Romania Day 2, the Power of the Athenaeum
Initially, Bucharest’s Athenaeum looks like just another nice neoclassical building of columns in front and a dome on top. Very European. So European that it’s familiar everywhere they sailed, ubiquitous in statehouses around the world. But it’s Romania, so deserves a closer look.
Architecture beginners like me can see the neoclassical style as a return to the Renaissance’s love of geometric simplicity and logic, in contrast to ornate baroque excess, and built large to impress. So straight lines and symmetry, supersized. Think of cavernous ballrooms with paired columns and either blank white walls or angular pattern decorations, with a giant staircase like a ladder to heaven. The Athenaeum has this neoclassical Western tradition because Romania is quintessentially European, both in lineage and self definition. But as with all the best places, they took an original source and amplified it.
Stepping inside I am always a little caught off guard by the sensuality. Instead of straight rows of columns and right angles we find sweeping curves that evoke Istanbul’s Hagia Sophia, but go further to take that neoclassical love of geometry and bring it nearly to organic life. Ribs and arches like the spirit of art nouveau, but instead of botany it’s Byzantium, a Contantinople that grew up in Paris. Customary austere white walls and intimidating black lines are nowhere to be found, replaced by intimate pinks and yellows that make the place seem more Atlantean than Viennese. Staircases don’t march to the heights, they curve seductively into the shadows, whispering of belle epoque trysts and Ottoman schemes. It is a concert hall crossed with the sultan’s harem.
This blend of western and eastern is a good start to understanding Romania. Add to it via the central circle of columns that fill this concert hall with echoes of Ancient Greek theaters, that Hellenic influence is here too, particularly in the Orthodox churches for hundreds of miles around. Look at the golden ornaments and find the Baroque heights of the Austrian Empire, but let me draw your attention to the dragons that circle the main hall’s summit. Those are fundamentally and inextricably Romanian, though you’ll have to wait for Transylvania to hear why.
So the Athenaeum is a beautiful building that reflects the incredible blending of cultures that nourished modern Romania. But look even closer.
I tell my groups in Rome why Saint Peter’s Basilica could only have been built in that specific time and place. The same is true of the Athenaeum. In its blending of influences and innovation we see Romania at the turn of the century. This is brought home by Silviu Petrescu’s almost 250 foot long epic fresco that wraps around the main hall to tell Romania’s history, from Ancient Rome to The War to End All Wars. That history, in that moment, in this place, to make this hall.
So what? What does that moment have to do with this one?
Romania was a new country, not yet a wealthy one, so it took a kind of crowdfunding to build, “One leu for the Atheneu.” Can you imagine people signing up for that today, in any country? Neither can I. So what changed, and what can that moment remind us? Early Romania had an eagerness and optimism that shaped this hall, which stood in defiance of what came after.
The 20th century was one of brutality, and Bucharest was not spared. Stalin’s protege brutalized Romanians into a stupor of terror and suspicion, and Krushchev’s tenement blocks rose like sentinels made of prison itself to loom over the city. Those architectural punches are the opposite of the Athenaeum, but now that Communism has joined the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the history books, they together tell Romania’s history, which is Europe’s history, and ask us where we want to go next. Turn one way for tenement block bludgeons of autocracy and enforced uniformity, turn the other for art, expression, and hope for greater wonders ahead.
Optimism feels fragile right now, as extremist views become politically commonplace, but it did in 1888 too. Yet they built the Athenaeum, whose worn velvet seats feel like a time capsule today, preserving the essence of a peace that was eager and hungry. Every time I step inside I am reminded of what is wasted under the implacable stupidity of authoritarianism, and reminded that the human spirit is one of dance, generosity, and celebration. And there is power in that.
