Pita

Go take a walk down the boulevards of Bucharest these days and breathe deeply. With your nostrils widely open. What a wonderful scent of spring! Without feeling it, in this package made up of the perfume of snowdrops and violets, you have just breathed in some sulfur oxides,

Peeled off plaster, broken windows, rats scuttling at ease day and night. And above all, the filth. Complete and utter filth reigning supreme over a piece of downtown Bucharest. But also over a piece of our past. The only part still living is the sign above the door, reading

Red bricks are the distinctive feature of this construction, next to the white rosette, a huge round window above the main portal: thereby, the reader has most certainly recognized the Archbishopric of Saint Joseph's Cathedral. It is one of the landmark buildings in

from left: Old Court ruins, Manuc's Inn, Lime-Tree Inn galleries, passageway on Lipscani St. The other day I was wandering through the Historical Center of Bucharest, the capital city, that is, the place from where the sun rises for all of us Romanians. The name –

I no longer love Bucharest. I'm no longer hoping something can be done about this dump of Europe An interview with Mircea Cărtărescu by Ion Longin Popescu Slowly but surely, the old, historic Bucharest – the little that was left after Ceauşescu's demolishing

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

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.

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