My First Impressions in Bucharest

I came to spend three weeks of vacation in Bucharest, Romania. Here are my first impressions.

I spent most part of my life in Bucharest - I became a Washingtonian only five years ago.

As a child, I learned that Bucharest was a small Paris. For many years I thought that this was an exaggeration - but after one week spent in Paris, I realized that many streets of Bucharest had really a Parisian air - and anyway, there were a lot of styled houses, looking greatly Parisian.

Only this Parisian air was much younger than Bucharest - and the city was hiding something that was much older: in its churches, perhaps in some of its neighborhoods, in very few houses - actually there was a spirit of the place - even if those old neighborhoods had vanished, the spiritus loci was there, hidden, waiting to be discovered.

Bucharest was also a small Istanbul (or maybe a small Phanar). The spirit is still in its small Eastern Orthodox churches, and not only: once I saw in a Turkish restaurant on the 18th Street a large photograph of a modern plaza in Istanbul. Well, the whole was very much alike with the modern structure of Unirii Plaza in Bucharest. The same structure: the buildings, the green spaces, were organized the same way, creating the same path for the light.

I’ll come back later.