Upon arriving in Bucharest, I struggled to quantify the city, that is to say, it was profoundly unlike any city I had ever visited and worlds apart from my home, New York. As my taxi inched along the wide boulevards connecting the city to the airport and its surrounding suburbs, I began to get a sense of its character. I am a firm believer in architectural determinism, both as a representation of the histories and cultures that make cities unique, and this lens is aligned with my adequate yet still shallow knowledge of Romania. My interest in European history, unfortunately, possessed an anglophone tint, which viewed Romania as ‘Eastern Europe’ slowly succumbing to modernization via the European Union. Yet while this seems true in the aggregate, the way this process has unfolded is vastly different from my distinctly New York-centered views on urbanism. Across even the most central areas of Bucharest, urban ruins can be reliably found in close proximity to modern buildings.
The husk of the Casa Radio dominates any walk to the metro or points west, a reminder of both Ceaușescu and the litany of failed redevelopment associated with the barren concrete behemoth.
This stands in stark contrast to the space-deprived nature of New York, where no square foot is wasted, any spare lot or abandoned building is snapped up, with the High Line, Chelsea Market, and Domino Sugar Refinery taking on new lives while preserving the original character of the city. Across Bucharest, I see modern glass-clad office and residential buildings rising next to derelict homes representing both the modern global economy and those left behind. Two cities on the same path, governed with the same democratic principles, yet they remain worlds apart. Bucharest reminds me of the stories and photographs of New York in the 1980s, shrouded with graffiti and abandoned buildings, yet with a teeming core, powerful culture, and awash with potential.
Yet Romania is a massively diverse country where one is rewarded for seeing as much of its character as possible.
On two weekends, many students made trips to the twin Carpathian mountain towns of Sinaia and Bușteni. These trips exposed a new side of the country, both in the towns themselves and through the windows of the intercity trains that carried us there. From the rails, we watched the flat Wallachian countryside dotted with small towns, sheep, and occasional industry pass by. In Sinaia, we visited Peleș Castle, seeing the legacy of the Romanian monarchy and its Mitteleuropean influences, as well as the nearby train station where those same currents of influence fed into the assassination of liberal Prime Minister Ion G. Duca.
In Bușteni, we encountered a more bucolic setting and hiked into the mountains until we were stopped by a wall of snow. In contrast to a Wallachia now largely stripped of its original forests, seeing what remains provided a necessary glimpse into earlier periods of Romanian history.
Most recently, we travelled through Transylvania to cities built by Hungarians and Germans, which widened my previously Bucharest-centered impressions of Romania. The trip became, in many ways, an exercise in tracing imperial legacies, particularly those of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. As a deep lover of European History, I was fascinated by reading about the waves of Germans sent to the region as they related to the Thirty Years’ War, but the deep historical role the community played throughout Romanian history had previously alluded to me. Being in Transylvania forced me to confront the effects of something very apparent throughout our classroom sessions, the consequences of the Romanian nation-state as it related to its many ethnic minorities. Transylvania, as a former Habsburg territory, contains cities that would not feel out of place in Germany, yet are now overwhelmingly Romanian in character.
Cluj-Napoca is a clear example. Its orderly streets, Austro-Hungarian facades, and diverse local economy create a Central European feel, yet the language, politics, and daily life firmly situate it within modern Romania. Yet what was lost throughout this process not only in terms of Germans and Hungarians, but Jews and Roma became immediately apparent in cities no longer populated by the groups who had created them. Especially on walking tours around Bucharest, hearing the illustrious history of the city’s Jewish population who were stripped of rights despite their fervent patriotism for the Romanian state, I learned about a less visible yet equally vicious destruction of a minority community. What strikes me is that the buildings remain, the German and Hungarian facades of Transylvania still standing, many grand buildings of Bucharest still bearing the imprint of the Jewish community that helped finance them, yet the people who built or financed them are gone.
The architecture outlasted the communities, which is perhaps the most quietly unsettling thing Romania taught me, and one that is not so different from walking the streets of Lower Manhattan, where the wealth of the slave trade and the skyline built by Mohawk ironworkers similarly outlasted any recognition of the people behind them.