigned the open space around their