The Solacolu Inn, Bucharest. Wikipedia/public domain.Bucharest, the capital city of Romania, is a city dying for an identity. In its heyday, during the interwar period, it was dubbed ‘little Paris’ due to its resemblance to the French capital. The city was severely traumatised, however, by the megalomaniac vision of former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu, who was determined to wipe out the architectural legacies of the monarchy and bourgeoisie in order to build a new communist city.
The few parts of Bucharest from the late 18th and 19th century that managed to survive Ceausescu’s questionable architectural vision are threatened by the current collusion of real estate agents and local authorities, interested more in buildings’ profitability rather than their historic, aesthetic and social worth. Purposefully forgotten, or intentionally damaged in the hopes of inevitable collapse, many of Bucharest’s old building which encapsulate the city’s past glory and unique architecture - a blend of oriental and occidental motifs - and represent valuable pieces of history, stoically await their fall, giving the city its contemporary beauty of decay and oblivion.
One of the buildings carrying out its slow sentence is the Solacolu Inn, a historic monument on Calea Mosilor, a notable street in Romania’s capital. Part of the Ottoman legacy, inns began to appear in Bucharest during the 18th century to satisfy the needs of international merchants seeking a place to rest and deposit their merchandise. There were three types of inns: monasterial (manastiresti), boyar ones (boieresti), and lordly (domnesti). As Calea Mosilor witnessed a rise in commerce during the 19th century, the number of inns built there increased.
