Miorita Fountain in Bucharest
As you leave Bucharest going north, you come across a massive fountain in the middle of the road. It is called Miorita Fountain.
România Internațional, 05.07.2014, 14:14
Miorita Fountain is one of the symbols of the city, even though it doesn’t have as long a history as some of the other representative monuments. One such monument is the Minovici Villa, or the Bell Villa, as it is known, built in 1905 right across from the fountain. It was built in 1936 for the exhibition entitled ‘Bucharest Month’, an exhibition placed between what is now the Press House and the present location of the fountain, an area which back then was not incorporated in the city.
A young architect was contracted to build it, Octav Doicescu, who was to go on to build Zodiac Fountain in Carol Park, and to design Herastrau Park, flanking the main northern avenue in Bucharest, Jianu Roadway, now called Airmen’s Boulevard, which is also close to Miorita Fountain. Doicescu imprinted a modernist look on the area, as architect Cristian Mihu told us:
Cristian Mihu “Those were the peak years of the modernist style, when good quality modernist architecture started cropping up all over the country, especially in Bucharest. The fountain is part of this style, and Octav Doicescu was one of the foremost Romanian architects after the war. Miorita Fountain is one of his early creations. He had not yet turned 40, and had not designed many buildings before that. Basically, we are dealing with a modernist monumental fountain, which is a rarity in Bucharest. It has two walls made of granite cut from Dobrogea, and water spouts out of them in a basin 50 m by 20 m. On the sides of the walls we have the two rectangular mosaics made by Milita Petrascu, which feature the famous traditional ballad ‘Miorita’ — “The Ewe Lamb”. On the east side of the fountain we have the three shepherds with their flocks, and on the other side, facing Minovici Villa, are the Moldavian shepherd’s betrothal and death. The friezes are in simple black and white mosaic, straight into the stone.”
Under the mosaics, small streams of water spring out of the mouths of fantastic beasts. The babbling of the water blended with the bell chimes from the nearby villa in a sort of water music enjoyed by passers by in quieter times. Today, when the villa no longer chimes, and traffic is stifling, the music is gone.
The creator of the mosaic, Milita Petrascu, who was born in Chisinau, the present-day Republic of Moldova, in 1892 and passed away in Bucharest in 1974, is considered to be one of the leading Romanian sculptors, and was also a painter. Her artistic roots are in the avant-garde of the early 20th century, being also linked to Constantin Brancusi, whose student she was in Paris in the 1920s. In designing the Miorita Fountain mosaic, she had some invaluable help, and architect Cristian Mihu told us about it:
Cristian Mihu: “There was a third person, less known, a ceramist called Gheorghe Mogos-Niculescu, who made the mosaic based on Milita Petrascu’s drawings. She was the graphic designer, helped with the graphic work by Mogos-Niculescu. This work was given to a team of young artists, that gave it its special look, totally different from that which fountains used to have. It was in the spirit of those times to seek something new, in line with the explorations that occurred all over Europe at that time. It was not, however, an avant-garde work of art. Romanian modernism in architecture is characterized by the fact that it did not wish to revolutionize art radically, it was simply a novel movement put in the service of a national ideal, we may say.”
Restored in 2005, after many years of neglect, Miorita Fountain now stands as an impressive fountain, just as its creators imagined it 78 years ago.
