History and historical facts discussed over the envelope of a letter sent from Bucharest to Paris in February 1948, just a few weeks after the forced abdication of King Michael of Romania. The envelope contains a two sets of stamps, one from the just ended royal period and another form the newly installed communist regime, constituting a good material witness of a watershed event in Romania’s history.
Valentin Mandache, architectural historian
Considerations on the built heritage of southeast Europe
Valentin Mandache, architectural historian 
Thank you for this – really fascinating! I’m assembling a small collection of King Michael stamps, but none on envelopes so far. In London recently I bought a large book of photos called RUMANIAN ARCHITECTURE, published in Bucharest in 1953. It deliberately does not include the Bucharest modernist/art deco architecture from the 1930s, as it was ‘decadent’; but it does include the Foreign Ministry and Railways Ministry Buildings. The introduction includes a quotation from Gheorghiu-Dej saying that ‘Soviet experience helps us to solve the most difficult problems…in the fields of education, literature, science and the arts’. Ironic…
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The communists liked the Mussolinian style of Foreign Ministry and Transport Department buildings, a sort of convergence in tastes of dictatorships. Many architects that designed Mussolinian during the Carlist and Fascist periods found excellent employment working for the communists’ prestige projects, using similar designs (Horia Maicu, Nicolae Cucu come to mind, but the list is long). Valentin
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How interesting!!!! Happy New Year! Charles + Eleanor, now in Chile, tempm +32 degrees Celsius > http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ssXJtzFOjA&feature=em-subs_digest-vrecs
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Thank you Eleanor! A very happy 2014 for Charlie and you from foggy Bucharest 🙂 Valentin
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