DThe lamps go out, the cell phone cameras move towards the window. On evening flights, the international signal for: We’ll be landing soon. Dozens of displays film the points of light in Bucharest against the deep black of the province. Even if you don’t recognize the blocks of flats yet, the city already winks at its visitors with a hundred eyes. Apparently slightly surprised, the boards for Coca-Cola and Co. flash: Nice to have you here. At least that’s what you might think, half asleep, at the window, when someone else’s mobile phone suddenly dangles in front of your face on a low-cost airline. And when you know that hardly more than a million foreigners visit Bucharest every year.
If you go through a list of the largest cities in the EU, memories of study trips, film scenes and postcard motifs come to mind: Schönbrunn Palace, the sparkling Eiffel Tower, a rough Kreuzberg. Then comes Bucharest, in 7th place, and the inner eye takes a break. The Romanian capital looks like an oddball, and after just a few days you can say: rightly so. And: fortunately.
Rightly so, because the city throws its visitors at a loss for fun. If you visit the official website of the Ministry of Tourism, “romania.travel”, it is not available. If you call representatives in Germany, it rings in vain. And fortunately, because in this city, which the Bucharest writer Mircea Cărtărescu calls a “spider web” and a “labyrinth”, you can easily get lost on your own. Well-measured foreigners and distance from Germany, with card payment as standard and the third fastest internet in the EU.
„The future will be confusing“
You can give yourself the south of the city. Endless prefabricated buildings, streets that feel like a hundred lanes – and yet that’s not enough, because according to current studies, no other city loses so many hours in traffic jams. So straight to the center and to the north, where uniformity is not an issue and where you can easily meander between the cars. It’s best to walk the length of Calea Victoriei: hipsters brew perfect coffee on the long boulevard and the smell of fresh bread lingers on the new clothes in the concept stores next door. In the side streets, Art Nouveau villas stand next to modern steel constructions, Soviet buildings next to wooden witches’ cottages. Nothing fits together here, in the shop window of a run-down apartment building it says “the future will be confusing” in illuminated letters. You believe it immediately. Already in the present, oriental influences and Francophilia are gathering, and above all Ceauşescu’s program of “systematization”.
Thrown together: the old town district of Lipscani with its churches, government buildings and the tiny Stavropoleos Monastery
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Bild: picture-alliance
Entire districts had to make way for its avenues, pompous buildings and the monstrous parliament palace south of the old town in the 1980s. Monasteries were blown up, a third of the historical center disappeared. Today, Bucharest is a single mixed bag that the residents think creatively. For example, directly at the National Museum, where orthodox and modern Romanian art hangs, there is a peculiar house: Blocks of steel and glass protrude from the Renaissance shell with red brick. What used to be the headquarters of the Securitate secret police is now the headquarters of the Architects Association.
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