Crown Princess Marie describes, in a letter (October 3rd 1895) to her mother Marie, Duchess of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, the inauguration of the great iron bridgeacross the Danube:
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Category: Industrial
19th c stone brige in the Principality of Moldova
This picturesque c19th pre-railway age bridge is located in the environs of Crasna in the county of Vaslui in eastern Romania. It is known as Podul Doamnei (Lady’s Bridge), spanning about 90 metres over a former riverbed of the river Barlad, which now flows nearby within embankments. The structure dates from 1841, at the height of the Russian Empire’s protectorate over the Danubian Principalities of Moldova and Wallachia. It represents a vestige of the first modern road building programme in the old Moldovan Principality, promoted by Michael Sturdza, its then reigning prince.
The bridge was on an important commercial road, linking the principality’s highland centres in the Carpathians, where a relative majority of the population lived with crop producing and animal husbandry lowlands. There was also an important local traffic between some of the “itinerant” capitals of the c15th – c17th princes of Moldova, towns as Husi, Barlad or Vaslui, from a time when that institution functioned as a travelling princely court. The emergence of the railway age in Romania, the state that emerged through the union of Moldova and Wallachia in the aftermath of Crimea War, gave a fatal blow to this road’s commercial traffic and the local economy that it sustained. As a consequence nearby villages disappeared, the population moving to more prosperous ones along the railway. Diminished traffic and landslides made the authorities in the mid c20th to change the course of the road and finally in 1981 to close the bridge and declare it an architectural monument, which is still its status today.
Its designer was major Singurov, a Russian army engineer attached to the Moldavian princely court, in charge with the public works, during the protectorate of the Tsarist Empire over the principality. That was a period of reforms that marked the onset of Westernisation within the Danubian Principalities under the aegis of Russia, known as the Organic Statute (Regulamentul Organic in Romanian) administration, which lasted for two decades, between 1834 and 1854, when the onset of the Crimean War put an end to that relationship. It is somehow ironic on account of the traditional anti-Russian discourse in Romania that the Russians were those who first implemented the benefits of Western cultural, constitutional and economic advancement in this region dominated for centuries by the Ottoman Empire and its civilization. That remarkable process, which nowadays is forgotten or swept under the rug, was magisterially detailed by the American historian Barbara Jelavich in her book Russia and the Formation of the Romanian National State, 1821 – 1878 (Cambridge University Press, 1984). The Doamnei Bridge is thus a beautiful architectural relic of that epoch of upheavals and transformations.
Prince Michael Sturdza (1794 – 1884), who ordered the construction of the bridge, was a prominent personality of the time, influenced by the ideas of the Enlightenment, and an able administrator. He was also the first ruler in the Danubian Principalities to free the Gypsies (those owned by the court and monasteries, not by landlords) from their centuries old enslavement. The bridge was part of an ample road building programme of the forth and the fifth decade of the c19th initiated to stimulate the Moldovan economy, financed with proceeds from grain exports, the main revenue making activity in this region until the emergence of the oil industry at the beginning of the c20th.
The architectural style of the bridge is quite utilitarian, although on broad lines is baroque, a style associated with the Westernisation process in Russia itself. The most conspicuous baroque like elements are the decorative panels at the centre of the bridge parapets that contain dedicatory inscriptions on each interior side in Romanian and Latin languages respectively.
The northern side inscription is in Romanian, rendered in a peculiar transition alphabet, a mix between Cyrillic and Latin, another instance of the intense Europeanisation drive at that time, when the Romanians aimed to shed not only the Ottoman influences, but also the Slavic heritage of the Middle Ages, a continuous source of conflict with the Russian overlords.
The inscription reads as: “This bridge is edified by the orders of the high prince [voyvode] Michael Sturdza of Moldova, in his 8th regning year and built under the ministry of Mr. logophete Constantin Sturdza, has been opened to the travelling public on 8 November [Julian calendar] 1841” (the original Romanian text is as follows: “Acest pod este construit din poronca pre inalt Domn Mihail Grigoriu Sturza V.V. [voyvode] domn Terei Moldovei in al VIII an al domniei ?sale si savarsinduse supt ministeria d log Const Sturza sau deschis pentru călători în 8 Noem 1841″).
The inscription in Latin is on the southern side at the centre of the bridge, mirroring the first one, and contains a translation of the Romanian text detailed above.
The Latin text: “Pons haec extructa est Jussu Serenissimi Domini Michaelis Grigoriu Stordza, principis regnatis Moldaviae, in octavo anno regiminis sui. Ad finem quae deducia Ministerio D. Logoteta Const. Stu[rdza]. Patefacia Via locibus 8 Novembris 1841” (source: Podul Doamnei din Chitscani). Both panels are crowned by a coat of arms of the Principality of Moldova, nowadays badly damaged.
The bridge was not a small feat of engineering accomplishment for this underdeveloped principality that functioned under sovereignty of the Ottoman Empire and the protectorate of Russia, in effect a double periphery of those mighty powers, far away from their bustling and flourishing imperial cores. The local economy, industry and also architecture will really take off only after the region’s international trade routes, which were represented by the Danube waterway and the Black Sea navigation, will be completely freed following the Russian – Turkish War of 1877 – ’78 and achievement of Romania’s independence, recognised by the Treaty of Berlin that concluded that war.
The construction is oriented on a West – East direction which exposes it to a peculiar sort of weathering. Its northern façades are darkened by the strong Siberian origin winds and precipitations that come via the system of open plains and hills linking Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The southern oriented façades are less weathered, preserving more from the original stone texture and colour. The stone used is a local yellow – grey soft limestone of Sarmatian age, type of rocks close at hand in this area of Europe, spread from Transylvania to southern Ukraine and Russia’s Black Sea region.
The bridge is said to have had initially just three arches built, with another two added during renovation works in the late c19th.
The width of the road supported by the structure is about 9 metres, which could take quite an sizeable traffic, a testimony of the intense circulation of goods and persons of those times.
The Lady’s Bridge (Podul Doamnei in Romanian) is now a a lonesome and imposing historical structure in the middle of nowhere, as this Google Maps satellite image corroborates.
Willys jeep in Bucharest house yard
I encountered this vehicle, which is a Willys Jeep, the World War II iconic jeep (the make is embossed on the engine bonnet), in Domenii quarter of Bucharest, itself an area built up in Art Deco, Modernist and Neo-Romanian architectural styles roundabout the great conflagration. The army car, which is excellently restored and kept, suits thus wonderfully the surrounding architectural designs. I am curious how the the vehicle was acquired by its actual owner, as this type of US Army motor is rare in Romania, a country that was on America’s opposite camp during both the war itself (with the exception of the period 23 August ’44 – 9 May ’45) and the Cold War that followed. I know that some of these jeeps were captured from the Red Army on the eastern front, which were part of the US support of the Soviet Union against Germany and its allies, transported by sea to the Russian held Arctic port of Murmansk and then distributed on the huge front-line, some of them ending up as captured material as far south as Romania. King Michael, the sovereign during wartime and a passionate car collector, has among his collection a Jeep of that origins. I also believe that this particular vehicle could have been acquired in the last decade or so on the open antiquities market (ebay, etc.) once Romania got rid of the communist dictatorship and joined again the more normal world.
Marmorosch Blank Bank’s doorway maker
I found another old architectural ironwork company plate, this one one the grand doorway of the Neo-Romanian style Marmorosch Blank Bank building in Lipscani area of Bucharest. The plate reads as “J. Haug, Str. Isvor, No. 8, Bucuresci”, the spelling indicating the writing fashions of the 1910s, which corresponds with the period when the building was erected. The metalwork is of highest quality and is easily restorable, although the edifice, one of the most magnificent Neo-Romanian style architectures still in existence, is now left derelict in the very centre of Romania’s capital, in danger of irreversible deterioration, a telling testimony of the lack of care and even awareness of the Romanian authorities and public about their diminishing architectural heritage.
Historic Houses of Romania checking out the forts of Bucharest
I undertook, some month ago, an exploratory trip around Bucharest, visiting a number of the more accessible forts and batteries built in the late c19th in the reign of King Carol I. That was in the perspective of organising there a specialist history and architecture tour (by appointment only) in one of the week end days next month (October ’11). The designer and supervisor of those huge military works, some of the largest in late Victorian Europe, is the Belgian general Henri Alexis Brialmont, famous also as a designer and builder of the first modern fortifications that defended Liège and Antwerp in his home-country. The remarkable defence complex surrounding Romania’s capital, now disused and left unmaintained, stretches over a circumference of 72km, containing a series of 18 forts placed at a distance of 4km from each other with another 18 batteries placed in between the forts. Bellow is a gif composition photograph of me posing inside Popesti fort in the south-east of Bucharest’s fortification ring, location marked with a red circle in the second image. The third image is a Google Earth satellite view of the city, on which the fort ring is marked, while the last image is a scheme of one of those forts.
You are invited to register your interest in visiting some representative examples of these forts and batteries in the comments section of this article or by email-ing me (v.mandache@gmail.com). VM
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I endeavour through this series of periodic articles to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural history and heritage.
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If you plan acquiring or selling a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in sourcing and transacting the property, specialist research, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contact page of this weblog.
Filaret – the first train station of Bucharest
Yesterday I organised another architectural history and photography tour, the third one so far, which took place in Carol Park area. One of the landmarks viewed was Filaret train station, the first such public transport facility of Bucharest, a terminus of the first railway on the territory of the then Romania, inaugurated in 1869, linking the capital with the Danube port of Giurgiu. This railway line was vitally important for Bucharest, a city on the threshold of an explosive development after it recently became the capital of the newly established state of Romania, one of the fortuitous geopolitical consequences of the Crimean war, among multiple other factors, of that period. The then Prince Carol I, the future monarch of the country, a meticulous military man, well trained in the management methods typical of the industrial revolution in his native Germany, was personally involved in this essential project for Bucharest’s infrastructure. The locals were thus able to travel and do business much faster, by quickly going to the Danube and embark on steamboats that went all the way to the Black Sea and Istanbul or to Vienna and from there by train to Paris. Also the railway was a lifeline for the city, which was now able to easily bring or send goods to and from most of Europe and the Mediterranean. The flamboyant Little Paris architecture (what I call the French c19th historicist styles provincially interpreted in Romania) emerged in a fulminant manner after the railway came into use. The station functioned until 1960 when it was transformed in a coach station and its rails dismantled. Today is still functioning as a coach station and the building with much of its old early Victorian infrastructure deteriorated and much abused. There are discussions to transform it in a railway museum, but as most such type of public projects in Romania, it will probably take another one or even two decades until something will emerge from that proposal. Until then, Filaret train station, an important industrial architecture identity marker of Bucharest, will continue to face indifference from both public and authorities, abuse and decay. Bellow are some image of how the building looks nowadays, covered with modern paint and plaster and a myriad of billboards and other injuries brought about by the Romanian wild capitalism of the post-communist era.
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I endeavour through this series of periodic articles to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural history and heritage.
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If you plan acquiring or selling a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in sourcing and transacting the property, specialist research, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
Unusual conical structure
I encountered the unusual structure in the photograph above during my trip to Campina last autumn. It reminded me like a flashback from my childhood of similar structures which I seen in my very early years in some Romanian train stations: steep conical or ogee profile concrete roofs, a quite terrifying sight for a child, usually sitting next to the trains station main building. Most of them were demolished in the last two or three decades and probably only a handful still exists now. From what I remember, the locals there said that these unusual constructions were bomb shelters designed in such a way to repel the deadly blows and shrapnel of airplane launched bombs. Many Romanian cities, especially the oil towns such as Campina, have seen a great deal of bombing from the Allies as well as from the Luftwaffe during the Second World War and was not a real surprise the building of bomb shelters to alleviate somehow that menace. I am however not entirely convinced of their role as bomb-shelter, especially if you notice the large windows from the base of the example presented above. They look strangely similar with the overnight prisons, the “lock ups“, built in c18th and early c19th in small English towns before the establishment of the state police force. Could this structure from Romania have had the same role during the war time or the early Stalinist period? Perhaps some of my readers have more precise information about the role of that type of highly unusual structure!
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I endeavor through this daily series of daily articles to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural history and heritage.
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If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in sourcing the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
Drobeta Turnu Severin: Fin de Siècle architecture and Roman heritage in south western Romania
The Danube’s Iron Gate gorge system separates the Carpathian and the Balkan mountain ranges, controlling the main waterway, and thus one of the important trade routes, between Central Europe and the Balkan peninsula. The city of Drobeta Turnu Severin sits immediately downstream from the Iron Gate and thus is excellently positioned to benefit from the traffic passing on the great river. Its history can be traced down to the period when the area was inhabited by Celtic and Dacian tribes, the place name “Drobeta” being probably, in my opinion, a Celtic origin toponym having similar roots with that of Drogheda in Ireland, which means “bridge of the ford”. In fact one of the most audacious civil engineering and architectural master-works of the Roman Empire, the Emperor Trajan’s bridge over the Danube (inaugurated in 105 CE), immortalised on the Trajan’s Column in Rome, both built by the architect Apollodorus of Damascus, stood in the vicinity of the city at a place where the river has one of the lowest depths in the area, which tallies with the meaning of the word mentioned for the Irish case. The “Turnu Severin” part of the city’s name came into use during medieval times and it means a northern (“Severin”) located tower (“Turnu”) provided fortification, originating probably in the old-Romanian language of early Middle Ages. An abstract depiction of the ancient Trajan’s bridge is presented bellow on the reverse of a bronze Roman coin, sestertius (RIC 569-C), issued by the emperor to commemorate its inauguration.
After the fall of the Roman imperial rule in the region, Drobeta flourished again economically and as an urban centre comparable with the Roman times, only eighteen centuries later, in the reign of Prince, later King, Carol I of Romania (1866 -1914). That was the result of freeing the Danube navigation in the second part of the c19th both physically by the blowing up of the dangerous underwater rocks from the Danube’s cataracts at Cazane, upstream Turnu Severin, and politically by wars against a dying out Ottoman empire, the erstwhile overlord of the region, and subsequent international treaties. Those circumstances allowed the navigation of large modern vessels on the river course, which allowed goods to easily travel from Vienna as far as the Aegean Sea or grains from the Wallachian plains to reach markets in the heartland of Europe.
Drobeta Turnu Severin greatly profited from the important trading opportunities generated by its favourable geographical location and those auspicious political circumstances prevalent at the Fin de Siècle. A remnant of those glorious times is the large warehouse pictured in the photograph above, today left neglected as the region is currently adversely affected by the actual recession and government maladministration. The city was also endowed in that period with beautiful buildings, a very small sample being presented in the images bellow.
The usual architecture of those houses is the Little Paris style, which represents French c19th historicist styles, interpreted in a picturesque provincial manner in Romania from the “La Belle Époque” period.
The edifices presented here are quite large by any standard and richly ornamented, more than positively comparable with the best houses in this style of the late 1890s Bucharest.
There were also buildings in other styles as the one shown in the image above testifies, due to a diversity of increasingly sophisticated tastes among a very cosmopolite population that numbered Romanians, Germans, Serbians, Jews, Hungarians, Greeks, Italians and many other ethnicities.
Turnu Severin, in 1906, together with the rest of Romania celebrated King Carol I‘s forty years of glorious and prosperous reign and eighteen centuries since the Roman conquest of Dacia (in 106 CE), a historical watershed moment that set into motion the formation of the Romanian people.
As part of those celebrations, a bust of the emperor Trajan was inaugurated in the central park of the city, whose history and identity is so much linked to the events at the start of the second century of the Christian era.
Trajan is also considered in the Romanian nationalist discourse and imagination as the founding father of the nation, a role shared with the Dacian king Decebalus whom he vanquished in two devastating wars. Those conflagrations represented the largest scale military engagements in Europe until the advent of the Great War, as stated by the historian Julian Bennett in his seminal biography of Trajan.
The 1906 celebrations culminated with a great exhibition, “Expozitia Generala Romana”, in Bucharest, where the country’s achievements in arts, science and industry were presented to the wider public. The Neo-Romanian style, the new national architectural order has also been one of the main themes of that exhibition, seen in the graphic motifs of the postcard presented above, circulated with that occasion. The two personages whose deeds the country, including the people of Drobeta Turnu Severin, were then enthusiastically celebrating, the Emperor Trajan of the two millennia ago (on the left hand side) and King Carol I, were facing each other across an altar with the Roman She Wolf emblem inscribed on it, blessed by a woman figure personifying Romania, a veritable effusion of national identity symbolism, giving an idea about the ebullient atmosphere and pride felt by the people of that era.
The photographs containing examples of period architecture from Drobeta Turnu Severin were provided by Irina Magdalena Bivolaru, a native of the city and a keen reader of this blog.
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I endeavor through this daily series of daily articles to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural history and heritage.
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If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in sourcing the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
Gustave Eiffel in Romania: Trajan Grand Hotel, Iasi
Gustave Eiffel, the famous French engineer and architect that has cast his creative shadow all over the world with great metallic structures and constructions based on metallic frame and prefabricated elements, such as the Eiffel Tower in Paris or the Statue of Liberty in New York, has also been present in Romania with two noteworthy projects. The amplest one is the design and construction of the Trajan Grand Hotel in Iasi (1882), the capital of the former principality of Moldova, presented in the photographs bellow, and a railway bridge (1877) over the river Prut, build under the jurisdiction of the Russian Empire, that linked its then frontier province of Bessarabia (the precursor of the contemporary Republic of Moldova) with Romania.
The Trajan Hotel is built on a metallic frame structure with prefabricated elements and light weight brick, wood and glass walls. Its architectural style is an avant-garde, industrial-like, Beaux Arts design typical of other of Gustave Eiffel’s edifices. It is a an engineering and architectural marvel of the Victorian era, which is still excellently preserved and maintained by the actual hotel owners and Iasi municipal authorities that seem to realise the crucial importance for the local cultural and architectural identity of this beautiful buildings, a situation which contrasts so much with the indifference and lack of professionalism in this field of their counterparts in Bucharest. The moment of glory for the Trajan Grand Hotel has been during the Great War when it hosted Romania’s government while Iasi became the temporary capital with most of the country occupied by the Central Powers led by the German Empire’s forces. In that extraordinarily dramatic time, the city’s populations swelled ten times to over one million of refugees in the space of just a few weeks, with the Russian allies troops stationed in the territory becoming hostile and disorganised due to their succumbing under the Bolshevik ideology. The patriotic spirit held on and the government, hosted at the Trajan Grand Hotel, together with King Ferdinand, managed to repel both the Bolsheviks and the Germans at the end of the war.
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I endeavor through this daily series of daily articles to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural history and heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in sourcing the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
Communities, political traditions and architectural heritage: Floreasca bus garage
The Floreasca quarter from north-east Bucharest is a somehow newer area of the city, properly developed starting with the inter-war period, settled in important proportion by skilled workers employed in Romania’s capital industries and services. Starting with the mid-1930s, the quarter also attracted intellectuals and successful small business owners who built their dwellings there. The skilled workers of Bucharest and Romania in general form a critical social segment with a very interesting identity, social and political history, which has barely been studied by the specialist academics or other type of writers. These people were educated in the inter-war period in good technical schools, which also provided them with well structured lessons of national history and literature. They were also politically active in the social democratic and Marxist inkling movements of their period, still nowadays maintaining that tradition and political affiliation in communities with established identities such as is the case with the Floreasca quarter of Bucharest. I found, during my study trips in the area, that the local bus garage, seen in the photograph bellow, epitomises within its architecture and symbols, the political traditions and identity of that community.
The architecture of this structure is typical of the late 1930s industrial architecture, with Modernist overtones, similar with examples from that period from western Europe, inspired from the models of airplane hangars of that time. A reader, who is the author of the blog Simply Bucharest, indicated on the Romanian version of this blog a newsletter published by the Bucharest Public Transport Enterprise- “Muncitorul ITB”, which indicates the 1949 – ’50 as the construction date of this edifice. It was designed by architect N. Nicolescu, who obviously followed a manner of design typical of the late 1930s – early 1940s, free of Soviet design influences, which started to be heavily promoted at that time in Romania.
During the communist period, between 1948 – 1989, the garage, as all public institutions in the country, were decorated with communist slogans, such as is the one still surviving on one of its gable rims, seen above, reading “Proletarians of all countries unite!” The fact that the painted sign still survives after the bloody Romanian anti-communist revolution of December 1989, more than two decades ago, is a telling testimony of the deep social democratic and Marxist traditions of the local community.
I very much like the sleek architecture of the garage, which must have looked during its heydays as a thoroughly high tech edifice. The building, if properly restored to its former glory, would be an excellent architectural focus point for the Floreasca quarter and Bucharest. In the photograph above is a fragment of one of the the glass brick gables. Its damages stem from water infiltrations throughout the years, which expanded and cracked the glass during the winter freeze.
A most interesting occurrence are the appalling Nazi (swastikas) and football hooligan graffiti covering the back wall of the garage, which is a diagnostic sign of the actual state of the local community, namely of its younger members. If the older and established workers, benefited from a good education and have now secure jobs, continuing to cherish the left wing traditions of their community, their offspring on the other hand went mainly through the low quality education system of post-communist Romania and many are now jobless, developing in turn extreme right wing, nationalistic neo-Nazi views, a situation not entirely dissimilar with what is happening with the working class youths in the former East Germany or Russia. The battered old bus garage with its architecture, painted signs and graffiti is thus like a crystal ball in which we can read the shifting identities, evolution and travails of that community.
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I endeavor through this daily series of daily articles to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural history and heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in sourcing the property, specialist research, planning permissions, restoration project management, etc. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this weblog.
Valentin Mandache, architectural historian 