umitru Bragadiru (former Marinescu) did not have a good education. Born poor, he gained wealth through diligence and entrepreneurship. As a child, he started carrying water, then became an apprentice in a brandy factory which he was fortunate enough to inherit.
An open-minded man, he invested his wealth in beer, realizing that this cheap drink will be to the taste of the people of Bucharest. And so it was. At the end of the 19th century, Dumitru Marinescu became the largest producer of beer and also a very rich man. In time he became better known as Bragadiru rather than Marinescu, taking the name of the beer that made him famous.
Although one might think that Bragadiru Palace was the home of Dumitru Bragadiru and his family, nothing is more true.
However, the palace, whose initial name was the Colossus, was built for the workers, to whom Dumitru Bragadiru also built houses on all of the 10 hectares bought between the Mitropolie and Calea Rahova. Even though the domain was delimited by the Calicilor (Greedy) Bridge (today’s Calea Rahova), the brewer did not hold back on the money. He turned to an Austrian architect named Anton Shuckerl, whom he asked to design a building for recreation, with a garden, ballroom, and performance hall. He wanted his workers to have all the facilities of the wealthy Bucharest resident namely a library, a bowling alley, and shops.
The Colossus brought civilization and prosperity to the land where poverty had haunted every inhabitant. Dumitru Bragadiru wanted so much to develop a truly European space around his factory that his Colossus competed with famous architectural constructions in Bucharest, such as the National Bank, the CEC, or the Supreme Court of Justice.
Today, when you go to the Flower Market, to Rahova, the only element that would make you realize that you are passing a beautiful building are two wrought-iron street lamps. The narrow sidewalk makes you unable to ignore them and admire their old handcrafted work, which is itself a masterpiece of street art.
No matter how hard someone struggles, they can’t cover the whole building. As in most cases, here too, in the dark period of recent history, the communists not only introduced their proletarian culture into the Colossus, turning it into the “Lenin” House of Culture but also minimized it by suffocating it between buildings. With ambition and imagination, you can still see the value of the palace from the other side of the street.
