The Bank of Romanian Credit

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Feb 052010
 

Versiune în română

Today’s photograph shows the building of the former Bank of Romanian Credit (Banca de Credit Român in Romanian), located on Stavropoleos Street next to the monastery with the same name. Nowadays the building serves as the headquarters of various public institutions. At the end of the 19th century Bucharest met with a rapidly growing economy and in order to cope with this development lots of banks were founded or opened offices in the streets around the National Bank of Romania, an area bordered by the Calea Victoriei, Stavropoleous, Smârdan and Doamnei Streets. This way a banking district was created within the perimeter of the Old Town, a place that was until then reserved for merchants, inns and monasteries.

Posters

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Feb 042010
 

Versiune în română

I’m not sure if Bucharest has a law about sticking advertisement posters in public places, but if there is one, it’s being safely ignored 😉 In Bucharest you can find posters stuck on everything: on recycling bins or newsstands (as in today’s photograph), covering windows and glass doors of private buildings, on electrical panels and poles, on garbage cans, on bus stations, on all types of walls, on trees and fences. And the list can go on 🙂

On bike lanes

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Feb 022010
 

Versiune în română

Between two and three years ago Bucharest got its own bike lanes. And it wasn’t an easy birth 🙂 First the City Hall tried to ban bicycles in Bucharest using as an excuse the fact that there weren’t any bike lanes! Yes, we’re talking about the most polluted capital in Europe, where every citizen breaths in the air filled with the exhaustion fumes spewed by approximately 1.5 million cars. They met with protests, somehow things got to Brussels, who send back a notification, the authorities removed the ban and started to create bike lanes. And, of course, they did it like nowhere else in the world 🙂 Instead of creating the bike lanes in the first lane of traffic, they drew the bike lanes on the sidewalk, taking from the little space pedestrians had. Two years later, people have still to get used to the presence of bike lanes. Pedestrians walk on them, cars are parked on the bicycle lanes, trees block the way. Still, in my opinion, based on the exact and reliable method of visual observations 🙂 I can tell that the number of bicyclists in Bucharest grew compared to a few years ago. It looks like we’re slowly going in the right direction.

Theme Day: Wood

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Feb 012010
 

Versiune în română

Today is Theme Day at the City Daily Photo community, a monthly event that happens the first day of every month, when all participating blogs will post a picture that relates to the theme day’s description. Today’s theme is: Wood. Click here to view thumbnails for all participants

If you feel tired after walking through the Museum of Romanian Peasant for an hour, you might feel inclined to sit down on the chairs shown in the photograph above. This wouldn’t be advisable, as you might end up being chased around by the army of attendants, who as you can see from the photograph below, have all different kinds of weapons at their disposal 🙂

Museum of the Romanian Peasant, part 2

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Jan 312010
 

Versiune în română

What makes this museum special is the way the collection is displayed, less like a museum and more like an art gallery. Objects are not behind glass cases but displayed freely and the display information is hand written on pieces of paper or illustrated by sketches. This somehow cuts the distance between the viewer and the objects, making the impact of the displays greater, more personal. It’s certainly different than other museums I’ve been to. The vision belongs to the museum’s first director after 1990, painter Horia Bernea, and to one of his main collaborators Irina Nicolau. Under their guidance the Museum of Romanian Peasant won the the European Museum of the Year Award in 1996, the first museum in Eastern Europe to be granted this honor.

Museum of the Romanian Peasant

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Jan 302010
 

Versiune în română

The Museum of Romanian Peasant is one of my favourite museums in Bucharest. It houses, as the name suggests, a large collection of objects used by Romanian peasants: pottery, textiles, traditional costumes, icons and other religious artifacts, pieces of furniture, carpets etc as well as photographs documenting the customs of rural life. Today’s photographs show the red-brick facade of the building. The museum was founded in 1906 under the name of Ethnographic and National Art Museum and was housed temporarily at another location. Construction to the present building started in 1912, was stopped in 1916 and restarted in 1932. It was completed in 1941, 29 years after it was started. The building is the project of architect Nicolae Ghika Budeşti who designed it as an illustration of the neo-Romanian style, very popular in Bucharest at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1953, the communists “liberated” the building, turning it into a museum dedicated to the history of the Communist Party and sending the collection away. In 1990, after the Romanian Revolution, the collection returned home.

The Impaler’s Castle

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Jan 272010
 

Versiune în română

In spite of its medieval look, the castle in today’s photograph is actually not that old. The famous Vlad the Impaler (Vlad Ţepeş in Romanian) didn’t live in it or for that matter live to see it. But if he did live to see it, maybe it would have been a familiar sight, because the castle is supposed to be inspired by one of Vlad’s main fortresses, the Poenari Castle. This similarity is the reason the tower in the photo is called Ţepeş Castle. It was in fact built in 1906 with the occasion of the “General Exhibition of Romania” (also named “Jubilee National Exhibition”), an event modelled after the World Fair organized in Paris in 1900. The event took place in Carol I Park and was intended to show the progresses made by Romania under the leadership of King Carol I. The castle is in fact a water tower, 23 meters tall, 9 meters in diameter. Near the top it has a platform from where one can admire the panorama. It was build after the plans of architect Scarlat Petculescu. After WWI the castle served as a military garrison for the soldier’s guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier which is located nearby. Since 2004 it serves as the headquarters of the National Office for the Memory of the Heroes. At the present moment the tower is undergoing renovation.

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