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Suspicious Fires

The house at 8, Visarion St. In recent years, many owners of monument mansions have deliberately left them to decay, or have set fire to them in order to be able to demolish them – Assan’s mill devastated by suspicious fire.  Culture Minister Adrian Iorgulescu has

Michel Bührer: Cannibal City

Michel Bührer: Bucharest A Cannibal City and White Billboards exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art, 10-11 2008 Bucharest, a “Little Paris” of the ghettoThe exhibition of the Swiss Journalist Michel Bührer, Bucharest, a Cannibal City/White Billboards

Dazzling

excerpt Beyond this second row of buildings, the town sprawled out to the horizon, covering half the window with an increasingly minced, confusing, indistinct, random mixture of the vegetal and architectural, with poplars’ spears soaring up here and there, and strange

Blizzard In Bucharest

a fragment from The Blind, Chapter Two of Corpuri de iluminat/ Dark Bodies Through Sfântul Ştefan, beyond the old Height and over the tramline in Bărăţiei, a phanariot and decayed Bucharest drained under the snow; a balcony fallen onto its side reminds you that once,

Souls For Sale

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

A Showcase For Kalodont

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,

Nature And Architecture: The Parks And Gardens Of The Capital

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

The History Of Nothing: Contemporary Architecture And Public Space In Romania

Richard Rogers Partnership proposal, 1996People's House (Parliament) After 1989: Methods of researching the built environmentResearching Communist architecture is a tricky endeavor in contemporary Romania, where some major actors of that era are still alive, some even

The Eroticized Universe

The Bucharest Surrealist Group1939-1947* […] Madness, black humor, dreams, eroticism, revolt: if one cannot speak of Unu (One) and Alge (Algae) as surrealist magazines in the strict sense, these themes indicate however the increasing attraction of a number of Romanian

Yesterday Will Be Another Day

I wonder if nature always plays the same game (Einstein) Of course I was coming from sleep, how else is a day supposed to start? However, I didn't know much about the world I was coming from. On the other hand, the world I had landed in should have been very familiar

The Impossible Oasis

The wire that I had failed to see hit me below my knees. The earth turned, the boles propped against the stars somersaulted and I no longer heard the whistles. The red bells started to toll. Whipped up by the rain, the smell of weed and death that had simply been the breath

The Man In My Dream

In short?In short, right now, as soon as you get home, pack up your things. . . Tomorrow morning, on my way to the station, I'll drop by for five minutes: I'm gonna drag you along! Fifteen days of quietness, of fresh air, after a whole summer in this inferno will