This is an invitation to an architectural history tour in Targoviste, renowned as the former capital of the former Principality of Wallachia and one of the seats of Vlad the Impaler, among many other fearsome medieval Wallachian rulers of the Medieval era, located north-west of Bucharest, 80km away, in the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps. The tour is open to all of you who would like to accompany me, the author of the Historic Houses of Romania blog on Sunday 11 September 2016!
I will be your expert guide in this excellently endowed in old architecture town. Targoviste contains a superb selection of period houses and public buildings, reflecting the styles and architectural evolution of Romania’s provincial towns since late Middle Ages. The locals are proud of the city’s heritage and legacy as a former princedom capital, somehow as Winchester is seen in England, if I may draw that parallel, with ample medieval ruins poignantly reminding its Read more →
The backyards of the period houses often hold hidden treasures and curiosities of architectural history, from fragments of decorations and structures much older than the street façade, to garden gazebos or former farm constructions. I had the rare opportunity to encounter in Targoviste, 80km north-west of Bucharest, a beautiful chicken coop structure, dating from Fin de Siècle period, which models a human dwelling at a smaller scale, of a style popular in those times in Romania’s towns. It follows the design of an Alpine chalet, which is part of the spa architecture fashion spread in the 1880s -1890s throughout central and eastern Europe.
The former backyard of the grand house that contained this chicken coop is now exposed to the street following probably the demolition of the building that previously obscured it and sale of the plot of land on which once stood. The coop was of a mixed domestic fowl use, with compartments for hens and possibly ducks or geese within its lower floors and pigeons in the attic.
I like the wood fretwork on the edge of the roof eave, so typical of the late Victorian period houses. Two pigeon holes flank a larger central door used for keeper’s access, through which is cut a third pigeon hole.
This is an excellent piece of domestic architecture, still quite well preserved and relatively straight forward to restore. It shows the sophistication of the Romanians of more than one century ago, who were most certainly more elevated and finer in their architectural tastes than their nowadays post-communist counterparts.
The Neo-Romanian architectural style is an all encompassing architectural order, which was meant to reflect the way of life, history, traditions and art of the ethnic Romanian communities. Among its more peculiar manifestations is the design of chimney stacks, about which I wrote on this blog another article last year. The ones illustrated here are from the city of Targoviste, the erstwhile capital of the principality of Wallachia, about 80 km north-west on Bucharest, in the foothills of the Transylvanian Alps. They model the medieval fortress towers of which Targoviste is famous through a large citadel keep built about five and a half centuries ago by Vlad the Impaler. The fortress tower motif is also used in the design of Neo-Romanian street fence poles, also epitomising the war torn history of these lands located on the fault-line between Islam and Christianity.
Bellow are presented two Neo-Romanian style wooden jardiniers, which I photographed during last month’s architectural history and photography tour in Targoviste. They adorn the exterior walls of a large and beautiful house from that that city, which I wrote about it in an article last year. I like the simple, clean design of these useful and very decorative artefacts, which manages to encompass allusions to ethnographic motifs (i.e. the small wooden “x”-es alluding to wood carvings decorating peasant houses). The delicate arched consoles supporting the jardiniers represent also an echo from those inspiring sources, similar with the design of Neo-Romanian style doorway awnings such as seen in the example which I detailed in an earlier article at this link.
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.
The city of Targoviste, 80 km north-west of Bucharest and a former capital of the old principality of Wallachia, has managed to preserve an important proportion of its architectural heritage during the last seven decades of communist misrule and post-communist wild transition to a market economy in Romania. It has also weathered quite well the calamitous property boom of 2000 -’08, which saw destruction of historic public and private buildings on a larger scale than throughout the entire communist period. One of those interesting historic architecture examples preserved in Targoviste is the house presented in the photographs bellow, displaying Neo-Romanian elements in an Art Nouveau guise. It dates probably from the 1900s and shows signs of extensive subsequent alterations. The edifice is located at one end of city’s old commercial street, near the beautiful Beaux Arts style Targoviste town hall, about which I wrote an article at this link. The Neo-Romanian style has evolved in large part, during its initial stages, within the Art Nouveau current and this building is an interesting product of that period. I apologise for the differences in shade and colour intensity between photographs, due to the various hours and light conditions in which they were shot and subsequently processed.
I like the Romanian ethnographic motifs giving personality to this house such as the wood carved poles embellishing the oriel balcony or the frieze modelling a peasant embroidery that decorates its street façade.
The main widow is also a Neo-Romanian type, making references to a church triptych, rendered in an Art Nouveau manner. The geometrical pattern of the wall frieze, easily discernible in this photograph, is inspired from peasant embroideries found in this area of Wallachia.
The main Art Nouveau trait in the design of the balcony is the circle arch, spanning the wooden poles, a reference to the Islamic inspired medieval and early modern architecture of the Ottoman Balkans, a region that also encompassed the former principality of Wallachia.
Other Art Nouveau elements, which are not related to Neo-Romanians motifs, are the two simple doorways embellishing the side of the house, the more remarkable of them looking inspired from the design of a Rennie Mackintosh Argyle chair.
There is another similar design building in Targoviste, about 0.5km away toward the old princely courts, presumably the work of the same architect(s), about whom I hope to find out details in my future fieldtrips to this wonderful southern Romanian city.
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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.
A conspicuous feature of the Neo-Romanian architectural style is represented by the elaborate decorative panels that emphasize areas of the façade or stairway. They contain a wealth of designs centred on a number of motifs inspired from the late medieval Wallachian church decorative panoply such as that of peacocks in the Garden of Eden, protector eagle or lions guarding the gates of Paradise. There are also instances of decorative panels containing non-religious abstract motifs in a variety of designs. Bellow are a few examples from the wealth of such attractive architectural artefacts embellishing Neo-Romanian style houses in Bucharest and Targoviste in southern Romania.
The panel above is a representation of the protector eagle, guarding the Garden of Eden, engaged in a manichean battle with a serpent, the embodiment of evil. The Garden of Eden is envisaged as a luxuriant grape vine full of fruit, with its vines contorted around the eagle in the shape of a Greek cross, an allusion that the supreme deity watches that never ending fight.
The panel from the second photograph is rendered in a more schematic, crisp manner, an indication of the Art Deco influence over the Neo-Romanian style that started to manifest in the early 1930s.
The image above shows an imaginative decorative use of a loft air vent, rendered in the shape of an abstract Greek cross, covered by a rectangular ironwork pattern containing smaller crosses of that type.
This forth decorative panel contains a floral motif that does not have immediate religious references, rendered in an Art Deco manner, a result of the high influence of that style on the Romanian architectural scene in the 1930s.
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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.
The Romanian word “mahala” comes from the Turkish “mahalle”, which means “city district”. The connotations are however quite different, in Romanian the word designating the city slums, the poorest and worst areas of an urban settlement. Many mahala houses display interesting transition features between peasant/ rural and urban architecture. The image above shows a late c19th mahala house from the city of Targoviste in southern Romania. It is quite well preserved and gives an idea how the city slums would have looked like in this region of Europe more than a century ago. This type of building is quite rare now, their number diminishing year by year. In my opinion they have an architectural and social history value and some of them deserve to be preserved as interesting witnesses of this region’s urban evolution.
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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.
This is a quite rare example of Neo-Romanian style industrial architecture, which I found in the city of Targoviste in the south of the country. A few months ago I documented another very interesting and also rare Neo-Romanian style garage in Bucharest that probably functioned as a fire station, hosting fire engines, in the inter-war period: click here to access that post. In this instance the building is less ornate, of a functional design, where the Neo-Romanian style elements consist in the pediment ornament present above each doorway, mimicking the crenelation of medieval fortresses and the imposing side tower containing the offices, modelled after the fortified houses from the Oltenia region named cula, an important diagnostic aspect for the Neo-Romania architectural style. I like the fact that the garage is still functional and quite well preserved despite the many economic vicissitudes that had to endure over the communist and post-communist decades.
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I endeavor through this 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.
A well maintained picturesqye example of a doorway dating from the 1900s that embellishes a Little Paris style house (c19th French historicist styles provincially interpreted in Romania) in the city of Targoviste, southern Romania. (Valentin Mandache)
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I endeavor through this 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.
The city of Targoviste in southern Romania, the former medieval capital of the Principality of Walachia, is endowed with a pair of impressive Beaux Arts style public buildings dating from the La Belle Époque, namely the Town Hall (“Primaria” in Romanian) and the former local prefecture headquarters, now hosting the Dambovita County Arts Museum. The style, promoted beginning with the last decades of the c19th through the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, was hugely influential in Europe, North America and beyond, being suitable especially for grand public edifices and mansions. Both Targoviste constructions were the work of the architect (some sources designate him as a builder) Giovanni Baldassare Vignossa (I found in different sources about a half dozen spelling versions for his name and settled for this one) and the decorator Giovanni Battista del Basso. They were part of the “second wave” of Italian builders, architects and artists active in the country, who have contributed in an important measure to the fabric of the built environment of what is now Romania. The “first wave” of Italians (Venetians especially) was active at the end of c17th – start of c18th, during the reign of Prince Constantin Brancoveanu, contributing to the emergence of the Brancovenesc style, a main source of inspiration for the modern Neo-Romanian architectural style. A “third wave” unfurled during the inter-war period when Italian building companies and architectural bureaus greatly contributed to the construction of the Art Deco architectural landscape in Bucharest and the rest of Romania. The “fourth wave” has started in the last decade, once the property and construction boom got underway in Romania, with the Italian construction entrepreneurs being some of most active in that area of activity. The photomontage above and the slide show bellow the text present details from different angles of the Targoviste town hall (1897). I like the balanced proportions of the building and its air of conviviality, very suitable for its role in the community. A most intriguing element among de rich decorative panoply of the building is the theme of the weathervane (a rarely used architectural element in Romania) on top of the tower, a whale with a crown on its head, which makes a sharp captivating contrast with the environment of this city located at the feet of the Transylvanian Alps, far away from the sea.
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I endeavor through this 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.
Dear readers,
Valentin Mandache, architectural historian 