A brief review of the artistic and architectural influences from throughout the Ottoman Empire into the making of the Wallachian style, the highly original Christian architecture with Islamic overtones of the Principality of Wallachia, the nowadays southern Romania, between the late 17th c and the early 19th c.
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My aim, through this series of blog articles, is to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania and Southeast Europe, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of world’s architectural history and heritage.
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If you have a historic house project in Romania or other country in Southeast Europe, I would be delighted to advise you in aspects pertaining to its architectural history and ways to preserve as much as possible from its period fabric and aesthetics in the course of restoration or renovation works, or to counsel you with specialist consultancy work related to that project. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this website.
The domestic heating devices of the Ottoman era Wallachia and Moldavia were the wood burning stoves made from cob, sun dried brick, and/ or burned earth brick, a sort of transition fireplace from the open hearth one typical of the more meridional territories of the Ottoman Empire and the brick and majolica stoves of Central Europe. This video explains their typology, and also elements of symbolism associated with their decoration and design.
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My aim, through this series of blog articles, is to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania and Southeast Europe, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of world architectural history and heritage.
***********************************************
If you have a historic house project in Romania or other country in Southeast Europe, I would be delighted to advise you in aspects pertaining to its architectural history and ways to preserve as much as possible from its period fabric and aesthetics in the course of restoration or renovation works, or to counsel you with specialist consultancy work related to that project. To discuss your particular plan please see my contact details in the Contactpage of this website.
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 advise 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.
Last week there was a full moon at this latitude and we also had an unusual Indian summer weather for the month of October. I took the photograph above in the evening while walking by Bratianu Boulevard, watching toward one of the side streets around New Saint George’s church, which is a more run down area of Lipscani, the old commercial quarter of Bucharest. In my opinion it conveys something from the peculiar half-Oriental – half-European identity of this city on the eastern edge of the European Union. The ramshackle Little Paris style buildings, small shops and people going about in the warmth of the night, in the clear-obscure generated by the the moonlight in competition with the makeshift street lamps are evocative for that type of character of which Bucharest abounds.
The quaint looking Ottoman Balkan and early Neo-Romanian type house, presented in the photographs bellow, dating probably from the last two decades of the c19th, sits in the backyard of the Military Topography Department of Romania’s Ministry of Defence, in the Ion Mihalache boulevard area. The building is probably one of this army branch’s first headquarters, left as a piece of heritage, as more modern edifices were erected in its vicinity in the subsequent decades.
The structure is typical for the domestic architecture in the region of northern Ottoman Balkans, where similar buildings, dating from the mid c18th until late c19th, are encountered nowadays also in Bulgaria or European Turkey. The house has a symmetric arrangement, sits atop a “half buried” basement, with a big protruding veranda adorned with wooden ethnographic poles that sustain large decorative column pediments adorned with floral motifs in stucco, forming three-lobed (a references to the Christian trinity) broken arches between columns.
The pediments are also sometimes crowned by a rich frieze of wooden fretwork (as can be seen in the above image). This genre of house was typically built by Christian small traders or or small landowners of the late Ottoman era.
What is unusual in this example is the presence of early Neo-Romanian style elements, seen in the decoration of the doorway (see the second photograph), the window pediments or the wall frieze, which were probably added as this patriotic style became popular in the last decade of the c19th, fusioning with local consecrated styles such as the Little Paris in urban areas or Ottoman Balkan in countryside or provincial towns as we can see here (the Ion Mihalache area was in that period a good few kilometres away from Bucharest).
The window pediments and the wall frieze as seen in the above and bellow photographs are picturesque references to the late medieval church architecture of Wallachia (Curtea de Arges cathedral inspired motifs).
The building has most probably endured many renovations and transformations in the last century of its existence, but it is still conserving quite accurately its transitional architectural character from an Ottoman Balkan design to timid, but eloquent early Neo-Romanian style elements, making it an excellent sampler of the cultural atmosphere of that era of intense transformations in Romania.
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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.
***********************************************
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.
From mail coach and horses station to post office: the story of the emergence of Mizil, a town in southern Romania. (engraving & old postcard: Valentin Mandache collection)
Mizil is a small town in the province of Wallachia in southern Romania, which owes its existence to the once extensive Ottoman mail coach station and inn network that functioned in the Danubian Principalities since mid-c18th. Even the name of the town- “Mizil” derives from the Turkish word for coach station- “menzil”. The settlement’s location was wonderfully propitious for the emplacement of a stagecoach inn (in Turkish: menzilkhan) and relay for mail carriage horses, being on the old highway that once linked the capitals of the Ottoman protectorate principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, at an equal distance of about 20 miles (35 km) in between the local county towns of Ploiesti and Buzau. That distance was generally considered as optimal for a team of coach horses to travel continuously at speed before being relayed by a fresh team of equines. The town thus witnessed, until the advent of the railways, the traffic of impressive horse drawn coaches as can be seen in the drawing form the lower part of the montage above, depicting such a scene from the lower Danube prairie of Wallachia, where Mizil is situated. The engraving is from my collection, made after a drawing by Denis Auguste Marie Raffet, a distinguished French illustrator famous for his lithographs of the Napoleonic wars. Raffet made the drawing in the 1830s while he travelled through the region in the service of the Russian aristocrat Anatole de Demidoff. The horses, their handlers and the battered coach rushing through the prairie, excellently convey the air of wild frontier of that region at the periphery of the Ottoman Empire. That image could not contrast more with the peaceful, near placid atmosphere of the Mizil post and telegraph office depicted in the the 1920s postcard in the upper half of the above collage, photographed less than a century after the “wild east” engraving was produced. That juxtaposition conveys the tremendous process of modernisation, which was going on in the whole of Romania within that time interval. The post office is built in Neo-Romanian architectural style, and I believe that is still in use nowadays (it was certainly there when I was for two years a high school pupil in Mizil at the end of the 1970s). The picturesque elements which remind of the old coach station are the petrol lamp in the courtyard together with the well and the horse watering trough carved from a block of local Istrita stone.
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I endeavor through this daily series of images and small 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.
The images above show the river sector of the Carpathian Timber Trail from its origination in Piatra Neamt (1), following the Bistrita (2) and the Siret rivers to the Danube port of Galati (3). (Montage of four old poscards dating from 1890s - 1910s, Valentin Mandache collection)
The Carpathian mountains contained until the first part of the c20th some of the largest millennial forests left in Europe. As the region was part of the Ottoman Empire for more than four centuries, this resource was extensively used as building material for houses and palaces throughout the empire and also for building the sailing ships (ie the ship’s masts made from Carpathian pine were very much appreciated at that time) that kept the commerce going within that great polity that stretched from Budapest in Central Europe to the Mecca in the Middle East and to the Algiers in the North Africa. The exceedingly beautiful Istanbul timber mansions called yali that line up the Bosphorous and many of the timber sided houses of that great metropolis, the largest city of Europe then as now, are in ample part built from timber sourced in the Carpathians. The same can be said of houses in Thessalonic, Smyrna/ Izmir or many other Ottoman cities. I illustrated in the photomontage above, made from four old postcards from my collection, the river navigation sector of this long “timber trail” from the Carpathians to the Mediterranean (see the route marked on the map on the postcard above). This timber was mainly sourced in the Moldavian sector of these mountains, the Oriental Carpathians, and gathered in floating basins at navigable points on the local rivers, such as Piatra-Neamt, depicted in the sector “1” above, a main such location in northern Moldavia. From there the timber was assembled in bulky rafts, called pluta in Romanian, manned by plutasi, the local peasants that embraced the raffter profession, see the image sector “2” above, all the way down to the lower Danube ports, such as Galati in the sector “3” of the photomontage, where the timber was sorted and loaded on seagoing boats to the markets of Istanbul and other Ottoman port cities. This huge timber trade started in late c17th until the demise of the Ottoman Empire in early c20th. It continued to function serving the local needs in Romania until 1950s, when the river route and the profession of plutas were replaced by road and railway transport. In my opinion this Carpathian “timber trail” phenomenon is a very interesting chapter in the economic history of South East Europe and Eastern Mediterreanean, practically unknown even by the academic specialists, which greatly contributed to the built heritage of the entire region.
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I endeavor through this daily series of images and small 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.
The picturesque veranda of a 1920s Neo-Romanian style house defined by mosque like pointed arches, short columns and latticework fence, motifs inspired from the religions architecture, especially Islamic, of the Ottoman Balkans. Magheru area, Bucharest. (Valentin Mandache)
There is a striking similarity in this example with the Moorish style architecture of Spain and its Islamic and Christian confluences, explained by the fact that the Neo-Romanian style expresses the architectural identity of a region also situated at the confluence between Christianity (of Byzantium) and Islam (of the Ottoman Empire).
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I endeavor through this daily series of images and small 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.
The small c18th Stavropoleos church in Bucharest is perhaps one of the most beautiful religious buildings in the entire eastern church world. The building has been a main inspiration source for the architect Ion Micu when he initiated in late c19th the Neo-Romanian style, the only original architectural design created in the state of Romania. Mincu lovingly restored the church between 1904 – ’10, toward the end of his life, when he also added a well designed cloister and outbuildings (see here an article and also a video on that subject), hosting the nuns serving the monastery with the same name. I am always most impressed, when visiting this church, by the flamboyant, colourful and full of life floral motifs decorating its exterior walls and cloister. That spurred me to put together the photo-montage above and thus try to make better known to the outside world this wonderful floral panoply, which resides at the heart of Bucharest. The cloister decoration was created by Mincu and contains a beautiful rendering, with an excellent spatial impression, of two floral motifs from the church register (seen here on the top-centre and right-hand-corner sectors of the above collage).
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating 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.
Bucharest, for most of its history, has been a gathering of villages scattered within a propitious fording place on the Dambovita – Arges river intefluve used initially by transhumant shepherds and their flocks on their seasonal migration between the pastures of the Transylvanian Alps and the Lower Danube plains and later by traders as a staging post on the great commercial road between Central Europe and the market towns of the Ottoman Empire. The domestic architecture of those times had much in common with that of the rest of the Ottoman Balkan region and the Mediterranean world in general. The house above, which I photographed in Popa Soare area, used to be a very usual type in the city beginning with c17th until the intense urban transformation of Bucharest on West European lines during the Victorian period. It is an adobe house (sun-dried brick made of clay and straw), plastered with a mix of clay and fine sand and painted in pigmented whitewash, a type which can be encountered from Turkey to Spain and Mexico. The decorative veranda poles are again of a Mediterranean type, called “zapata” in Spanish American architectural terminology, also encountered from Turkey to the rest of the Mediterranean and the Spanish offshoots in the New World. The house is an extreme architectural rarity in today Bucharest and a witness of the long forgotten connection of this city with the Mediteranean and Oriental worlds through the conduit of the erstwhile Ottoman Empire.
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I endeavor through this daily image series to inspire appreciation of the historic houses of Romania, a virtually undiscovered, but fascinating chapter of European architectural heritage.
***********************************************
If you plan acquiring a historic property in Romania or start a renovation project, I would be delighted to advice you in locating 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 