The Bucharest of Yesterday in Postcards

"Journey through the Bucharest of yesterday" is the title of an album signed by historian Cezar-Petre Buiumaci, based on the author's personal collection of postcards

Daniel Bilț, 20.12.2025, 14:00

The transformations we see in today’s Bucharest are effects of the communist regime, of the bulldozers and cranes that tried to legitimize an illegitimate and criminal power. “Journey through the Bucharest of yesterday” is the title of an album signed by historian Cezar-Petre Buiumaci, based on the author’s personal collection of postcards. He proposes a Bucharest of today with the help of small fragile objects through which people send each other a sign of affection

Cezar-Petre Buiumaci:  ” I started this process from the saying that a picture is worth one thousand words. I tried something the other way around, to say one word, <Bucharest>, in a thousand images. Obviously I had to halve the number because it was a matter of saving the album. But this collection stands on pillars. They are pillars of urban memory during the communist regime, seen from the perspective of people who lived then, who worked then, whose houses were demolished, who suffered this drama. But it is also from the perspective of architects who worked in the undergrounds of Bucharest at that time, who built the Bucharest metro and a series of apartment buildings and other administrative buildings in the last communist decade.”

However, the attractive and innocent postcard at first glance, can also become an instrument of propaganda in the hands of a tyrannical regime.

Cezar-Petre Buiumaci:  “This type of object, the illustrated postcard, was a vehicle of propaganda for the communist regime. They were printed and issued, mainly, the new buildings of power, cultural-political and administrative buildings, as well as the  new housing complexes that were recently built and which, through the postcard, were transformed into vehicles of correspondence. It was a self-censored correspondence because a postcard is free, the lines on the back can be read by anyone. And then, it was a self-censored correspondence. So it was also about the principle of censorship, of the most drastic censorship because self-censorship is the most drastic manifestation of this phenomenon of censorship.”

Bucharest’s buildings built during the years of socialist power were also privileged in postcards.

Cezar-Petre Buiumaci:” We have a series of objectives such as Casa Scânteii, which is, practically, the true House of the People. All Romanian citizens participated in its building, all made a donation, donated days of work or money, physically worked directly there or participated through various activities in the construction of this main objective. It is, practically, a demonstration of the maximum obedience of the communist regime towards Moscow, being a copy of the emblematic buildings in Moscow that Stalin ordered.”

Not only what is immortalized on postcards represents an evolution of the city, the postcards themselves have an evolution of their own.

Cezar-Petre Buiumaci:  ”The first illustrations are of very poor quality because everything that meant printing equipment went, as spoils of war, to Russia. With the construction of Casa Scânteii, new equipment from Moscow appeared that allowed for a high-quality multiplication of all propaganda materials. They formed the basis that had the greatest impact. First, cultural-administrative and political objectives such as Casa Scânteii, the Circus, and then the Television, the Radio House, and so on are depicted. Then, we have the photographs, the photo postcard appears in which the image is very clear. We have two types of images: we have the static image, in which there is only the objective, with nothing around it, and then we have the animated image of characters who are around an objective doing different activities.”

Until the late 1970s, when the tragedy of massive demolitions began in Bucharest, the authorities’ urban planning interventions were rather limited, but with a massive impact.

Cezar-Petre Buiumaci: “There is an evolution of the city, mainly, and this is what is tried to be reproduced in the postcards. We have the communist city that surrounds the old city, communist Bucharest is all around the old city and these objectives are shown: the neighborhoods, the theaters, like we have in Bucurestii Noi or in Drumul Taberei, commercial complexes like the Favorit Complex and then some objectives in the city center, which in the first part of the communist regime were called plombări (fillings). They are those buildings that were built on empty places, on the free places that remained after the earthquake of 1940 or the bombings of 1944. In the first part of the communist regime, there are extremely few areas that are demolished in order to build a certain area. The best example is the Square of the Congress Palace, or, as it is known, the Palace Hall Square. There is an aggression against the urban space, but it is somehow an attempt by the communists to move the city center from the Royal Palace Square behind the Royal Palace, where the new Palace of Power, the Palace of Congresses is located. The Palace Hall is practically linked to the Royal Palace, which was now the Palace of the Republic.”

 “Journey through the Bucharest of yesterday” is an invitation to contemplate the past. It is also the journey of change, from what was lost to what remains today.

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