Orient

The chance passers-by through the quiet Cotroceni neighbourhood could discover, at the end of a well tended garden, a two-storey house with no other adornment than its iron-wrought latticework. What was strange was that leaning against the wall separating it from the house

The inauguration of the art collection Beatrice and Hrandt Avakian, held on a torrid day in August 1974, brought together an extremely numerous public. The exceptional interest manifested was owed to the fact that two siblings living in modest conditions, from hand to mouth,

22 Spătarului Street, Bucharest (see also in Romanian with illustration)  The siblings Béatrice and Hrandt Avakian set up their collections independently, nevertheless evincing a shared predilection towards Eastern art, to be accounted for among others, perhaps, by the

(see also in Romanian with illustration) Garabet (Garbis) Avachian (1907-1967) was an eminent violin professor with the Ciprian Porumbescu Conservatoire in Bucharest; among his students may be counted several laureates of international contests. This talented musician undoubtedly

I often meet people who are trying to sell a painting or some other work of art, claiming that it's a part of their collection. They are really mistaken. Every man furnishes his house according to his possibilities and his tastes. A rich man can have in his house paintings

Once, the art lover, strolling along the streets of Bucharest, would stop in front of certain houses – either known to him or not – that confined within their walls innumerable works of art. Around these art works there endured a name, that of the people who had gathered

click here to see film The Peleş Castle, former royal summer residence, today a museum open to numerous visitors from the country and abroad, was built between 1875 and 1914 in two important construction phases. Placed at the foot of the Bucegi Mountains, in the upper

Everybody knows Monet's famous painting, Impression, sunrise. The canvas, considered to be Impressionism's manifest, due to its style and title (the latter was chosen to designate the group of artists who had the same style of painting and were united by the same

Have you noticed the relaxed way in which we actually re-create ourselves in our times off? Dem lieben Gott die Tage stehlen – Germans refer to the waste of time as to a theft committed in the face of God. I remember an episode during my student years, when, at the close

excerpt  Never have I felt more keenly all that separates us from the West than in a summer afternoon spent in the Versailles gardens. In the park full of Greek memories: Apollo's Pool, that of Latona, in which the superposed arrangement of the gardens that mount towards

In the olden times, in the Year of Our Lord 1937, as soon as the vernal wind had started wafting, I would cross the Danube with a handful of companions, to hail the passage of woodcocks in some of the parts of the Dobrudja. We reposed in propitious places, groves and copses,

excerpt Two or three years had passed in a very happy atmosphere, the only years of my childhood that stayed with me clearly. I was 11. Chira was 15 and I stayed with her all the time, with a voluptuousness that I was to understand only later. I followed her, like a dog,