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Yellow and blue streetcars, princely coaches, churlish carts and bikes and a lot of folks on foot…From so many streets and ways, like on as many arms of a huge river waves upon waves of people are flowing as if into a boisterous sea, unto the barrier at the end of the

Volume I, 1871 - 1884 The Christmas of 1871? My young age then was so eagerly waiting for it. By 10 o'clock the night of the Eve, the shrill voices of the carolers would resound all over Bucharest. In those days the carolers were children from the edge of town, children

Walking around the city arm in arm with literary recollections… Laying on façades invisible memorial plates with quotes in verse or prose… Experiencing live the sensation of osmosis between fiction and reality… Feeling literature become history, and history – literature…

excerptsThe Beginnings With the passage of time the ancient road was called by sundry names: lane, bridge, promenade – as if it needed any name or title, this street of streets whose reign over the city goes back two hundred years. Victory Promenade! The Nation's

Bucharest became the capital of Wallachia in the middle of the sixteenth century in preference to the earlier sub‑Carpathian capitals of Câmpulung, Curtea de Argeş and Târgovişte. It became the capital of the united Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia

excerpts In the second half of the 17th century, inns emerged in Bucharest. They later formed a very important chapter in the Bucharest economy of the 17th century and of the first half of the 18th century, and they made an important contribution to the development of the

A thousand years ago on the spot where Bucharest stands today there rose a town called Perun; this Perun was the god of fire and thunder with the ancient Slavs, featured with a golden face, silver hair and beard. It replaced the Greeks' Zeus and the Roman Jove. The

In the visual arts, the laugh, the ridicule and caricature have a certain regime, which is rather different from the one developed in literature, mainly because it is an expression of criticism and contempt much more immediate and politically engaged. Starting in Germany

Emptyyyy bottles! Buyyyyyyyyin'! This dramatic call, like that of the ancestors, which we have all heard at one time or another in Bucharest slums, reminded me of what happened to a friend of mine – it could be a comic thing, if it was not tragic – who went to Sovata

It was common knowledge that Iacint Manoil was a lady-killer. He was so ugly that they were impressed. And so direct in his stupidity that he came over as honest. Like a millstone. He was an actor. Only those very beautiful or as ugly as sin can make a career in this profession.

excerpt Lying on the hot tile floor, Brave Leader was reaching back and scratching his ass with the Romanian people. What he lovingly called the Romanian people was in fact a tiny little bathroom brush with ivory engravings, which he never parted with, and liked to have

excerpts Episode no. 33At the Vizier[1] Meanwhile, not long after the crescent had entered a Christian cloud, much to the heathens' grief, three men's shadows on three horses' shadows were more like crawling than riding towards the vizier's palace.