[URBAN NOTE] "The dying beauty of old Bucharest"

[rfmcdonald]

Open Democracy features an essay by Romanian blogger and writer Raluca Besliu talking about the problems faced in Bucharest for people concerned with historic buildings.

Bucharest, the capital city of Romania, is a city dying for an identity. In its heyday, during the interwar period, it was dubbed ‘little Paris’ due to its resemblance to the French capital. The city was severely traumatised, however, by the megalomaniac vision of former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was determined to wipe out the architectural legacies of the monarchy and bourgeoisie in order to build a new communist city.

The few parts of Bucharest from the late 18th and 19th century that managed to survive Ceausescu’s questionable architectural vision are threatened by the current collusion of real estate agents and local authorities, interested more in buildings’ profitability rather than their historic, aesthetic and social worth. Purposefully forgotten, or intentionally damaged in the hopes of inevitable collapse, many of Bucharest’s old building which encapsulate the city’s past glory and unique architecture - a blend of oriental and occidental motifs - and represent valuable pieces of history, stoically await their fall, giving the city its contemporary beauty of decay and oblivion.

One of the buildings carrying out its slow sentence is the Solacolu Inn, a historic monument on Calea Mosilor, a notable street in Romania’s capital. Part of the Ottoman legacy, inns began to appear in Bucharest during the 18th century to satisfy the needs of international merchants seeking a place to rest and deposit their merchandise. There were three types of inns: monasterial (manastiresti), boyar ones (boieresti), and lordly (domnesti). As Calea Mosilor witnessed a rise in commerce during the 19th century, the number of inns built there increased.

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In 2003, the Solacolu Inn was returned to the original owners’ descendants. In Romania, the owners of historical monuments benefit from lower taxes, but are responsible for restoration. The people who entered in possession of the Inn emphasised that they wanted to return it to its former glory, but lacked the funds to do so. The local authorities in Bucharest stressed that they could not invest in rehabilitating a private property. As a historic building cannot be torn down, the Solacolu Inn, one of Bucharest’s architectural jewels, was left to turn into a ruin, to the point of either collapsing to the ground or being declassified as a historic monument. The building’s decay process was accelerated in 2010, when part of the roof collapsed.

There are, however, ways in which this historic monument could be spared. In an interview with Romania Curata, Roxana Wring, the president of Pro.Do.Mo Association, stressed that the Mayor’s Office can expropriate the Solacolu Inn to save it, just as in cases of public utility. Serban Sturdza, the president of OAR Bucharest, argued that the Mayor’s Office could compensate the owners and restore the build or help the owner financially for the rehabilitation process and construct a business plan to recuperate its investment. Another solution would be filing a criminal complaint against the owners, who are not fulfilling their legal obligation to restore and maintain the patrimonial building. The complaint can be initiated by any interested party, from the Mayor’s office to heritage nonprofits and neighbors. The police then conduct a penal investigation whose results are presented to a court, which can adopt a complementary measure to restore the building.