A Love Letter to Bucharest

Ask me to tell you about home. Ask me about Bucharest and I’ll tell you it’s more of a living soul than a city. It breathes, expanding and contracting at its own pace.

I’ll tell you about its architecture and how it tells a story charged with vivacity, tumult, and change. Walking down the streets you’ll notice how neoclassical villas and eclectically decorated palaces meet the brutalist style of communist-era tower blocks. Yet, contrary to popular belief, it is more than a poor architectural choice. The lack of cohesiveness tells the story of composers, painters, writers, but also of merchants, artisans, and noble families that were once the heart of Bucharest’s cultural life. It tells of communist Romania and its attempt to reconstruct a more egalitarian society, which ended up as a dictatorial regime.

Dacia Boulevard, the main artery in the quarter of the same name, is decorated by buildings, skating between the Parisian, Viennese and the neo-Romanian styles. Bucharest’s inclination for the sleek formality of the French capital merges into the rustic, earthy elegance of the neo-Romanian buildings, with their ornate facades, arched windows, ceramic roofs, and Corinthian columns. The streets have a quiet sentiment to them, charged with an undertone of heritage and a distinctive feel of București.

Ask me to tell you about my home and I’ll tell you about Bucharest’s revival: how it licked its wounds, picked itself up, and started pumping life into its streets again. Calea Victoriei, a boulevard that turns pedestrian during weekends, bursts of excitement in the late evenings, vibrating again with live music and laughter and conversation, after decades of being drenched in silence and fear. Down Amzei Street, there is a garden restaurant whose walls hold the imprint of our laughter and sorrow after a long week. Just two streets down, a little cocktail bar is so well-hidden between two buildings you could almost miss it if not for its twinkling lights and echoes of joy. The adjacent streets are filled with little specialty cafes and tucked-away restaurants that beg to be explored. How much care and emotion has this street seen! How many couples drunk on love held their hands proudly as they rushed to get to their reservation; how many nervous and awkward first dates; how many friends reunited after months of video calls; how many lost souls looking for a distraction. If you sit right between Atheneum and the National Museum of Art at sunset, you’ll see the entire boulevard wrapped in rays of light. Calea Victoriei is a place where you find peace and trepidation in the intimacy of the crowds: it’s magnetic, seductive, inescapable.

Ask me again about my home and I’ll take you to another neighborhood, vastly different, yet equally rich in its vivacity: Cotroceni. In the vicinity of the presidential residence, Cotroceni Palace, and the Romanian Opera, the neighborhood tastes eclectic: from Neo-Romanian style houses, modernist and Art Deco blocks to imposing buildings in Moorish-Florentine, Baroque or Neoclassical style, and neo-Gothic elements. Cotroceni is a window into a version of Bucharest that sank beneath the horizon not too many years ago. A selective neighborhood, it holds an unmistakable inclination towards the Belle Époque and prestige. The best thing you can do in Cotroceni is come during one of their fall yard sales. If the streets hold an antique charm you can almost smell throughout the year, then the yard sale transports you in an alternate world. Though it remains peaceful, the neighborhood gleams with life as people enthusiastically open up their doors to strangers. An amalgamation of their clothes, furniture, books offer a glimpse into Cotroceni’s elegance and grace interlaced with jazz, freshly roasted coffee, and homemade lemonade.

Bucharest is an elderly lady in her vintage two-piece mahogany-coloured suit, smoking a cigarette over black coffee. She is also a woman in her 20’s rushing home from her first art exhibition feature to celebrate her breakthrough with her friends. And a snow-haired widow playing the saxophone in Cișmigiu Park on a Tuesday evening. To me, Bucharest is a microcosm of stories of people losing and finding themselves again in the murmur of the city. If you listen carefully enough, it might just start to whisper its secrets to you. At last, the city shines with pride: it loves and it’s loved again.