In the Dorobanti district, the cafe window is wide open. Those who can afford a drink in that place are chatting inside. Outside, the street is constantly crowded with people. A foreigner, forty years old, gray hair, well-tailored suit, talks in English with two young brunettes. The two of them are arranged in accordance with an expensive bar. Attractive, long-legged. Then the man gets into his Bentley, and the two of them cross the street, aware of their appearance.
At the pedestrian crossing, they passed a thin, unsightly girl. She turned after them. For a moment, two universes that have nothing in common touched. The girl wears a bright red vest, she is a street cleaner. Until late at night, they will clean the garbage of the metropolis.
We are in Bucharest, a city that rarely makes it onto the meteorological maps of the West. There, where millions of people live, where street cleaners armed only with brooms and buckets on wheels lead the fight against dirt, where hundreds of thousands of people demonstrated for the purity of politics this spring, where the Romanian capital is located, with all its charm, roughness and contradictions - there is no weather forecast.
The western meteorological chart is immaculately white, like earlier navigational charts. Terra incognita. But it's not terrible, the weather in other European capitals - Tirana, Sofia or Bern - is also of no interest to anyone.
Two bloodsuckers significantly influenced the fate of the city. The first has come a long way in the film industry. Vlad Cepes, who served as a model for Dracula, built a fort here, at a favorable location on the road leading from the Carpathians to the Black Sea. There he dined as the prince of Wallachia. Minimal remains of the former princely court are now located in the Leipzig district (Lipscani). The area is so called because numerous merchants from Leipzig settled there, where Christianity and Ottoman Islam collided.
Ceausescu's sick nature overshadows even the figure of Cepes. The communist prince of darkness - in the 80's the whole country really often had no electricity - built a real princely castle with forced labor, confiscation of property and forced emigration of people, just a few hundred meters from Cepes' residence. There were hundreds of monumental columns, so the old duke's court would fit in the space occupied by two or three such columns. Ceausescu called the building the House of the People, and today it is called the Palace of Parliament. That renaming is really an upgrade for a building that is optically an act of terrorism, a violence of stone and cement, that was actually meant to be blown up.
It's a freaky place the city has to live with. Many MPs who have their offices there have been accused of corruption. But judges, government officials, and businessmen also put money in their own pockets. Bloodsuckers of a special kind. And the Romanian Social Democrats (PSD) wanted to weaken the DNA, the most credible anti-corruption institution. There are corrupt politicians in all parties, but the Romanian Social Democrats clearly have the most of them.
At the beginning of the year, the people revolted. While in Hungary and Poland the streets were long ago filled with demagoguery and man-hating slogans, in Romania the city streets were filled with democratic and civic demands. Hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Victory Square to protest the PSD policy. The hope was awakened that the spark of civic spirit had finally been ignited. Today, only a few flags can be seen at that place, and only a handful of people gather in the evening. Heavy traffic muffles their voices. Ruling politicians have learned from the protests and are achieving the same goals in several smaller steps. In Romania, the danger to democracy is not from the right, as in Hungary or Poland, but from the left.
And Victory Square is ugly. A vast, empty space without a soul. Earlier, here was the northern border of the city, behind which there was a dense forest. Arriving in 1866 in a small provincial town where his future subjects were waiting for him, the German Prince Karol passed through that forest. The Romanians did not believe that someone from their own ranks was able to ensure the continued existence of the young state, the Romanians imported the entire German dynasty. Later, they brought in French and German architects to give Bucharest a Western European face. New buildings - royal palaces, libraries, concert halls, banks - brought the city closer to Paris. But only a little.
At the time when the king arrived through the forest, the dark Stalinist building, which today is called the House of the Free Press and which was the largest building in Bucharest before the House of the People was built, had not yet been erected. The forest was not intersected by the wide, elegant boulevards that really resemble Paris today. Stalin and Paris get along well in Bucharest.
The parking lots end on the north side of Victory Square. This is where the green lungs of the city and the end with villas begin. In the twenties and thirties of the last century, wealthy citizens built their elegant homes there with a chaotic multitude of styles and forms. Ceaușescu also lived there with his red nomenclature. It's the Dorobanti neighborhood with Bentleys and elegant women. A walk through the colorful streets of this area is compensation for some of the city's monstrosities. From communist Bucharest, a man without warning steps into the world of pre-war citizenship.
Here, as in other places, it is shown why Bucharest is attractive - because of the coexistence of completely different worlds. The southern part of Victory Square is a massive concrete nightmare, huge blocks have been erected there. One might think that the beauty ends there, but that is not true. In various places in the city, blocks of buildings surround the original neighborhoods as if to protect them. Or are they suffocating? Between two blocks, one comes across almost rural Bucharest. It's quiet and the rhythm is slower. Vines cover the porches. This city has many faces, an urban Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
While the bloodsucking show doesn't stop, while the businessman is driving around in his Bentley, and two girls are showing off their bodies in gyms, one unsightly girl will be cleaning the streets until deep into the night. Her tired face will emerge from the darkness under the beam of car headlights, but she will be quickly forgotten. Tankers will sprinkle the streets with water. The city suffers from hygiene mania, as if a clean shirt is obtained night after night, which gets dirty during the day. In this way, street cleaners in Bucharest are like Sisyphus.
(Deutsche Welle)
Bonus video:
