Europe

Like most people living and working in Bucharest, I've often wondered what it would be like to live in any other European city, to actually be surrounded by civilized human beings and not to collect a ton of dust on your shoes and clothes after a day's trip to

I once saw some Romanian thieves on a bus in Rome and I thought they're just bad publicity for us, but every cloud has its silver lining: maybe this way we'll get rid of them, maybe they'll go and steal from richer people. A cop confirmed that over the past

Bucharest is a city that is difficult to describe, and difficult is a term that tends to suggest the word impossible. Many of us have probably at least once in our lifetime been in the situation of talking about the city that we live in. And, just as probable, among the

from left: Antiques store on Covaci St. ; National Bank on Lipscani St. ; Victoria department store; Dimbovitza river. The navel of the city: one couldn’t find a better name. There was once an umbilical cord. Through it, Bucur’s shepherds village used to receive, no

I used to play this game when I was a child, I played it so often that, from one day to the next, I always remembered to keep some leaves of grass, small leaves or even an entire plant, root and all, in my pockets, socks or sleeves. Little children played it too, later on.

Well, then, Dilema Veche intends to host a series of comments on the state of the city in which we live, to which some of us are bound, by birth, others by a life experience that is getting longer and longer, and which we want to defend against the aggressive attempts to

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.

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,