Tag: Buzau

Solar symbol in local stone

Valentin Mandache
Ethnographic solar symbol (about 70 cm diameter) in lumachel limestone, Buzau (©Valentin Mandache)

The above ethnographic solar symbol adorns the doorway of the remarkable Palace of Justice in Buzau, south east Romania, a building designed by the great architect Petre Antonescu in the Neo-Romanian style with interesting Art Nouveau overtones; edifice completed in 1912. The solar motif features prominently in the Romanian peasant art and is found represented in contexts ranging from sewing patterns to wood and stone carvings. What I like in this particular representation is the fact that is carved in the local lumachel stone (greyish brown limestone, made from cemented together fossil shells). The stone comes from quarries located on the Istrita hill in the Carpathian piedmont (aka the Subcarpathians), not far from the city of Buzau. The stone, known locally as the “Istrita stone” is found in the structure and decoration of many peasant houses or public edifices from that region. It also used to be the main material for making peasant crosses, which imprinted the old local village cemeteries with an extremely picturesque, stone forest like character. The Istrita stone has seen a fatal decline in its use as building material ever since the industrially produced concrete became cheap and widely available in the 1960s, a fact that contributed to the loss of an essential component of the architectural identity and character of the Buzau county.

Above is a Google sattelite map of the Istrita hill

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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 Contact page of this weblog.

Vernacular Neo-Romanian style house

Valentin Mandache
Vernacular Neo-Romanian style house dating from the early 1920s, Buzau, south-east Romania. (©Valentin Mandache)

I found this a quaint provincial, craftsman designed town house in the town of Buzau, south-eastern Romania. The building displays a mixture of styles, rendered in a vernacular fashion, where the most eye-catching order is the Neo-Romanian one, seen in the massive broken arch windows and the architrave medallions. There are also strong features pointing out to the Little Paris style popular during the Fin de Siècle era throughout the then Romania, a suave synthesis of provincially interpreted French c19th historicist architectural styles and a multitude of local Ottoman Balkan decorative elements, most evident in this case in the wooden roof eave ornaments or the apparent quoins. The vernacular interpretation of the established architectural styles is frequently encountered in the Romanian provincial towns, where professional architects were in short supply or too expensive to hire and many houses were designed and built by skilled craftsmen. In an earlier post I documented some similar remarkable examples from the town of  Targoviste in southern Romania: click here for access.

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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 Contact page of this weblog.

Mizil: from mail coach station to town

Valentin Mandache
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.

Symbols and Messages of a Peasant Rug

Valentin Mandache
A peasant rug from the Buzau ethnographic area of South-East Romania. (©Valentin Mandache)

This post is relevant to those interested in the peasant and traditional houses of Romania, looking to find out clues about the meaning and significance of the myriad of ethnographic symbols decorating this ancestral type of habitat. Traditional rugs, such as the one I photographed above, are essential decorative and spiritual artefacts that contribute to the make-up of a peasant house. This particular example exhibits an abstract human figure multiplied seven times (a number with miraculous beneficial properties in local mythology), in shades of red and black (see bellow for meaning) that has his/her arms suspended up in the air, denoting the worshipping of the Sun god, represented in this instance by the repeating rhomboidal figure on the rug’s border area. The chromatic range is formed from variations of three colours with fundamental ethnographic significance: black (earth), red (fire) and white (air-space-spirit). I very much like the stubborn persistence of old pagan worshiping elements in local ethnography, which can be encountered in every corner of a peasant house in the Carpathian region, dating probably from the times when the first Indo-Europeans settled the area more than 5,000 years ago, or even from earlier populations, despite the last two millennia of relentless “assaults” from the organised Christian religion. In fact there is an intense and lively intermingling and even syncretism within the local peasant culture between the Christian and ethnographic symbolism, that gives it a peculiar character, which just captivates the outside observer.

The beautiful rug in the image above is actually a treasured present from my grandmother, a peasant woman from the Buzau ethnographic area of South East Romania, which she gave me about some years ago to decorate my house in London and thus bring me luck and insure protection against the Thames Valley malevolent spirits.

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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.

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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 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.

1900s Roof Eave with Local Dissemination

Valentin Mandache
Roof eave adorning an early 1910s trader's house in Buzau, eastern Romania. (©Valentin Mandache)

I photographed the above exquisite roof eave in the old commercial quarter of the city of Buzau in eastern Romania. It is a creation inspired from the roof eaves of the Buzau Commune Palace, built in a peculiar Art Nouveau – Neo-Romanian style in 1903, about which I posted a short video-article some weeks ago. There are also some vernacular elements used in this roof eave decoration, like the protruding fusaiolles on the horizontal arm of the eave, a decorative feature encountered throughout the old Ottoman Balkan realm, of which Buzau together with southern and eastern Romania have been once part. What I found very interesting is the quite wide dissemination of this type of roof eave (where the main distinguishing element is the circle sector taming the harsh right angle between the eave’s vertical and horizontal arms) throughout Buzau county area. It can be found adorning a number of old vernacular architecture houses in some of the local villages. I know that in my birth village, Goldeanu-Silistea, in southern Buzau county, that there are at least two houses (built in the early 1930s by local wealthy peasants) that use a variation of this type of roof eave. It represents a very interesting  phenomenon of architectural style transfer/ dissemination from a prestige edifice, built in a high architectural style, to the aspirational craftsman built houses belonging to wealthier and more educated local traders and peasants.

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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.

Daily Picture 14-Feb-10: Spa Town Development Boom in Victorian Era Romania

Valentin Mandache
Sarata-Monteoru spa town in South East Romania, developed by the great Monteoru aristocratic-commercial family in the 1880 - '90s, part of the boom period of spa town developments in late Victorian era Romania. (old postcard Valentin Mandache collection)

Endowed with a geographically diverse territory and the longest sector of the Carpathian Mountains (over 1,000 km length of alpine geology mountain chains), Romania is very propitious for the development of spa towns around the innumerable hot and mineral springs, among stunning natural scenery. The Roman Empire was the first to establish such spas on what is now the Romanian territory (ie the Herculane Spa town in SW Romania) and the occasion occurred again in the Victorian era Romania, 17 centuries later, in a time of peace and prosperity not encountered by this region since the Roman conquest. The old postcard above shows an 1890s image of the pumps’ hall in Sarata-Monteoru spa town in Buzau county, SE Romania, one of the many such towns that sprang up in that era of prosperity. The architecture of these towns was that of similar establishments in Central Europe or France and Belgium. Many of these buildings and facilities still survive today, albeit in a very run down state or even on the verge of demolition, constituting extraordinary potential renovation projects for those willing to undertake such an enterprise. Unfortunately, these old quaint buildings, are also eyed by rapacious and ignorant local property developers.

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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 Contact page of this weblog.