On the street Maria Rosetti you can still walk among beautiful buildings. You can admire real jewels in ArtDeco style and church architecture – Darvari Hermitage is a real treat. If you have the strength to ignore the state of certain constructions, you can easily slip into the style of the early twentieth century.
Given the fact that you are in a neighborhood of the capital, where the esthetics have been preserved, the fact that it is co-inhabited by citizens who by far do not want peace or cleanliness, is the first sign of absurdity.
But what could be more absurd than the ideas of Comrade Ceausescu? He believed that mixing the country’s elite with the Roma people, who had long lived in slavery in Romania and only recently had a chance at real development, would bring about the destruction of interwar civilization. Put more simply, he believed that by merging these two social categories, they would form the “new man” of the age of progress and prosperity.
There is nothing more absurd in Bucharest than a part of Maria Rosetti Street. So absurd lovers can be truly satisfied.
Because it is about Romania who could have been at the center of this absurdity, if not the playwright I.L. Caragiale. Hardly accessible to those who do not know the Romanian language, it is enough to know that before Eugen Ionesco – protagonist of the theater of the absurd, there was this Romanian writer whose very life was full of the absurd.
Caragiale did well during communism, so he was not excluded from Romanian literature like other writers. For the censors, his works were proof of the decadent society before 1948. So it was accepted to make statues of him.
Strangely, Caragiale never had his own house in Bucharest. The genius of Romanian drama did not get to enjoy his own roof over his head, and this means that today the city has plaques commemorating all the places where he lived at times.
Even his first statue, now on Maria Rosetti Street, has a complicated history and has been placed in various places.
In 1957, Romania was under a cruel communism dictated by Stalin himself from Moscow. Constantin Baraschi , a talented artist, entered a statue competition of Lenin.
Apparently Constantin Baraschi was so sure of winning the contest that he also cast the bronze statue. Probably in the end he could not prove that he was a real proletcultist and his work was eventually rejected.
The result? Absurd, of course! Lenin became Caragiale by simply replacing his head.
For a long time the new statue of Caragiale sits in storage, somewhere near the banks of the Dambovita. When Marin Preda, writer and then director of Cartea Romaneasca Publishing House, finally learned of its existence, he took the statue and placed it in the courtyard of the publishing house on General Berthelot Street.
Then the statue ends up on Maria Rosetti Street. The location was natural, as it is the street where I.L. Caragiale lived the most. Two houses face each other and if you stay at number 5 and look diagonally, there is a plaque with the inscription: ” Ion Luca Caragiale lived here”.
But like the writer who moves often, his statue does not last a decade in this place. Without any permission, it is moved by the management of the National Theater, which bears his name, in front of the building on Nicolae Balcescu Boulevard.
After a relatively short time, however, the statue returns to Maria Rosetti Street at number 4.
But the absurdity does not stop here. In the meantime, the new capitalism has hit the beautiful area, rich in buildings with personality, and “planted” some modern “wonders” of glass and concrete, of course without any connection to what is around it. A closer look reveals a building from the interwar period that still retains its beauty, but whose death is surely to be expected because it is in complete decay.
If you want to linger longer, there is a chance you won’t find a bench nearby, but there is another way to approach the story.
At the time of writing, there is a restaurant open right in said building where Caragiale lived for a year. The address of the restaurant is Ion Luca Caragiale Street No. 21-23.
Looking back at the history of the statue with Caragiale’s head and Lenin’s body, we can’t help to wonder how long the statue will stay in its place?
