Bucharest became the capital of Wallachia in the middle of the sixteenth century in preference to the earlier sub‑Carpathian capitals of Câmpulung, Curtea de Argeş and Târgovişte. It became the capital of the united Romanian principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia after their union in 1859, and has been the capital of Greater Romania, so called because of the addition of Transylvania and Bessarabia, since the end of the First World War in 1918. (1) From its beginnings in the early part of the fourteenth century to the mid 1980s Bucharest developed gradually, without undergoing any sudden or dramatic change. It is true that it had suffered destruction repeatedly, whether by fire, earthquake or the sword, and that its population had been decimated often enough by the plague, but it recovered from these disasters time and again. Despite the considerable increase in the rate of change and the modernization which took place after the Union and again after World War I, when it suddenly found itself the capital of a country more than twice its former size, it remained recognizably one city.

Today Bucharest consists of two distinct cities. This change was brought about in his last years of power and in the most brutal manner possible by Nicolae Ceauşescu, dictator and tyrant, General Secretary of the Communist Party from 1965 until 1974 and President of Romania from 1974 until 1989, when he was deposed and executed.

Ceauşescu's two‑fold ambition was to restructure Bucharest by providing services worthy of a modern capital, and to immortalize the ‘Golden Age’ of his rule in the construction of a monumental civic center. Unfortun­ately he pursued the latter at the expense of the former. Only the Metro was built: water and electric power supplies, sewerage and roads were neglected, so that at the time of his fall Bucharest looked like a third‑world city. While there is no denying that Ceauşescu continued the comprehensive planning policy of earlier Communist governments (they called it ‘systematization’), which resulted in the construction of vast industrial complexes like Berceni (South of the city), satellites with populations of 150,000 or more like Titan‑Balta Albă (south‑east of the city), and centers for sport and culture comprising stadiums and theatres like the 23 August Park (east of the city), the peripheral location of such developments meant that they made little or no impact on the city itself. Ceauşescu's center, on the other hand, to which he devoted all his energy in the last decade of his rule, introduced a new component which was alien in both scale and character to the larger urban whole.

A severe earthquake struck Bucharest on 4 March 1977 leaving over 1500 dead and destroying or damaging a great many buildings. The area selected for the new development, however, was part of Bucharest's historic center: the Uranus quarter and parts of the adjoining Antim and Rahova quarter located in the hilly area south of the Dâmboviţa River, where the buildings had barely been affected by the earthquake thanks to this area’s natural anti‑seismic properties. Ceauşescu therefore could not make the poor structural conditions of the buildings an excuse for demolition but he no doubt appreciated the fact that the anti‑seismic properties of the area would also benefit the new center. Still under construction when Ceauşescu met his end and unfinished even today, the new center consists of a 120m-wide boulevard (one meter wider than the Champs Elysées) three kilometers long and lined along its western half with ten‑story apartment buildings. The boulevard runs east‑west and leads nowhere, cutting across at least five old‑established north-­south routes, one of which, Calea Rahovei, one of the five main radial arteries of old Bucharest, is totally cut off. At its western end stands the Casa Republicii, 84 meters high and covering more than 265,000 square meters, the second-largest building in the world (after the Pentagon), since 1996 housing both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, and renamed of Palace of Parliament. It stands isolated from the city it is meant to serve by acres of wasteland, intended no doubt to be landscaped, but now awaiting a decision following the international architectural competition ‘Bucharest 2000’, held in 1996, which required competitors to weaken the new center's symbolic properties by, for example, building closely around the Palace and so absorbing it into the city.

The Boulevard opens out with sweeping crescents of government buildings facing the Palace across a vast square. The Palace appears overpoweringly dominant on its gentle acclivity, which is all that is left of a large hill on which stood at the river end until 1984 the Monastery of Mihai Vodă, founded in 1589 by Michael the Brave, the reigning prince of Wallachia who in 1600 briefly succeeded in uniting all three Principalities under his rule. The monastic buildings and the prince's residence, rebuilt at the beginning of the twentieth century to house the state archives, were demolished, but Ceauşescu gave his consent to the relocation of the church and eastern gateway, and these can now be seen in a back yard off Sapienţei Street between the Boulevard and the river, overshadowed by tall buildings. They were moved bodily, first by being lowered vertically down a shaft to the level of the new site and then horizontally on rails.

On the larger southern part of the hill, called Spirea after a famous eighteenth century doctor who lived there and built the Church of Spirea Veche (also demolished in 1984 to make way for the new center), stood the ruins of the New Court (Curtea Nouă), which was built in 1776 to replace the ruined Old Court on the other side of the river, and which served as the Phanariot Princes' residence until its destruction by fire in 1812, whereafter it came to be known as the Burnt Court (Curtea Arsă).

The Boulevard extends eastwards across the old Piaţa Unirii and over the river on to the left bank, ending in another large square which Ceauşescu hoped would provide the setting for a monument to the Victory of Socialism, the Boulevard's full name having originally been ‘of the Victory of Socialism’ but having become ‘of the Union’. Along this eastern section of the Boulevard, one of the buildings for which foundations were laid was a grandiose opera house which was intended to replace the charming and more than adequate opera house built as recently as 1945.

To make way for the new center, most of the Uranus quarter and parts of the Antim and Rahova quarters had to be destroyed. Ten thousand dwellings were demolished and more than 40,000 people displaced. To prevent organized resistance little or no warning was given. With only a few hours' notice of the bulldozer's arrival people were unable to take with them all their belongings, barely having time to collect their most treasured possessions and flee to their new abode which was more often than not an unfinished block in a remote part of the city.

The areas which were demolished had a special urban character typical of old Bucharest: streets meandering, capricious, sylvan, each house having its spacious courtyard with trees; a concentration of trees heralding a church, usually free‑standing or, if monastic, surrounded by walls – not a long perspective view but a sudden surprise effect as often as not. It is still possible to experience this character on the edge of the demolished areas, south of the Patriarchate Hill or in the neighborhood of the Radu Vodă Monastery, for example. The houses which have been lost ranged from nineteenth‑century Neo‑Classical, through early twentieth‑century National-Romantic, to the Art Deco and Modernist style of the thirties. But the interest of the area lay not so much in its individual houses as in the total effect, the whole being greater than the sum of its parts.

The widespread practice of designating special conservation areas, which did not of course extend to Ceauşescu's Romania, reflects an awareness of the value of groups of buildings as well as the importance of spaces around and between buildings and, more generally, the integrity of whole quarters. Underlying this policy is the belief that the integrity and character of an area are worth protecting and enhancing without necessarily preserving everything or discouraging new building. This approach has been carried into effect successfully at Covent Garden in London and the Marais district in Paris, both areas which have been rejuvenated by a sensible balance of conservation, re‑use and redevelop­ment. Such a policy, which is not incompatible with improving the infrastructure and services, was never given the consideration it deserved by the authorities in Bucharest.

Unbelievably the demolition required to provide a tabula rasa for the new center caused the loss of fourteen churches and two monasteries, one of which, as has already been observed, was the famous Mihai Vodă Monastery. It caused the loss of a number of nineteenth‑century public buildings like the Brâncoveanu Hospital, the George Călinescu Institute of Literature and the Bellio House, first home of the Romanian Academy. The demolition also caused four churches to be moved to new sites, such a move inevitably causing damage to a masonry church and invariably changing the setting of the church for the worse. Some of these churches have been moved to sites which are so inappropriate that it will tax the ingenuity of the very best architects to provide them with a worthy setting. The architectural competition, ‘Bucharest 2000’ barely touched on this problem.

Competitors were more concerned with the main objective of the competition, that of urban re‑integration, of making two cities again into one. The competition conditions required competitors to show how they would heal the fractures caused by wholesale destruction and how they would at best blur the new center's overwhelming totalitarian image, for it was a re­quirement that both Boulevard and Palace be retained. This meant in effect denying the Palace its singularity and isolation, and finding a way of reducing the powerful axial effect of the Boulevard and Palace together. It meant building up the shattered area around the edge and somehow tying the old to the new by a gradual change of scale in both street pattern and buildings. It meant, above all, validating the old urban structure where it survives by using it to provide the genesis for that transitional zone without which the new center will always remain divorced from the rest of the city.

The difficulty of integrating the new center is compounded by the uniformity of its architectural style whereas the architecture of the old city is infinitely variable. Add this uniformity to the fact that the units of building in the new center are far fewer and larger, and the shock experienced when entering the new center becomes understandable. With regard to town‑planning and urban design Ceauşescu is known to have been interested in the capital of North Korea, Pyongyang, rebuilt after the Korean War in the image of Kim Il Sung's particular brand of tyranny, which was if anything more extreme than Ceauşescu’s. With regard to architecture Ceauşescu admired the Classical style favored by the pre‑war Fascist dictatorships, Albert Speer's architecture for Hitler or Piacentini's for Mussolini. He also admired the Stalinist architecture of Moscow with which he would have been more familiar as a result of his stay in Moscow when he was attending the Frunze Academy in the early fifties. It so happened that when he was building the new center in Bucharest thirty years later, architects in western Europe and America were toying with so‑called Post‑Modernist styles and, in order to do so, were re‑examining both Speer's and Stalin's architecture. It is one of the ironies of history that the architecture of Ceauşescu's new center should have been built in what was perceived by many westerners as the latest and most fashionable Post‑Modernist style.

Having described the new center – the city within a city – the damage and the problems it has caused Bucharest as a whole, what of the other city, the old city? The art historian Dana Harhoiu, in her remarkable study of Bucharest (2) has identified a Byzantine inheritance post Byzantium within the present structure of the city. The first documentary evidence of Bucharest dates from 1459, six years after the fall of Constantinople, three years after the Siege of Belgrade and two years after the accession to the throne of Moldavia by Stephen the Great who fought valiantly throughout his long reign (1457‑1504) to check Ottoman expansion. Already in the early part of the century in Wallachia Mircea the Old (1386‑1418) whose capital was Târgovişte had rebuilt the fortress called Dâmboviţa after the river on which it stood, renaming it Fortress Bucharest and using it as a base from which he could quickly reach his castles on the Danube to confront the Ottoman armies.

Vlad the Impaler, three times reigning prince of Wallachia (1448, 1456‑62, 1476) and owner of large estates in the Bucharest region, enlarged the fortress and it is in a document ordering some local boyars to fortify their houses, “written on 20 September in Fortress Bucharest, in the year 1459”, that the city is first mentioned by name. If the main purpose of the larger fortress was to assist Stephen the Great in his wars against the Turks, its very presence attracted merchants and artisans so that a population of some 2,000 was soon gathered there. The main commercial artery was called Main Street (Uliţa cea Mare) and is the same street which since 1589 has been called Strada Lipscani because of its associa­tion with merchants who imported goods from Leipzig. The oldest arteries of the city, which are known to have been in existence at this time, are Main Road (Podul Uliţei Mari), today Strada Iuliu Maniu, which came right up to the fortress; and the External Market Road (Podul Târgului de Afară), today Calea Moşilor, which led north‑east to the Obor market place

Both Stephen the Great and Vlad the Impaler set themselves up as heirs to Byzantium and last defenders of the Orthodox Christian faith against the infidel. In the first half of the sixteenth century the fight was continued against greater odds by Petru Rareş in Moldavia (1527‑38, 1541‑46) and Neagoe Basarab in Wallachia (1512‑21). In 1521 Solyman the Magnificent finally captured Belgrade; in 1526 at the Battle of Mohacs he defeated the Hungarians, setting up a Turkish 'vilayet' in the central part of Hungary with Buda as its capital; and in 1529 he un­successfully laid siege to Vienna. The transformation by the Turks of the Banat into a 'pashalik' with its capital at Timişoara and the creation of the autonomous principality of Transylvania under Turkish suzerainty followed in 1541. Unlike the countries south and west of the Danube, Wallachia and Moldavia were not made into 'pashaliks', but the Ottomans tightened their grip by establishing the right of the Porte to confirm or dismiss the reigning princes elected from among the native boyars and to raise heavy tribute in money or in kind, the principalities supplying the Ottoman Empire with, among other things, corn and cattle. The Porte in return acknowledged the principalities' frontiers and agreed not to interfere with their internal affairs, observing their laws and customs. As protectors, the Turks undertook to defend their frontiers while the principalities in their turn agreed to fight alongside the Ottoman army in Europe if the Porte requested it.

A more sophisticated way of opposing the Turks, and perhaps more durable in its results than giving battle, was to support the Orthodox Church in the Balkan peninsula by founding monasteries and churches. Vlad the Impaler had built a monastery on an island in the Lake of Snagov north of Bucharest and, according to tradition, the Monastery of Comana south of Bucharest, rebuilt by Radu Şerban in 1588 (he was reigning prince from 1602 till 1611) and again in 1699 by a nephew of Şerban Cantacuzino who bore the same name and was cup-bearer (paharnic) to Constantin Brâncoveanu. Neagoe Basarab, who was the author of Instructions to his son Theodosius in which he set down, among much else, the Byzantine doctrine of absolute monarchy, rebuilt Snagov and founded the monasteries of Curtea de Argeş, and Caluiu. These monasteries were surrounded by high walls and watch towers, and formed, together with the fortresses of Bucharest and Târguşor, a line of outposts protecting the Princely residences at Târgovişte, Curtea de Argeş and Câmpulung. Later at the beginning of the seventeenth century, when the Turks had taken control of the Danubian fortifications, the line of defense moved into the Wallachian plain, and we find Matei Basarab, an officer under Michael the Brave and later reigning prince (1632‑54) founding the monasteries of Maxineni, Slobozia, Negoieşti, Sadova and, closer to Bucharest, Căldăruşani, Plumbuita and Plătăreşti.

Bucharest in the sixteenth century was one of the few towns in Wallachia which continued to grow apace, spreading on to the right bank of the Dâmboviţa and taking in that section of Calea Rahovei which Ceauşescu's new center succeeded in cutting off. To the west it reached the marshy area of Cişmigiu and to the east it extended to the intersection of Calea Moşilor and Strada Hristo Botev. It is not surprising, therefore, that the first known delimitation of the city dates from the reign of Mircea the Shepherd (1545‑54, 1556‑59). A charter states that the territory of the city was deemed to consist of the property belonging to its citizens and the area lived in, and that one of its limits was where it met the territory belonging to the villagers of Văcăreşti.

Mircea the Shepherd also built the princely residence, the Old Court (Curtea Veche) as it came to be called much later after the Phanariot princes had moved to the New Court on Spirea Hill (1776). The Old Court, which replaced Mircea the Old's fortress, occupied a quadrilateral de­fined by the streets Iuliu Maniu, Şelari and Bărăţiei and by Calea Moşilor. It comprised residence, chancellery, guard‑house, stables, pleasure pavilion, garden and church which, with the exception of the vaulted cellar of the residence revealed in recent archaeological ex­cavations, is the only building which has survived. The whole was surrounded by high walls on three sides and protected by the river on the fourth side.

The new princely court attracted merchants and artisans so that during the second half of the century the population of Bucharest rose to ten thousand and the number of guilds to 40. The court also attracted circulation which gave rise to a network of radial roads converging on to the court. At the same time the buildings of the merchants and artisans – shops, workshops, living quarters – grouped themselves tightly around the Court in narrow streets which took the name of the trades practiced in them: furriers, ironmongers, cobblers, milliners, saddlers – all street names which survive to this day in the Old Court quarter.

By this time the majority of towns had become permanent centers of ex­change where the produce from the boyars' estates was sold at better prices. So the boyars, who until the sixteenth century had had only indirect links with the towns, their agents coming regularly to town to sell the estate produce and buy goods brought by merchants from abroad, started buying land in towns with princely courts like Bucharest and developing it not only with houses for themselves but with churches and monasteries, and with their own shops in the commercial center and around the market places.

One of Mircea the Shepherd's boyars, Governor Bălăceanu, built in 1562 on a site off Calea Moşilor, St. George's Church, which came to be known as Old St. George's when Constantin Brâncoveanu founded in 1707 New St. George's in its vast caravanserai. The Radu Vodă Monastery was built on a hill situated in a bend on the right bank of the river during Alexandru Mircea's reign (1568‑77) and fortified by the Turkish Commander, Sinan Pasha, in 1595 in anticipation of an attack by Michael the Brave which never materialized. Before withdrawing from Bucharest the Turkish army dynamited the monastery which remained in ruins until 1614 when Radu Mihnea began restoring it. On another hill on the right bank of the river, a mile or so upstream, on the site of an earlier wooden church, Michael the Brave founded in 1589, when he was Governor of Craiova, the imposing Mihai Vodă Monastery which, as has already been noted, was demolished in 1984, the hill on which it stood razed and the church and gate‑tower moved to a new site.

Until about 1600, when the battles with Michael the Brave determined the Turks to forbid it, Wallachian towns were fortified, but with palisades of tree trunks and a deep ditch (3), not with stone walls and watch towers or bastions, like Transylvanian towns. The French lawyer, Pierre Lescalopier, who visited Bucharest in 1574, saw the palisade erected by Mircea the Shepherd in 1545 and described it as “made of large tree trunks, driven into the earth tightly one against the other, and held together by cross‑beams fixed to the trunks with long, large dowels.” (4). Some eight years later Paul of Aleppo (5) visited Târgovişte, which had clearly ignored the Turkish edict (the Turks in fact ordered the Metropolitan Palace to be demolished only in 1659), finding the city “as large as Aleppo and Damascus, very spread‑out, crossed by a number of streams and surrounded by a palisade and deep ditch.” (6)

Until 1827 when stone paving was introduced, the main streets of the city were paved with wooden planks, which prompted the remark that Bucharest was “a city totally devoid of stone and surrounded by unlimited forests.” Sir Robert Ainslie, who visited Bucharest in the first years of the nineteenth century, described the streets as a “continued bridge, (8) being floored from side to side with massy planks of ten or twelve yards long, and as many inches thick, which are continued through a considerable part of the town, for some miles in extent.” (9)

With the principal roads and some of the churches and monasteries in place, it becomes possible to identify the Byzantine inheritance in the city's structure. For a long time it has been assumed too readily that, unlike Roman or European medieval towns, Bucharest had no structure but developed as a loose aggregate of monasteries, churches and markets, separated from each other by wide open spaces, with an organic road pattern and irregularly grouped houses with extensive gardens and orchard giving the city as a whole the look of a large village. Dana Harhoiu’s analysis (10) begins with the complementary effect of people's movement against natural feature – commercial and political routes against the tortuous Dâmboviţa river valley with its corniches and hills. Of particular importance was the trade route between the German cities and the Ottoman south, passing through Lvov, Moldavia and Bucharest, which developed when the Ottoman conquests of the Genoese cities on the north coast of the Black Sea blocked the route via these cities. This Moldavian road, none other than Calea Moşilor, formed a right‑angle with the river, its axis when projected south‑west cutting through the hill on which in 1655 the Patriarchate Church was erected.

Another route, parallel to the axis of the river, had provided connections since the fourteenth century between the princely courts of the sub‑Carpathian zone and the fortifications on the Danube. Bucharest's development in the seventeenth century and its de­finitive choice as capital of Wallachia around 1660 (it had competed with Târgovişte for the best part of a century) should also be re­lated to a new road along the Prahova valley to Braşov which served the large estates of the rich and powerful Cantacuzino family and, around 1700, Constantin Brâncoveanu's Palace of Mogoşoaia.

Laying out cities and ordering urban space have possessed since the earliest times an all‑important sacred and religious dimension. It is therefore not surprising that the urban structure of Bucharest should incorporate such a dimension. Hills and similar prominences may have had a strategic role to play, but they were regarded above all as holy places on which only temples or churches should be built. Churches and mosques are the only buildings, the orientation of which is sacred. The use of astrology and astronomy in the siting and orientation of buildings, and in the way they relate to one another, places the city and its creation within a larger cosmic framework. The structure of Bucharest is concentric and radial, with the axis mundi, the road to Moldavia, passing through the center of the circle, Old St. George's, and through the Patriarchate Church on the hill. The circle is divided by six radii, two of which (north-­east and south‑west) form the axis mundi, and another two (south and north‑west) pass respectively through the hill monasteries of Radu Vodă and Mihai Vodă.

The circle consists of a series of concentric rings representing the growth of the city through its churches. Thus the first ring contains the sixteenth-century churches of the Old Court, Old St. George and Răzvan Stelea: the second and third ring contain the early seventeenth-century St. Nicolae Jicniţă, St. Dumitru and Ghiormea Banul, later to be known as the Church of the Greeks, and the fourth ring, which in turn generated the development of the Phanariot city, contains the Patriarchate Church (1654‑58), Batiştei (1660), Oţetari (1681) and the Armenian Church (1685).

The central importance accorded to Old St. George's by such a diagram is in no way compatible with the church standing on the site today, which dates from 1880 and which replaces a church built in 1724 and destroyed in the great fire of 1747. Its importance lies in the fact that the original church of 1562 functioned as the Patriarchate Church until Constantin Şerban built his church on the Patriarchate Hill nearly a century later; that here stood also the first Princely Academy and subsequently Şerban Cantacuzino's Slavonic Academy, and that the Parish of St. George had by far the highest density, with twice the number of houses of any of the other parishes.

The concept of sacred space and the quest for a celestial geometry in city planning faded during the eighteenth century in the face of in­creasing pressure from a growing population and a great expansion in commercial activity brought about by the many Greeks who came to the Principalities during the Phanariot rule.

While the memory of Byzantium was preserved, as Dana Harhoiu has remarked (11) in the sacred space of its churches, Bucharest in the eighteenth century became, also under the influence of Constantinople, a city of the urban caravanserai. A decline of the sacred and religious in all aspects of life, moreover, was inevitable with the influence of the Enlightenment filtering through, this time ­from the West, its rational approach to social and political problems undermining the authority of Church and State as well as the belief in such concepts as absolute monarchy.

A survey carried out at the beginning of the nineteenth century identified forty‑three caravanserais, which in Romanian are called han. Fifteen of these were large and seven had a church in the middle of their courtyard, just like a monastery. There were three kinds of han: simple rectangular two‑story structures with between twenty and forty merchants’ setts, of which no examples survive. A larger kind consisted of a courtyard surrounded by ranges on three sides, like the early nineteenth-century Red Han (Hanul Roşu) which still stands near the intersection of the streets Şelari and Iuliu Maniu on land formerly occupied by the princely residence; or the nearby Hanul cu Tei (lime-tree), built in 1833, which is reached through the Pasaj Blănari (Furriers Passage). The third type of caravanserai was very large and monastic in plan, with a single gated entrance, sometimes in the form of a tower. The only example of this kind which survives is the Han of Manuc in Iuliu Maniu Street.

One of the oldest and largest of this type was the Han Şerban Vodă, built between 1683 and 1686 in the reign of Şerban Cantacuzino after whom it was named. It stood on the site of the present National Bank (1883‑85, architects Cassien Bernard and Albert Galleron). In 1670 the same Şerban Cantacuzino, when he was prefect of the city, began the construction of the largest of all Bucharest caravanserais, the Han of St. George, which was only completed thirty years later in the reign of Constantin Brâncoveanu. It consisted of a vast courtyard with the grand New St. George's Church in the middle, surrounded on all four sides by two‑story ranges which accommodated some two hundred merchants' setts. For a century and a half this han played host to all the leading merchants with most expensive and desirable goods coming from Leipzig, Constantinople and Galaţi. Both the han and the church suffered greatly in the 1847 fire and the demolition of the han followed. The church was restored immediately after the fire by the Catalan architect Xavier Villacrosse in the Neo‑Romanesque style but on the old ground plan. Destroyed a second time in the 1940 earthquake, it was restored to its original form in 1988‑92 by Stefan Balş.

There was a concentration of caravanserais in the area of Lipscani and Stavropoleos Street which provides an idea of the character of commercial Bucharest in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century. ­Walking down the last section of the Calea Victoriei between its intersection with the Boulevard Regina Elisabeta and the river we can imagine both sides of the street, lined with the high and largely blank walls of caravanserais for almost the whole length between the junctions of Lipscani and Iuliu Maniu Street. On the west side where the imposing Neo-Baroque Savings Bank (1896-1900 architect Paul Gottereau) now stands was the large Han of St. John while on the opposite side of the street, on either side of the Stavropoleos Street junction, stood the Zlătari and Constantin Vodă hans. There were massive han walls on both sides of Stavropoleos Street for most of its length: the Zlătari Han and the Han of the Greeks on the north side, and the Constantin Vodă and Stavropoleos hans on the south side. Extending well into the south side of Lipscani Street, the Han of the Greeks faced the Şerban Vodă Han on the north side of the street.

Continuing east along Lipscani Street and crossing both Smârdan and Şelari (Saddlers) Street we find two examples of surviving hans: on the north side at nos. 63‑65, Hanul cu Tei (lime‑tree), built in 1833, whose long and narrow courtyard extends to Blănari (Furriers) Street: and on the south side, at no. 86, the sixteenth-century Han Gabroveni which extends to Gabroveni St.. If we continue further east along Lipscani Street, crossing the modern Brătianu Boulevard, we find New St. George's Church which, with its wide open spaces around it, is easily imagined standing in the very large courtyard of the former Constantin Vodă Han. Finally, by descending the Brătianu Boulevard, we may reach via Şepcari (Milliners) Street the Han of Manuc, the Church and ruins of the Old Court (Curtea Veche) and Hanul Roşu (the Red Han), all in Iuliu Maniu Street.

The only one of its kind to survive and so unable to bear any comparison, the Han of Manuc, must have ranked highly, even when it had grander rivals, on account of its consistent and unified design, all four sides of the courtyard consisting of a masonry plinth supporting two floors of open timber galleries with three‑cusped arches spanning between elegantly carved columns and over continuous balustrading which every so often cascades down in a staircase. Built in 1808, the han played host four years later at the end of the six‑year Russo‑Turkish War to the delegation drawing up the Peace Treaty of Bucharest which, among other things, ceded Bessarabia to Russia. Around 1865 the han was converted into an hotel which it has remained to this day, though not without a further major conversion and restoration in 1969‑70 (architect Constantin Joia) which revealed that the han had incorporated two earlier buildings of the Old Court.

By the end of the seventeenth century Bucharest had become the most important city of Wallachia and one of the principal urban centers of south‑east Europe. To the Lower Market (Târgul de Jos) around the Old Court were added first the Upper Market (Târgul de Sus) and then the Cuckoo Market (Târgul Cucului) around New St. George's Church. In the course of the century the number of guilds had doubled to eighty. Antonio del Chiaro, the Italian secretary of Constantin Brâncoveanu, described Bucharest as having “an almost circular form, with a very large circumference.” (12) Although the inhabitants numbered some 50,000 according to a contemporary census, the city had a large spread and a low density, its houses being “isolated one from the other like islands each with courtyard, kitchen block, stables and orchard, lending the place a very agreeable aspect and plenty of life.” (13) Thomas Thornton at the beginning of the nineteenth century found Jassy and Bucharest to be “more like large villages than what they are meant to be, that is seats of government. In one as in the other the most representative buildings are the churches and monasteries. As for the boyars' palaces, surrounded by courts and large gardens, they provide a painful contrast with the dwellings of the common people, which have a miserable appearance.” (14) In addition to the princely court, the three market areas and the grand boyars' houses, Bucharest contained many monasteries and churches, caravanserais, public baths and water mills along the river. Because the Turks forbade the construction of city fortifications, defensive features in the form of high surrounding walls and watch towers were the privilege of the prince's palace, monasteries and caravanserais.

Starting in the seventeenth century a series of engravings of Bucharest, generally seen from the Spirea Hill south of the city, show a large river in the middle distance and the city on the far bank depicted in a fanciful manner, which tells us more about the way a medieval city was perceived than about the city itself. A seventeenth century engraving entitled ‘Prospekt der Stadt Bukarest in der Wallachey’ shows a compact city of buildings with high‑pitched roofs, out of which spring a multitude of tall slender towers with conical roofs, like some northern San Gimignano. A more dominant and denser mass of buildings, with a square tower reminiscent of the Campanile of St. Mark's in Venice, indicates the princely court, while a very tall octagonal watch tower, part of the defensive system of ramparts and bastions which surrounds the city, suggests that the greatest and most persistent threat lay with the Turks in the south and, sure enough, we find in the foreground of the engraving a Turkish army encampment. Most fictitious of all is the background landscape north of the city, which is depicted as a range of barren mountains where there is in fact a second river valley.

Another early eighteenth-century engraving shows the city entirely circumscribed by castellated walls and towers, crowded with buildings, of which rows of gable‑ended houses, three‑ to four‑stories high, and minaret‑like towers crowned with the Islamic half‑moon symbol are the most persistent. More credible are the two approach roads quite close to one another, each one crossing the river by means of a simple wooden bridge and leading to a city gate. There were in fact two main approaches from the south, Calea Rahovei leading to the Old Court, and Calea Şerban Vodă leading to Old St. George's Church, the latter always being used by the Phanariot rulers and by the Sultan's emissaries arriving in Bucharest from Constantinople.

Until Calea Victoriei came into existence, Calea Şerban Vodă was the most important street and one of the five principal arteries of old Bucharest. Still to be seen along the first section of this road are two churches of historical rather than artistic importance. St. Catherine (Sfânta Ecaterina) stands on the site of a sixteenth-century monastery near      the place where in 1631 Aga Matei from Brâncoveni defeated the boyars of the reigning prince, Leon Tomşa, and assumed the throne as Matei Basarab. The present church was built in 1774 by the reigning prince Alexandru Ipsilante's wife Ecaterina and restored after the Great Fire of 1847. Nearby on the east side of the street, set back among trees, is one of the largest churches in Bucharest, New St. Spiridon (Sfântul Spiridon Nou), built between 1852 and 1858 in the Neo‑Romanesque style. It stands on the site of an earlier church built by the reigning princes Scarlat Chica (1758‑61 and 1765‑66) and his son Alexandu Ghica (1766‑68). Scarlat Chica and three other Phanariot princes are buried in the church: Nicolae Mavrogheni (1786‑90), Constantin Hangerli (1797‑99), both put to death on orders from Constantinople, and the last Phanariot reigning prince, Alexandru Suţu (1818‑21).

The typical reign of a Phanariot prince was generally too short for him to have carried out a substantial building program. The shining exception is Nicolae Mavrocordato (1715‑16 and 1719‑30) who built the Monastery of Văcăreşti some five kilometers south of the city, and in whose reign were constructed the Creţulescu Church (1720‑22) in Calea Victoriei and the Stavropoleos Church (1724) in Stavropoleos Street. Văcăreşti Monastery, which was demolished in 1985 on the orders of Ceauşescu under the pretext of wanting the site for a new ‘law courts’ building, has been described as the greatest eighteenth-century monastic complex in south‑east Europe. It was built in two stages because of the 1716‑18 Austro‑Turkish war. Begun in 1716, work was interrupted for three years when the Austrian army under General Stainville marched into Bucharest and carried off Mavrocordato to prison in Sibiu. Reinstated in 1719, Mavrocordato continued the work for another three years and in 1722 completed the monastery which consisted of an immense courtyard surrounded by ranges of monastic and secular buildings, including a residence for the prince in the north‑east corner. The monastery's dominant axis originated at the entrance gate situated in the western range, passed through the free‑standing church in the middle of the courtyard, and extended to the chapel in the eastern range. Although in use as a prison for over a hundred years, the monastery buildings had been restored before the final demolition order was given.

Before Nicolae Mavrocordato, the Cantacuzino family and Constantin Brâncoveanu, whose mother was a Cantacuzino, had been great builders. Şerban Cantacuzino, the reigning prince, built himself a palace in 1678, the year of his accession, on land which he owned in the Upper Market around Doamnei Street and Calea Victoriei. As his favorite residence, it was in constant use throughout his ten-year reign, but soon fell into disrepair after his death. Restored and transformed many years later, it became the Russian Legation after the War of Independence and once again the scene of glamorous political and social events. Abandoned at the Russian Revolution, it was eventually sold by the USSR and finally demolished in 1935 to allow for the extension of Doamnei Street.

Of more lasting value was Şerban Cantacuzino's reorganization of the hundred‑year old Slavonic Academy at Old St. George's, making it into one of the most important centers of learning in the Balkans, and his revival and patronage of the capital's printing presses, the most important result of which was the publication in 1688 of the first bible in the Romanian language. The re‑animated Slavonic Academy was soon to be overtaken by Constantin Brâncoveanu's Greek School at St. Sava's Monastery situated on the present University Square. The monastery, which was rebuilt by Brâncoveanu on the site of a sixteenth-century foundation named after the monastery near Jerusalem to which it was dedicated, became famous because of the school which was attached to it and in which it was possible to study, in Greek, rhetoric, philosophy, logic, the physical sciences, astronomy, geology and foreign languages. The school, which did not acquire a Romanian language course until 1818 despite Alexander Ipsilanti's 1776 reorganization in the spirit of the Enlightenment, was finally demolished in 1855 to make way for the University building (architect Alexandru Orăscu) and the projected boulevard and square.

Şerban Cantacuzino's greatest foundation, begun in 1679, was undoubtedly the Monastery of Cotroceni, situated on a hill forming part of the south corniche of the River Dâmboviţa, some three kilometers west of the city center in what were at the end of the seventeenth century still forests covering most of the right bank of the river. Today it is called the Palace of Cotroceni, having become, since the Union, the summer residence, and in more recent times the permanent residence of the heads of state. From the very beginning the monastery incorporated a princely residence whither the reigning princes and their retinue would halt for rest or refuge, or because the princely courts in the city center were no longer habitable. Both Alexandru Cuza (1859‑66), the first prince since Michael the Brave to reign over the United Principalities, and Carol I of Hohenzollern‑Sigmaringen, (1866‑1914) until the completion in 1880 of Peleş Castle at Sinaia, used Cotroceni as a summer palace. After 1888 the monastery became the permanent home of Crown Prince Ferdinand, and it is for him and his wife, the future Queen Maria of Romania, that the old princely residence was demolished and replaced with a grander building, designed in a Venetian Classical style by the French architect Paul Gottereau. A few years later the Romanian architect Grigore Cerchez remodeled the north wing in the National Romantic style, adding a large hall with a terrace on top and two delightful colonnaded belvederes one of which was a replica of the famous belvedere at Hurez Monastery, Brâncoveanu's great foundation in the County of Vâlcea.

Until 1984, in the second courtyard of Cotroceni Monastery, stood the church which, together with some of the surrounding buildings incorporating the old kitchen and a range of vaulted cells, was all that was left of the old monastery. The plan of the church combined a trefoiled nave sur­mounted by a central domed tower with a spacious rectangular pronaos, within which twelve ornately carved stone columns supported a second lower tower. An arcaded porch extending the full width of the pronaos formed the entrance to the church. Orders went out for the demolition of the church on 25 April 1984. No explanation was given but it was known that Cotroceni was one of Ceauşescu's palaces and that he disliked churches. Fortunately there was an architect in charge who dismantled the church with the greatest care, numbering and storing all the stone­work, so that it could be rebuilt and still retain a fair degree of authenticity.

In 1683, the year of the Siege of Vienna, Şerban Cantacuzino's wife, Maria, founded the Princess's Church (Biserica Doamnei) which survives to this day in Strada Doanmei, near the site of the Prince's palace and opposite the National‑Romantic pile of the Marmorosch‑Blank Bank (1915‑23, architect Petre Antonescu), today the Investment Bank. The beautiful columns of the porch and the two larger columns which separate the pronaos from the nave are very much like the columns of the demolished Cotroceni church. With the exception of the bell‑tower over the pronaos which has long since disappeared, and the interior frescoes of which only fragments survive, the church is well preserved and, with its remarkable porch and well‑proportioned interior, highly character­istic of its time.

One of Şerban Cantacuzino's brothers, Mihai, who was commander‑in‑chief of the army (‘Mare Spătar’), built the monastery at Sinaia (1690) as a thanks­giving for his mother's, his sister's, and his own safe return from a journey to the Holy Land and to the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mount Sinai, after which the new monastery and later the town which developed around it were named. In Bucharest he founded in 1695 the Colţea Hospital and Church on Brătianu Boulevard (formerly Colţea) and in 1699 the extraordinary Fundenii Doamnei Church in the village of Fundeni on the eastern shore of Lake Pantelimon, seven kilometers north‑east of the city. The hospital church, built on the site of an earlier wooden church is one of the most beautiful examples of seventeenth-century Wallachian architecture, with a remarkable Baroque portal and a particularly fine porch, in the domes and arches of which survive some interesting frescoes. The hospital buildings which we see today, grouped around a vast courtyard, are the result of a reconstruction and enlargement in 1888 of the original hospital. It was then, too, that the Colţea Tower (Turnul Colţei), a much illustrated Bucharest landmark which had lost its upper part in the 1802 earthquake, was demolished to make way for the new boulevard, part of the north‑south axis consisting of the boulevards Lascăr Catargiu, Magheru, Bălcescu and Brătianu, which was not completed until after World War I.

The Fundenii Doamnei Church is extraordinary – and probably unique – because of its seventeen stucco relief panels which decorate the external walls, the panels on the north wall having barely survived the intemperate weather conditions. Though impossible to explain, the influence is un­doubtedly Persian as can be seen in the flowers, birds, fountains and especially in the singular palace, which form the subject matter of the panels.

It is supposed that the stuccatore who worked at the Fundenii Doamnei Church was also responsible for the stucco decoration of floral motifs at the Palace of Potlogi, one of a number of country houses built in the environs of Bucharest by the team of building craftsmen which Constantin Brâncoveanu set up for this purpose. Ever since the early part of the seventeenth century the grander boyars had taken to building themselves country houses, one of the earliest being that of Udrişte Năsturel, Matei Basarab's brother‑in‑law, still to be seen in part at Hereşti, some forty kilometers south of Bucharest, described by Paul of Aleppo who saw it when it was new as “a palace without equal in the world except perhaps in France, built inside and out in dressed stone.” (15) Constantin Cantacuzino, Lord Chamberlain (Mare Postelnic) and the father of Şerban and Mihai, had a large estate at Filipeşti de Târg, west of Ploieşti. Its splendor astonished Paul of Aleppo, who found the house, today a mere vestige of a ruin, “more beautiful than anything in the city”, its many rooms “planned and decorated in the manner of palaces at Constantinople”... with the possibility of “taking wonderful hot baths in beautiful marble”, the water being brought from the river by means of wheels and a system of canals with which the orchards and vegetable gardens could also be watered (16). Nearby at Măgureni, around 1670, Constantin's grandson, Pârvu, who had been educated in Constantinople, also built a family house of considerable dimension, but this, too, is now in ruins.

In Bucharest, Constantin Brâncoveanu's alterations and extensions to the Old Court were much admired by his contemporaries. Antonio del Chiaro, perhaps not surprisingly, writes proudly that ‘the palace was built entirely of stone, with the principal staircase of marble.’ (17). It contained several large vaulted halls, one of which, the throne room, had a row of columns down the middle. Outside the palace there was a large garden which del Chiaro described as ‘very beautiful, square in shape and designed with the good taste of an Italian.’ (18). The great change which came about under Brâncoveanu's rule was the application of classical principles in planning and design. This influence may have come via the France of Louis XIV, through the Russia of Peter the Great, or direct from Italy. It is most evident in the symmetry and order found in the palaces of Potlogi, Doiceşti and Mogoşoaia.

Of all Brâncoveanu's palaces, Mogoşoaia, the construction of which was begun in 1700, is the only one that has survived more or less complete. For the first time the palace stands in the middle of what was originally a vast rectangular court enclosed on three sides by high walls (the side to the lake being left open), where previously the princely residence was part of the surrounding structures. Not only is the palace now free‑standing, but one of its long sides faces and relates to the distant landscape via a series of terraces which step down to the lake. Brâncoveanu lived barely twelve years in his sumptuous new palace before he was deposed and taken to Constantinople where, on 15 April 1714 he, his four sons and his Chancellor of the Exchequer, Ienache Văcărescu were all beheaded. For a while Mogoşoaia became a caravanserai. In the 1769‑74 Russo‑Turkish War it was badly damaged when Russian troops occupied Bucharest. A first restoration was attempted after 1860 by the reigning prince, Gheorghe Bibesco, who had inherited the property through his marriage to a Brâncoveanu. Continued with the help of a French architect by his son Niculae, the restoration was finally completed, with the help of the Venetian architect Domenico Rupol (assisted by the young Romanian architect, G. M. Cantacuzino), by Georges and Marthe Bibesco after the First World War, the palace becoming once again a home as well as a center of social and political activity. Under the post-Second World War Communist regime the property was seized by the state and the palace turned into a museum.

Although Bucharest at the end of its medieval phase ran true to form in so far as ‘religion’, as Lewis Mumford wrote, ‘gave way to commerce, ‘faith’ to ‘credit’’ (19) the spiritual substance tending to disappear with the very growth of the city, new churches continued to be founded under the Phanariots but by boyars, merchants or priests rather than by reigning princes, and often in what in the eighteenth century was outside the city's limits. There is, for example, the Mântuleasa Church at the junction of Negustori and Mântuleasa Street, a small but well‑proportioned edifice with an elegant belfry and good interior frescoes, built in 1734 by Manta Precupeţu whose surname may well describe a mercantile function which has long since disappeared. There is the charming little Stejar Church near the intersection of Câmpineanu and Luterană Street behind the former Royal Palace, built in 1743 by Tănase the Captain (‘Căpitanul’) and restored by King Carol I with the intention of making it the Chapel Royal. Or there is, in Calea Griviţei the Manea Brutaru Church with its separate bell‑tower, built in 1777 and named after its founder, the Master of the Corporation of Bakers.

Of the churches built outside the city's limits, three deserve to be mentioned: Old St. Eleutheria (Sf. Elefterie Vechi), half‑way to Cotroceni on the right bank of the Dâmboviţa, built between 1741 and 1744 by the Metropolitan Neofit with money left for this purpose by the merchant Maxim Lupetu: Mavrogheni Church in Monetăriei Street off Kiseleff Avenue, built together with a princely residence and a beautiful garden of which nothing remains by the reigning prince Niculae Mavrogheni in 1789, the year in which Austrian troops, under Prince Frederick of Saxe‑Coburg, occupied Bucharest: and the Church of St. Nicholas at Băneasa, which is all that survives of the poet boyar Enăchiţă Văcărescu's illustrious court, begun in 1755, twice delayed by Russo‑ and Austro‑Turkish wars, and eventually completed in 1792 as the private chapel of the court.

The best loved and the most ornate of the eighteenth-century churches was and is Stavropoleos Church in the street of the same name. Built to a simple rectangular plan in 1724 by the Greek monk, Ioanikie, as a chapel for his han, it was enlarged in 1730 by the addition of an elaborately decorated porch and lateral apses. The church best loved by the aristocracy was Domniţa Bălaşa, situated in a large garden at the eastern end of what is now Sfinţii Apostoli (St. Apostles) Street but what used to be, before the construction of Ceauşescu's new center, the extremity of Calea Rahovei. The church we see today, the fourth building on the site, is a tall brick edifice with five towers built in the National‑Romantic style between 1881 and 1888 by Alexandru Orăscu, the architect who was also responsible for the University building, but which he designed, not inappropriately, in the Palladian manner. The first church on the site, however, was built in 1751 by Brâncoveanu's daughter, Bălaşa; it was rebuilt in 1831 by the Governor (‘ban’) Grigore Brâncoveanu but, having collapsed in the earthquake of 1838, was rebuilt a third time by Grigore's wife, Safta.

It would be inconceivable in an essay on Bucharest to omit the Bucur Church if only because of its association with the shepherd Bucur who, according to legend, founded Bucharest in the late fourteenth century, building this church in the place where he took his sheep to graze. Dana Harhoiu has pointed out that it was nineteenth-century Romanticism that connected this legend with the shepherd life of Romanians and that it needed Mircea Eliade's mythic and religious perspective to re‑establish the mythic dimension of this tradition and consider ‘Bucur as a precursor, endowed with the knowledge of signs, destined to see the materialization of some superior energy in the cosmic becoming of the place.’ (20) The little church, which seems to belong more to a village than to a capital city, was in fact built in 1743 as the cemetery church to the adjacent Radu Vodă Monastery.

The finest of the eighteenth century churches are also the earliest: Antim Monastery Church, founded in 1714 by the Metropolitan Antim Ivireanu: and the Creţulescu Church, built between 1720 and 1722 by the Governor (‘Vornic’) Iordache Creţulescu. Despite the loss of the western range and most of the northern range, where an excessively bulky synodal house was built in the second decade of the twentieth century, and despite the irreparable damage to its setting by Ceauşescu’s new center, Antim Monastery with its imposing belfry entrance gate and church aligned on a central axis, with its chapel and symmetrically disposed cells and kitchens, and with its superlative stone carving, remains a monument of outstanding artistic quality. The Creţulescu Church is exceptionally well‑proportioned, with a grand porch, two towers and brick walls gracefully decorated with panels and blind arches. The church was not built in conjunction with a han but the founder erected some houses nearby which enabled the church to become a monastery forty years later. In 1822 the Prussian consul in Bucharest, Ludovic Kreutchely, found the church surrounded by a great han, part of which survived until 1939.

The Creţulescu Church was built at what was then the northern ‘gate’ into the city in a place called ‘Puţul cu zale’, recalling the presence of an earlier well. Bucharest with its five river valleys, the Colentina and the Dâmboviţa, both well‑endowed with springs, has never been short of water. Indeed it is axiomatic that a city can only survive and prosper if it has access to an adequate supply of pure water. Bucharest's abundance is reflected in the many place names which include the words for water, well, source, spring and especially fountain in the sense of structure for the constant supply of drinking water. One of the churches destroyed by Ceauşescu was called Fountain of Healing (Izvorul Tămăduirii) and it was in the Street of the Cold Water Well (Puţul cu Apă Rece). There is the Street of the Flowing Waters (Apele Vii), of the Small Fountain (Fântânica), of the Stone Well (Puţul de Piatră), of the Well with Poplars (Puţul cu Plopi) and there are many others with similar names. The modern fountain in front of the Military Circle (Cercul Militar) building on the corner of Regina Elisabeta Boulevard and Calea Victoriei, a monumental Neo‑Classical pile erected in 1912 to the designs of D. Maimarolu, V. Ştefănescu and E. Doneaud which replaced the famous Sărindar Church built in Matei Basarab's time, is the site of one of the oldest fountains in Bucharest, ‘with spring water brought from afar at great cost.’ (21)

In 1786 the reigning prince, Niculae Mavrogheni, built the fountain in front of the Izvorul Tamaduirii Church, also built by him, and brought water to some of the boyars' houses. Another fountain, Cişmeaua Roşie (The Red Fountain) was erected in 1800 at the junction of Calea Victoriei and Strada Nuferilor (The Street of the Water Lilies) whose original name was Strada Fântânei (The Street of the Fountain). Piped water was installed after the War of Independence by the Swiss engineer, B. Urelly Ziegler, the works beginning in 1884 and finishing in 1888, which is also the year the canalization of the Dâmboviţa inside the city was begun. The section between Piaţa Naţiunile Unite and Piaţa Unirii was put under ground before the Second World War, eliciting the comment that ‘this wretched little stream which in its time has been a mirror to the Old Court, the Burnt Court, Brâncoveanu's Court and so much princely pomp and circumstance will remain from now on and for evermore a collector‑ canal’. (22) Under the post‑war Communist regime, however, the Dâmboviţa was dammed and a lake formed some five kilometers upstream, and the central section, which had been put underground, again exposed in a canalized form. There is now the possibility, encouraged by the 1966 Architectural Competition ‘Bucharest 2000’ that the section across the Piaţa Unirii, which has remained underground, may also be exposed.

The Colentina river valley north of the city has provided a green belt and set a natural limit to expansion northwards. This river valley has in fact been transformed, starting in the inter‑war period and continuing after the Second World War, into a chain of lakes – Mogoşoaia, Străuleşti, Griviţa, Băneasa, Herăstrău, Floreasca, Tei, Pantelimon and Colentina which provides a vast and wonderful area for leisure, recreation and sport.

Wars, like fires, earthquakes and epidemics, were regular events in Bucharest's history. In the two hundred years between the Second Siege of Vienna in 1683 and the War of Independence in 1877‑78 there were, if we include the 1848 Revolution with its ‘bloodbath of Bucharest’ as Karl Marx called it, no fewer than ten wars involving Turkey, Russia Austria and the Principalities in some combination or other. But wars sometimes have a positive side and, in the case of Bucharest, it was Austrian and Russian engineers and cartographers, in occupation of the city with their respective armies, who surveyed it and drew the early plans, the Russians being the first in 1770 and the Austrians second in 1789. Not only did these and later more detailed plans, like Major Borroczyn’s of 1852, provide an invaluable record but they laid the foundations for town‑planning.

There had been two previous Russian occupations, in 1769 and 1808, but it was the Russo‑Turkish War of 1828‑29 and the Russian occupation and administration of both principalities from 1828 to 1834 that had the most positive and lasting effect. The Peace Treaty of Adrianople (today Edirne) in 1829 confirmed the administrative autonomy of the principal­ities but maintained the Russian occupation until war reparations had been paid. It restricted Turkey's right to interfere in the principal­ities and obliged the Porte to acknowledge the administrative regulation set up during the occupation. These regulations, introduced in 1830, were nothing less than the Organic Law, in effect a constitution which remained in force in both principalities, except for a brief moment during the 1848 Revolution, until 1858 when the Organic Law was replaced by a political, social and administrative statute, drawn up by the Seven Powers in Paris for the use of the United Principalities of Moldavia and Wallachia, which were about to unite under the reigning prince, Alexandru Cuza. (23) The Russians in 1830 thus unwittingly encouraged both union and independence.

The Organic Law determined a clear separation of powers into executive, belonging to the reigning prince, who was elected for life; and legis­lative, belonging to the General Assembly whose chairman was the Metropolitan. It established the general competence of central bodies; created public and specialized services with well‑defined tasks; separated justice from administration; abolished the guilds' monopoly thus promoting the development of industry; and set up a single tax­ation system, the poll‑tax. It could be said that town‑planning proper dated from the Organic Law, which required towns to set up administrative organs that would control development. The requirements included the preparation of cadastral plans and setting limits to the growth of the town, cutting new roads (usually parallel to existing arteries) to ease the growing vehicular circulation; and, most significant of all, the use of durable building materials like brick or stone instead of the light inflammable materials of which most of the old buildings in Bucharest were constructed. Finally, anyone wishing to build had to obtain a permit from the town administration. The new controls over building materials and the further requirement to demolish wherever possible old buildings which were a fire hazard did not prevent the Great Fire of 1847 when Bucharest burnt for three days and nights and half the city was destroyed.

If the Russian occupation strengthened among Romanians the idea of union and independence, it also opened the door, paradoxically, to the full force of western influence. In 1832, General Count Pavel Kisseleff, the president plenipotentiary of Wallachia's and Moldavia's Divans, whose policies reflected those of his late Czar, the liberal and re­formist Alexander I, laid out the Kisseleff Avenue which extends Calea Victoriei northwards through woods to today's Piaţa Presei Libre (Free Press Square) with its monumental and alien‑looking Stalinist pile, to the lakes of Herăstrău and Băneasa. Unlike the Stalinist pile, it was a fine present to Bucharest from the Russians which was to be enhanced in the 1840s and 50s by the reigning princes Gheorghe Bibescu and his brother Barbu Ştirbey with the extensive gardens planned on either side of the long avenue by the German landscape architect Wilhelm Meyer, who from 1850 to 1852 also laid out in the English Romantic style the beautiful Cişmigiu Gardens. A few years later in 1859, the year of the Union of the Principalities, the first and largest of eighteen cemeteries, the Bellio (Bellu) Cemetery, was opened at the southern end of Calea Şerban Vodă.

Public gardens, parks, cemeteries were all an essential element in what in the middle of the nineteenth century was perceived as a modern city. In addition to the Kisseleff Avenue and Cişmigiu Gardens there was the Carol I Park in the southern part of the city, designed in 1903 by the French landscape architect Redont and created to accommodate the ex­hibition commemorating forty years of the King's reign; the Botanic Gardens at Cotroceni, laid out in the 1890s and made into a public garden by the architect Octav Doicescu. between the wars; and the Carol II Park on the banks of the Herăstrău Lake, laid out in 1936 for the exhibition ‘Luna Bucureştilor’ part of which, the Village Museum, became a permanent fixture, expanding considerably with its many genuine peasant houses and farmsteads moved from their place of origin and re‑erected in idyllic surroundings.

It was also in the nineteenth century that the concept arose of the infrastructure of a city – roads, bridges, sewers, water etc. – and that the connection was made between a sound infrastructure and the health of citizens. Haussmann's operation in Paris had a direct in­fluence on the planning of Bucharest. If the 1850s mark the beginning of the history of the center of modern Paris, 1857 is the year in which in Bucharest a start was made with the cutting of Carol I Boulevard, part of that east‑west artery starting in University Square, which continued westwards with Regina Elisabeta Boulevard in the 1870s and eastwards with Pache Protopopescu Boulevard in 1890. A similar north-­south artery, running roughly parallel with Calea Victoriei, was begun in 1894 with the straight northern section between Piaţa Romană and Piaţa Victoriei, called Lascăr Catargiu Boulevard, and continued in 1906 with the middle and southern sections, Magheru, Bălcescu and Brătianu boulevards, which were only completed after the First World War in time to benefit from the inter‑war building boom. As a result of this boom, the Magheru and Bălcescu boulevards presented at the end of this period, and still present today, a unique array of 1930s Modern Movement architecture.

If the Organic Law of 1831 laid the foundations of town‑planning, the Great Fire of 1847 required Bucharest to be largely rebuilt and provided the opportunity of creating a capital city worthy of the United Principalities (1859), an independent nation (1877) and a Kingdom (1881).

Some of the grander houses which were built of masonry survived the fire. One of these was the house of High Steward (‘Stolnic’) Dinicu Golescu (1812‑15) which stood on the site of the south wing of the former Royal Palace, today the Palace of the Republic and National Museum of Art. Two‑stories high and Neo‑Classical in style, the house had at least twenty‑five rooms, of which one, the ‘salon’, was very large indeed for Bucharest at that date. Acquired by the state in 1832, the house became the palace of the reigning prince, Alexandru Ghica, whose successors, Gheorghe Bibescu and Barbu Ştirbey, used it for ceremonial purposes only, preferring to go on living in their own houses. Both Alexandru Cuza and Carol I made the house their palace, though Carol I, after becoming King, found it necessary to build the first Royal Palace (1882‑85, architect Paul Gottereau), linking it to the house with a domed structure containing a circular ‘salon’. After a fire in 1927 the Royal Palace was totally rebuilt on a U‑shaped plan, to the grandiose Palladian design of Nicolae Nenciulescu (1930‑37).

Dinicu Golescu's house became the reigning prince's palace more because of its location than because of its grandeur. Larger and much grander, but located on the borders of Lake Tei outside Bucharest, was Grigore Dimitrie Ghica's palace, built in 1822, the year Ghica ascended the throne of Wallachia as the first native reigning prince after more than a century of Phanariot rule. Like the Golescu house, the Ghica­-Tei Palace, as it came to be called, is a full‑blooded Classical design in the way a rusticated ground‑floor podium carries a piano nobile divided into bays by Corinthian pilasters supporting a cornice, with pediments over the side wings. Towards the end of his reign, in 1833, Ghica added a chapel, the plan of which is an oval with four deeply rounded niches, supporting a circular drum and dome. Both buildings are western imports planted on Wallachian soil and part of the westernization process which was a reaction to the predominating Greek influence of the Phanariot period.

A house in the very heart of Bucharest which survived the fire was that of Governor (‘Vornic’) Slătineanu on the corner of Calea Victoriei and Edgar Quinet Street, today the Restaurant Capşa. It was in this house in 1871, in the renowned Slătineanu Hall, that the German colony in Bucharest, celebrating the victories of the Prussian army over the French, had stones hurled at them through the windows by pro‑French student demonstrators, after which the Prussian Prince Carol I threatened to abdicate. Three years later Grigore Capşa, who had learnt the culinary arts from Boissier in Paris, bought the house and converted it into a confisserie, salon de thé, restaurant and hotel, the confisserie and salon de thé becoming not only the very best of their kind, but a fashionable meeting place, both of which they remained, as readers of Olivia Manning's The Fortunes of War (11) know, well into the Second World War.

The other houses of note which survived the Great Fire are the Neo‑Gothic Soutzo (Suţu) Palace, today the History Museum of Bucharest Municipality, built in 1833 to the designs of Konrad Schwinck and Johann Veit on a site opposite Colţea Church in Brătianu Boulevard; the elegant Neo‑Classical Ştirbey Palace in Calea Victoriei, built in 1835 to the designs of the French architect, Charles Sanjouand, and restored in 1881 by the Austrian architect Hartmann (who added the picturesque corner tower), its well‑preserved interiors being ransacked in 1950 by an insensate, communist‑ inspired mob; and, built about the same time as the Ştirbey Palace, the Creţulescu House at no.4 Strada Fundaţiei, now the Museum of Romanian Literature.

It was the street‑fronted shops, cafes and eating houses, of which Bucharest at the beginning of the nineteenth century boasted some 1500 and which proliferated as the century progressed, as well as the development of the wax, cloth and paper industries on the periphery of the city, (24) that led to the decline and eventual disappearance of the caravanserai. An example from the very first years of the nineteenth century which survives is the fragile‑looking Cafeneaua Veche (The Old Coffee House) on the corner of Şelari and Covaci streets. The Brasserie Carul cu Bere (Beer Cart) in Stavropoleos Street, built in 1875 to the designs of the architect of Polish origin, Zigfrid Kofczinsky, on the other hand, is a robust Neo‑Gothic building with remarkable and well‑preserved contemporary interiors.

The introduction of street lighting, an essential part of modernizing the city, created a dramatic change in the appearance of the streets at night. The first public lighting with oil lamps was in­augurated in 1857, and the first gas lamp standards date from 1861, which is before Paris or Berlin. Gas lighting was fully introduced in 1871 and electricity in 1881, the year Carol I was crowned. One does not need too much imagination to appreciate the difference the introduction of oil lamps must have made to the setting of the recently completed and very popular National Theatre. Begun in 1846 on the west side of Calea Victoriei between Matei Millo and Câmpineanu Street, its construction was delayed first by the Great Fire and then by the 1848 Revolution, so that it was not completed until 1852, marking the start of a development in a city which is well‑known today for its lively and creative theatre.

Romanian theatre has its dual origins in the itinerant players of the eighteenth century, a kind of commedia dell’arte, and in the court theatre of the Phanariot princes, who in 1818 built the first theatre a little further north in Calea Victoriei – near Cişmeaua Roşie (the Red Fountain). Performances, which were at first in Greek, were also given in the Greek School of St. Sava Monastery and in the Slătineanu Hall. Given legitimacy with the founding in 1833 of the Philharmonic Society and School of Music and Dramatic Art, the theatre flourished so that the spaces in which performances took place soon became inadequate. The new theatre, designed by the Viennese architect Josef A. Heft in the Italian Baroque tradition, with a horse‑shoe plan and several tiers of boxes, also provided a capital aspiring to modernization with its first cultural status symbol. Writing in 1938, the architect and art historian Grigore Ionescu described the old National Theatre as ‘pleasing to look at with its simple architectonic lines, yet in its proportions and beauty, providing a marked contrast with the uniform and cold architecture of the two giant buildings which frame it, the Telephone Building on one side and the Adriatica Company Building on the other.’ (25) The theatre survived a few more years, until damage from the 1944 bombardment of Bucharest became the excuse for its total demolition after the war, and its eventual replacement in the 1970s by a new theatre in Piaţa Teatrului National. The buildings which framed it since their construction in the 1930s are still there.

Other necessary cultural symbols were related to higher education and included university buildings and museums. The construction between 1856 and 1869 of the University and its relation to the formation of the new square and east‑west artery have already been noted. Alexandru Orăscu’s imposing ‘palace’ was extended by Nicolae Ghica­-Budeşti between 1912 and 1926 to include the faculties of letters, philosophy, theology, pharmacology and the sciences. The Faculty of Medicine was also created in 1856, only acquired its own fine building, designed by the French architect Louis Blanc, on the corner of Carol I Boulevard and Carol Davila Street (named after the famous French doctor who founded the faculty) in 1903. The training of architects was en­visaged in Alexandru Cuza's law of 1864 which established the University but eventually the Academy of Architecture was set up in 1904 as a separate and parallel institution, (26) for which Grigore Cerchez designed a monumental building in the National Romantic style in Biserica Enei Street, begun in 1912 but not completed and occupied by the academy until 1927.

The oldest museum in Bucharest dates from 1836 and is the National History or Antipa Museum (after the distinguished natural historian and former director of the museum, Grigore Antipa). Founded by Alexandru Ghica and his brother Grigore, it began life in the School of St. Sava, transferring, when this was demolished, to the new university building until 1906, when it finally moved into the white‑stuccoed Neo‑Classical building in Piaţa Victoriei at one end of Kisseleff Avenue. No building or institution, however, was more representative, or more fully the embodiment of national cultural aspirations than the Romanian Athenaeum (Ateneul Român), built in 1886 to the designs of the French architect Albert Galleron, on a site in Calea Victoriei, which had belonged to the Văcărescu family and on which had stood a church erected by the General Mihai Cantacuzino and given by him to the See of Râmnicu Vâlcea. With the church gone, the site had come to be known as the Bishopric's Garden (Grădina Episcopiei) and it was at the back of this garden, on the foundations of a circus building which the Romanian Equestrian Company had started in 1874 but had been unable to finish, that the Athenaeum with its grand Ionic entrance portico and ornate Second Empire dome was sited. The building is best known for its delightful concert hall (in which the first parliament of Greater Romania ratified the union with Bessarabia, Transylvania and Bukovina in 1919), but it was built also to contain a library and the national collections of art which have long since been moved to other premises.

It would be impossible to leave the world of culture without mention­ing the National Museum Carol I, the great National Romantic pile of red brick next to the Antipa Museum in Kisseleff Avenue. Designed by Nicolae Ghica‑Budeşti, the museum was begun in 1912 with the intention of housing all the collections of Romanian popular art from prehistoric times to the present day. With the museum still unfinished in 1939 (three of the four projected wings had been built), completion was only achieved in the 1960s by reverting to a simpler and more modern style architecture. Changed under the Communist regime to the Museum of the History of the Communist Party, it has recently been restored to its original purpose and renamed Museum of the Peasant.

As a result of the Union and with the establishment in 1862 of a parliamentary democracy, new buildings were required to house the burgeoning institutions of government – parliament, ministries, law courts, town hall , and the new service industries – postal services, telephones, hotels and railways, gas and electricity companies. The Patriarchate Hill, as we have already seen, was a holy place. It had been the exclusive domain of the Patriarchate Church and its palace, a straggling building, the oldest part of which dated from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century (including the private chapel of the Patriarch with its well‑preserved frescoes), and to which major extensions were built between 1850 and 1875, and again between 1932 and 1935 in the National Romantic style (architect George Simotta).

To the church and early palace Constantin Brâncoveanu had added in 1698 a gate‑tower and belfry. There is no better example of the decline of the sacred and spiritual than the admission to the holy site of the Patriarchate Hill of a temporal power: first in the shape of the princely divan (Divanul Domnesc), where on the 24^th of January 1862 Alexandru Cuza proclaimed before Moldavia's and Wallachia's assemblies the definitive Union of the Principalities and declared Bucharest the capital of the new country, and outside which on the 8th of June in the same year, Barbu Catargiu, leader of the Conservative Party, was shot dead as he was leaving the assembly; and second in 1907, in the shape of a grand parliament building, designed by the architect Dimitrie Maimarolu, which sur­vives to this day, but since 1996 devoid of any function as a result of the move of both houses of parliament to the Casa Republicii in Ceauşescu's new center.

The new ministries either moved into grand boyars' houses as they became available, like the Sturdza Palace in Piata Victoriei (Ministry of Foreign Affairs) (27) and the Gheorghe Vernescu house at 154 Calea Victoriei (Ministry of Industry and Commerce), built to the designs of Ion Mincu, the leading advocate of the National Romantic style, or they had new ‘palaces’ purpose‑built for them, like the vast Ministry of Finance on the corner of Calea Victoriei and Calea Griviţei (1883), and the French‑Renaissance style Ministry of Agriculture on the corner of Carol I and Brătianu Boulevard (1996, architect Louis Blanc). Also in Renaissance style, but more severe, is the law‑courts building (Palatul de Justiţie) on the quays of the Dâmboviţa, built between 1890 and 1895 to the designs of the French architect Albert Ballu, son of the great eclectic, Theodore, whose masterpiece was the Trinité church in Paris. Far more original and one of the most interesting buildings erected during these years was the City Hall (1906‑10) by Petre Antonescu, a staunch advocate of the National Romantic style and an influential architect who later became Rector of the Academy of Architecture where he was able to educate a whole new generation in his manner of thinking.

The Union of the two principalities not only increased their economic potential but it provided a powerful incentive to development and expansion, to what was perceived, in other words, as progress. This development was most conspicuous in the fields of industry and commerce, and in the establishment of the most modern methods of transport and communication. With the official registering of crude oil production in 1857 (the year which also saw the installation near Ploieşti of the first Romanian oil refinery), Wallachia became ­the first country in the world with an industrial oil production, crude oil extraction rising from a mere 275 tons in 1857 to nearly two million tons in 1914. Other industries which experienced con­siderable growth included mining, timber, leather, paper, building materials and, most important of all in a country with a predomin­antly agricultural economy, food. The Chamber of Commerce was established in 1864, a new monetary system introduced in 1868 (Romania thus acquiring its own currency, the ‘leu’) and the State Mint inaugurated in 1870. The National Bank was founded in 1880, acquiring magnificent premises in Lipscani Street five years later, and was followed by the establishment of some 170 banking organizations over the next 30 years, two of which, the Savings Bank in Calea Victoriei and the Marmorosch‑Blank Bank in Strada Doamnei, have already been noted. One other deserves to be mentioned, the Chrissoveloni Bank with facades in Lipscani and Stavropoleos Street, built after the First World War, to the robust Palladian designs of G. M. Cantacuzino.

In matters of communication, the year 1853 saw the inauguration of the telegraph line between Jassy and Vienna, and the following year the start of the construction of telegraph lines between Bucharest and Ruschuck (Russe), Bucharest and Braşov, Timişoara and Braşov, and Timişoara and Orşova. In 1862 an agreement regarding the inter­national telegraphic service was concluded between the United Principalities and Austria, Turkey and Serbia. This was followed in 1967 by the first postal convention (with Russia) that postal services on Romanian territory were to be effected only by the Romanian Post; and by postal conventions in 1868 between Romania and Austria­, Hungary, and Romania and Germany. These extraordinary and exciting developments in communication were represented by one building, the Palais des Postes or General Post Office. No budding European capital could afford to be without one, and Bucharest built its im­posing ‘palace’ (architect, Alexandru Săvulescu) between 1894 and 1900 in Calea Victoriei (converted after the Second World War into the National Museum of History), on the site of the Constantin Vodă han which had been largely destroyed in the fire of 1847 and replaced by a large wooden structure housing a circus, Circul Suhr, which performed there for the best part of 50 years.

The second half of the nineteenth century saw the growth of traditional means of transport – the intensification of river and maritime navigation, the reorganization of river ports and, on land, the construction of over 27,000 kilometers of roads – as well as the development of a totally new means of transport, the railway. The very first railway line on Romanian territory was laid in 1857 between Timişoara and the Serbian frontier town Jimbolia. In 1866 a British company (John Trevor Barclay and John Stainforth) was licensed to build the railway from Bucharest to Giurgiu, its inauguration being held three years later with the completion of Gara Filaret, Bucharest's first railway station. In 1868 a law was passed licensing an Anglo‑Austrian and Prussian consortium to build railways linking all the principal towns from Suceava and Botoşani in Northern Moldavia, via Ploieşti and Bucharest, westwards to Craiova and Turnu Severin. In 1872 Romania signed an agreement with Russia to connect the railway systems of the two countries, and similar conventions followed with Austria‑Hungary, Serbia and Bulgaria. Also in 1872 Bucharest's main railway terminus in Calea Griviţei, Gara de Nord (the North Station), a structure of little distinction which has suffered many alterations and additions, was inaugurated on the occasion of the opening of the Bucharest‑Ploieşti railway and of the official start of work on the Piteşti‑Bucharest­-Buzău‑Galaţi‑Roman line.

The twenty‑five years preceding the First World War were characterized by an extraordinary freedom of movement. It was possible with a passport, but without the need of visas, to travel comfortably by rail almost anywhere in Europe. Not surprisingly hotels sprang up in profusion following, but often in anticipation of, the con­struction of railway stations. We have already observed how the Han of Manuc was converted into the Hotel Dacia around 1865. Typical of this early period was the Hotel Boulevard in Calea Victoriei, completed in 1867 to the designs of Alexandru Orăscu, who also designed the university building and who is generally recognized as the first Romanian architect. The much later Athenée Palace Hotel (1912), Bucharest's Ritz, built to the designs of the French architect Théophile Bradeau, has the distinction of having been the first building in Bucharest to make use of a reinforced concrete structure. The hotel was enlarged in the 1930s and again in the 1960s, and has recently been restored to something like its original splendor.

The population of Bucharest rose three‑fold in the hundred years before the First World War, from 100,000 in 1821 to 300,000 in 1918 a relatively steady increase compared, say, with Budapest which rose from a mere a 36,000 in 1813 to 930,000 in 1920. With the creation of Greater Romania in 1918 and the period of prosperity which followed, the rate of increase accelerated and by 1945 the population of Bucharest was close to one million. To cope with this increase, some public and a great deal of private housing was built between the wars, mainly in the form of two‑ and three‑story houses and small apartment blocks often imaginatively designed. There are whole quarters of such housing and they are invariably well laid out with plenty of open space generously planted with trees – an extension of the true garden city that Bucharest has always been.

Over the 50 years after 1945 the population of Bucharest more than doubled to 2.25 million, an increase which occurred mainly at the expense of the countryside, as is made clear by the rise in the per­centage of the total population of Romania living in towns, from 21 per cent in 1930 to 45 per cent today. It is hardly surprising that the post‑war Communist governments made housing a priority and built a vast number of apartment blocks in satellites or along the main arteries of the city, as a result of which Bucharest suffered considerable expansion to the east and west. In general this housing was poorly built and has been even more poorly maintained, leaving the democratic and market‑oriented governments of the post-­Communist era with a difficult problem, not unlike that of London with its sixties’ council blocks or Paris with its HLMs (habitat à loyer moyen). Because there is so much of it, demolition, except in a few isolated instances, is not an option. A better way forward would be to make it possible for tenants to buy their apartment, and to encourage the formation of tenants' associations to look after the communal areas inside and outside the building which establish the image and which are generally in desperate need of improvement.

Housing, mainly on the periphery of the city, is just one of the many problems – perhaps the most visible – which constitute the legacy of the Communist era. Industry is another but this, too, lies at the periphery and does not have a direct impact on the city itself. It is the making good of the enormous damage to the old city, caused by the construction of Ceauşescu's new center which was noted at the beginning of this chapter, that remains the most important and urgent of the many tasks confronting the people of Bucharest. In this task it will be necessary to have a vision of the future city, of a sustainable city which is clean and pleasant to walk in, which espouses the principle of ‘greening’ its buildings while continuing the tradition of greening its open spaces, which appreciates the importance of daily care and maintenance, which respects, restores and re‑uses its old buildings and, above all, a city which has the imagination and wit to patronize the best artists, urban designers and architects.

NOTES

 1                      Bessarabia was annexed by the Soviet Union in 1940, becoming the Soviet Republic of Moldavia, despite its 2,020,000 Romanians out of a total population of 3,776,000. At the break‑up of the Soviet Union in the late eighties it become the independent Republic of Moldova. By 1980 Romanians numbered over 21 million, constituting 64 per cent of the total population. Also in 1940 northern Transylvania was annexed by the Hungarians but returned to Romania in 1945.

                        a City between East and West), Simetria, 1997.

                        limits, is more important than the palisade. The Romanian village

                        from time immemorial was surrounded by a ditch and it is significant

                        that the word for village in Romanian is sat from the Latin fossatum

                        meaning ditch.

spent the Years 1653‑58 (with a break in the middle) traveling

extensively in Wallachia and Moldavia.

                               (Journeys of the Patriarch Macarie of Antioch in the Romanian

                            Principalities) translated by Em. Cioranu, Bucharest, 1900. p.91.

                        de Afară (External Market Road), later Calea Moşilor; Podul Calicilor (Road             

                        of the Infirm), later Calea Rahovei; and Podul Mogoşoaiei, later Calea         Victoriei.

9                      Views in Turkey in Europe and Asia comprising Romelia, Bulgaria,

                        Walachia, Syria and Palestine. Selected from the collection of

                        Sir Robert Ainslie. Drawn by Luigi Mayer and engraved by

                        William Watts, London, 1801.

                        Ed. N. Iorga, Vălenii de Munte, 1914. p.14.

                        and religious constitution, government and laws of the Ottoman Empire,

                        Moldavia and Wallachia, Thomas Thornton, London, 1809.

                        constitution, based on the Belgian Constitution of 1831 and

                        strengthening the role of parliament, was introduced.

                        industry and commerce

                        the next seven years architecture became part of the curriculum of the

                        Academy of Fine Arts.

                        and a true rarity which should never have been demolished. It made way for a

                        new Ministry of Foreign Affairs, begun in 1938 to the designs of Duiliu Marcu

                        damaged by bombs, during the war, repaired and completed after the war, only

                        to become a few years later the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.

                        The demolition of the old and construction of the new ministry was part of a

                        grandiose plan for the Piaţa Victoriei which has not yet materialized.